THE MIND OF WOMAN 245 



the mind of the rising generation under the influence 

 of emotion. They are the inspirers of causes, the 

 founders of faiths, the sustainers of the ideal, the 

 authors of those great policies of mind in which 

 the human spirit, rising through contagious emotion 

 from the individual to the universal, is transmitting, 

 through the cultural inheritance, an accumulating 

 power to subordinate itself in civilization to the 

 spiritual meaning which is immanent in the world. 

 And the meaning which underlies it is Power, 

 always Power. It is the systems in which this 

 inspiration lies in its highest might and reality 

 which will win out over all competition in the 

 future of the world. 



The characteristic inspiration which is accom- 

 panying this development in which the imaginative 

 and emotional literature of the West has become 

 the medium of the highest art, is a very striking 

 phenomenon. In the imaginative literature of all 

 the peoples of the modern West as contrasted with 

 the literature of all other people and all other times, 

 the outstanding feature is the position acceded to 

 woman. In the current literature of the Western 

 world woman stands triumphant as the central 

 figure. In it, as I have stated elsewhere, wherever 

 man becomes an idealist it is almost invariably 

 woman who is the measure of his idealism. It is 



