THE NATURAL 



and strong, when she has been fecundated, and when 

 she must give birth and food to the posterity of her race. 

 The male then becomes inert; equable sharing of the 

 expense of forces, just division of labour. This passivity 

 of the female element is found again in the very figura- 

 tion of animality, formed by the egg and the spermato- 

 zoide. One sees the play under the microscope: the egg 

 waits, solid as a fortress or as a woman whom many men 

 look on and covet; the little animals begin their attack, 

 they besiege the enclosure, they butt it with their heads; 

 one of them breaks the wall, he enters, and as soon as 

 his tad-pole tail passes the breach, the wound recloses. 

 The entire activity of this embryonic female reduces it- 

 self to this gesture; the greater part of her great sisters 

 know no other. Their free-will nearly always consists in 

 this: they receive one among the arrivals, without one's 

 being able to know very well whether the choice is psy- 

 chological or mechanical. 



The female waits, or flees, which is but another way 

 of waiting, the active way; for not only se cupit ante 

 videnti but she desires to be taken, she wishes to fulfill her 

 destiny. It is doubtless for this reason that, in species 

 where the male is feeble or timid, the female resigns her- 

 self to an aggression demanded by care for future genera- 

 tions. In short, two forces are present, the magnet and 

 the needle. Usually the female is the magnet, sometimes 

 she is the needle. These are details of mechanism which 

 do not modify the general march of the machine to its 

 goal. At the origin of all feeling there is a fact irreducible 

 and incomprehensible in itself. Common reasoning starts 

 from the feeling to explain the fact; this gives the absurd 

 86 



