THE WOMAN OF EVOLUTION AND PESSIMISM. 317 
which the changing facts of life are endlessly produced. 
A child is only a child to pessimism, a mere human larva, 
heir to all the defects of human nature, and bound to 
run the course over which its ancestors have been un- 
willingly and ineffectively driven. In the light of evolu- 
tion the child has all the grand possibilities of thought 
and action and love that go to the making of a man. 
It sees it not as what it is but as what it may become. 
And in the light of evolution, human life may be judged 
not by its failures, but by the strongest and most har- 
monious representatives of humanity. In the defects 
of church and state may be read the higher ideals for 
which men are striving. In the broken ideals of the 
ethical life may be read the forces inside ourselves 
“which make for righteousness,” and which are the reali- 
ties in life, rather than the acts of greed and failures of 
will which make up the sad facts of human existence. 
In his remarkable essay on woman, Arthur Schopen- 
hauer takes her character and relations as the basis of 
a most caustic analysis. Discarding all 
illusion and romance, the “ present, 
poor and bare,” is allowed to “make 
its sneering comment” on “the eternal womanly,” and 
it is found to be poor stuff. Schopenhauer finds woman 
to be merely a form of man, modified 
by Nature, to make real men possible 
and comfortable. ‘Without woman,” 
he quotes from Jouy, “the beginning of life would be 
helpless, the middle without pleasure, the end without 
consolation.” 
According to Schopenhauer,* “ woman is capable of 
no great labour of mind or of body.” Her “debt of 
Schopenhauer’s 
essay on woman. 
Woman a 
modified man. 
*In the paragraphs which follow, the language of Schopen- 
hauer is much condensed, only enough being quoted to give the 
substance of the original statements. 
