PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



small, soft, black-pelted beast. What human virgin would 

 show such constancy in the defence of her virtue? Who, 

 alone in the night, in a subterranean palace, would use her 

 hands to open the walls, all her strength to flee from her 

 suitor? Philosophers have believed that sexual modesty 

 was an artificial sentiment, fruit of civilizations: they did 

 not know the mole's story, or any of the true stories in na- 

 ture, for nearly all females are timorous, nearly all react, 

 at the appearance of the male, in fear or in flight. Our 

 virtues are never more than psychological tendencies, and 

 the finest of them are those whr e explanation we are 

 forbidden to seek. Why is the slie .at violent, the she- 

 mole timorous? Without doubt the she-mole observes 

 the rule, even in exaggerating its severity, but why the 

 rule? There is no rule, there are nothing but facts which 

 we group in modes perceptible to our intelligence, facts 

 which are always provisory, and which a change of per- 

 spective can denaturize. The notion of a rule, the notion 

 of a law, confession of our impotence to pursue a fact 

 into the logical origins of its genealogy. The law is a 

 fashion of speaking, an abbreviation, a point of rest. The 

 law is half the facts plus one. Every law is at the mercy 

 of an accident, an unexpected encounter ; and yet, without 

 the idea of law all would be mere night in our conscious- 

 ness. 



"The male," says Aristotle, in his Treatise on Genera- 

 tion, "represents the specific form, the female, the matter. 

 She is passive, in so much as she is female; the male is 

 active." 



Sexual modesty is a fact of sexual passivity. The 

 moment will come for the female to be in her turn active 

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