54 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



confounded with pure selfishness. In the case 

 supposed by Mill self-restraint may be dictated in 

 part by selfish or utilitarian considerations, because 

 men's sense of honour with reference to the indul- 

 gence of appetite is not at the best very strong, and 

 may, like other virtues, such as honesty, love of fair 

 play, compassion or benevolence, be wholly absent. 

 But the incompleteness of the utilitarian theory 

 will be seen if we pass from the case of men to that 

 of women. From causes explained in a previous 

 chapter men have exacted from women a much 

 more rigid and uncompromising virtue than women 

 have exacted from men, and the result is that a 

 woman's sense of honour has become perhaps the 

 strongest feeling of her nature. In the highest type 

 of womanhood the sense of honour may certainly 

 be said to have passed altogether out of the range 

 of selfish considerations, and to have become a 

 blind inexorable instinct, which is not to be reasoned 

 with, and which not even the fear of death can 

 overcome. 



It is very fallacious in this connexion to set the 

 experience of one age or people against that of another. 

 Cervantes in Don Quixote quotes a popular saying 

 derogatory to female virtue — 



