Fortunately for us, whose minds have been so overwhelmingly
sophisticated by literature, what produces all these treatises and poems
and scriptures of one sort or another is the struggle of Life to become
divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and
thither in the line of least resistance. Hence there is a driving
towards truth in all books on matters where the writer, though
exceptionally gifted is normally constituted, and has no private axe to
grind. Copernicus had no motive for misleading his fellowmen as to the
place of the sun in the solar system: he looked for it as honestly as a
shepherd seeks his path in a mist. But Copernicus would not have written
love stories scientifically. When it comes to sex relations, the man of
genius does not share the common man's danger of capture, nor the woman
of genius the common woman's overwhelming specialization. And that is
why our scriptures and other art works, when they deal with love, turn
from honest attempts at science in physics to romantic nonsense, erotic
ecstasy, or the stern asceticism of satiety ("the road of excess leads
to the palace of wisdom" said William Blake; for "you never know what is
enough unless you know what is more than enough").

There is a political aspect of this sex question which is too big for my
comedy, and too momentous to be passed over without culpable frivolity.
It is impossible to demonstrate that the initiative in sex transactions
remains with Woman, and has been confirmed to her, so far, more and more
by the suppression of rapine and discouragement of importunity,
without being driven to very serious reflections on the fact that this
initiative is politically the most important of all the initiatives,
because our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap
misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.