Amongst the fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Origen certainly had a very low opinion of woman, and St. Augustine, except for his relations with his mother, seems to have shared their view. At the Renaissance the Aristotelian conceptions gained many new adherents, amongst whom Jean Wier (1518-1588) may be cited specially. At that period there was a general, more sensible and intuitive understanding on the subject, which is now treated as merely curious, contemporary science having bowed the knee to other than Aristotelian gods.
In recent years Henrik Ibsen (in the characters of Anitra, Rita, and Irene) and August Strindberg have given utterance to this view. But the popularity of the idea of the soullessness of woman has been most attained by the wonderful fairy tales of Fouqué, who obtained the material for them from Paracelsus, after deep study, and which have been set to music by E. T. A. Hoffman, Girschner, and Albert Lorzing.
Undine, the soulless Undine, is the platonic idea of woman. In spite of all bi-sexuality she most really resembles the actuality. The well-known phrase, “Women have no character,” really means the same thing. Personality and individuality (intelligible), ego and soul, will and (intelligible) character, all these are different expressions of the same actuality, an actuality the male of mankind attains, the female lacks.
But since the soul of man is the microcosm, and great men are those who live entirely in and through their souls, the whole universe thus having its being in them, the female must be described as absolutely without the quality of genius. The male has everything within him, and, as Pico of Mirandola put it, only specialises in this or that part of himself. It is possible for him to attain to the loftiest heights, or to sink to the lowest depths; he can become like animals, or plants, or even like women, and so there exist woman-like female men.
The woman, on the other hand, can never become a man. In this consists the most important limitation to the assertions in the first part of this work. Whilst I know of many men who are practically completely psychically female, not merely half so, and have seen a considerable number of women with masculine traits, I have never yet seen a single woman who was not fundamentally female, even when this femaleness has been concealed by various accessories from the person herself, not to speak of others. One must _be_ (_cf._ chap. i. part I.) either man or woman, however many peculiarities of both sexes one may have, and this “_being_,” the problem of this work from the start, is determined by one’s relation to ethics and logic; but whilst there are people who are anatomically men and psychically women, there is no such thing as a person who is physically female and psychically male, notwithstanding the extreme maleness of their outward appearance and the unwomanliness of their expression.