committed by and a curse laid upon Woman, through her pure child, or
influence, shall the new Adam, the redemption, arise. Innocence is to
be replaced by virtue, dependence by a willing submission, in the
heart of the Virgin-Mother of the new race.

The spiritual tendency is toward the elevation of Woman, but the
intellectual by itself is not so. Plato sometimes seems penetrated by
that high idea of love, which considers Man and Woman as the two-fold
expression of one thought. This the angel of Swedenborg, the angel of
the coming age, cannot surpass, but only explain more fully. But then
again Plato, the man of intellect, treats Woman in the Republic as
property, and, in the Timaeus, says that Man, if he misuse the
privileges of one life, shall be degraded into the form of Woman; and
then, if ho do not redeem himself, into that of a bird. This, as I
said above, expresses most happily how antipoetical is this state of
mind. For the poet, contemplating the world of things, selects various
birds as the symbols of his most gracious and ethereal thoughts, just
as he calls upon his genius as muse rather than as God. But the
intellect, cold, is ever more masculine than feminine; warmed by
emotion, it rushes toward mother-earth, and puts on the forms of
beauty.

The electrical, the magnetic element in Woman has not been fairly
brought out at any period. Everything might be expected from it; she
has far more of it than Man. This is commonly expressed by saying that
her intuitions are more rapid and more correct. You will often see men
of high intellect absolutely stupid in regard to the atmospheric
changes, the fine invisible links which connect the forms of life
around them, while common women, if pure and modest, so that a vulgar
self do not overshadow the mental eye, will seize and delineate these