232 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



of the ideal in woman, similarly bred in her through 

 the long stages of our primitive past, is in like manner 

 released into the service of civilization, the effect 

 will transcend the effect of man's qualities. Woman 

 as a sex will reveal in these circumstances the same 

 power of devotion to ideals, to causes, as she does 

 to persons. Her relationship to the future through 

 the long eras of her evolution in the past has per- 

 manently endowed woman's mind with a capacity 

 for self-sacrifice and renunciation, persisting through 

 every variety of opposition and of suffering even to 

 death, which is the highest product of the other- 

 regarding emotions, and which in woman is without 

 any superior example in the whole realm of mind. 



The elemental hunger of civilization at the present 

 moment is for a public opinion able to subordinate 

 the present to the future for a public opinion, 

 that is to say, which would express through the 

 collective will just the qualities which are here 

 described as reaching in woman their highest ex- 

 pression. By no other means than this can civiliza- 

 tion secure to itself the capacity to rise above the 

 rule of the systems of Power, knowing no law but 

 their own interests, namely, than by a public opinion 

 which is touched with and sustained by emotion 

 in the manner described in Chapter V. The miracle 

 which was related in that chapter as taking place in 



