[Das Prinzip der Geschlechter.]
Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
If we look at the universe as a whole, we see two forces in the eternal UNITY of the essence of all things, just as Schopenhauer described it in his work. One force is the life of things, the reason they come into being, the unconscious will to exist, the stuff or essence of which things are made. The other force is the thought or idea which forms matter and gives it its qualities; for everything represents a thought and is in itself the expression of an idea. In its appearance, every natural thing represents what it is essentially. A thing that is not based on an idea would also have no meaning.
The thought is the masculine principle, the will the feminine. Thought is what generates, will is what gives birth. A thought without the will to carry it out could never be realized and could never be acted upon. Thoughts without this will are and remain meaningless reflections of the imagination. If a thought is to be realized, the deed must be born of the will. A will without thought cannot give birth to anything. If something is to come from the will, the thought must fertilize the will. The world is full of ideas, and there is no lack of will either, but only through the union of thought and will does thought become action.
In man will and thought are to a certain extent united. Were the two perfectly one in him and imbued with knowledge, man would be perfect. He would then not give in to empty fantasies, but he would also seriously want what he thinks, and his will, permeated by the spiritual power of knowledge, would become action. But in our present state of development, the masculine and feminine are not yet sufficiently united in us. The blessing of the knowledge of truth and unity necessary for this unification is still missing, and that is why we still live to a large extent in the realm of fantasy, think what we do not want, and are driven by willing without our thinking or even against it, that is, seduced by ignorant desire. Only then will we become the “Lords of the Earth,” i.e., to be rulers over ourselves when man and woman are united in a harmonious unity within us. But as long as true knowledge is not available, this marriage will not come about either. As long as it is missing, the thought will lead the will astray and the will lead the thought astray. In order to attain perfection, thought must be permeated with the knowledge of truth and make the will subservient to itself. This and nothing else is the meaning of the teaching that the “woman” obey the “man,” and that the “woman,” i.e., the self-will, in the “church,” i.e., in the realm of God-knowledge, should be silent. The rule: “Mulier taceat in ecclesia” [“A woman should be silent in the church”] has nothing to do with human beings who happen to be female.
Occult science teaches that the original man was sexless, that is, in other words, that in him both sexes, will and thought, were one. The Bible also points to this. “God created man in his own image; male and female he created them.”[2] Man was then an ethereal being, just as he is to be again in the future, and did not have to drag himself along with a gross material body and reproduce it in an animal way like we do. Only later, when he sank more and more into the material and began to speculate and argue, did will and imagination separate in him and finally also the sexes, because with his material condition direct reproduction through mental power[3] was no longer possible. In his innermost being, of course, his nature remained male and female in one; for every human being has masculine and feminine characteristics. If man had completely lost all femininity, he would no longer have a will and would have become an empty fantasy.
Man and woman in our visible phenomenal world are therefore the external representatives of these two principles. In general, in woman the will, or in other words love, is more predominant, in man intellectual speculation; but there are also men of the male sex, so-called “feminine,” in whom the feminine principle, the feeling, stands higher than the intellect, and on the other hand men with bodies of the female sex, so-called man-women, in whom the speculation of the brain exceeds the feelings.
One may argue about which is higher, the will or the intellect. It is certain that the “man” cannot achieve anything without the “woman,” that is to say, thought may rise and dream of a higher life, but without the will it cannot realize it. But if the will is aimed at the highest and thereby has become love for the highest, then this love not only carries the thought but also the soul up to the highest. “Soul” means the true, individual self-consciousness of man, in contrast to his external personality-consciousness, which is the result of his sensory impressions. From this ascendant love springs the intuitive knowledge of truth, goodness, and beauty, which is generally stronger in female creatures than in males, and in itself far superior to the dissecting intellect, reasoning, and intellectual speculation. Intuitive knowledge is spiritual-divine in nature; she is seeing. The thinking machine dissects and works in the material; it is blind in itself (without intuition or cognition). The greatest fool can be an excellent logical thinker, but because he lacks the intuitive basis of his reasoning, his conclusions are foolish. True, on the other hand, is that which is self-evident in the depths of the heart, and without these self-evident truths there is no other than a foolish science from which the greatest errors and follies arise.
If we disregard those rare female or male beings in which love and reason are in harmony, and if we leave out of our consideration the abnormalities of male women and virile women, woman appears to us as the representative of unselfish love in her property as the crown of creation. The very name “Frau” or “Miss” means to be happy; they are something to be happy about, while in man, as the representative of cold, calculating, loveless thinking, egoism appears embodied. For him there is no other salvation from destruction than marriage, that is, he must unite himself with love in order to attain true knowledge and immortality through it. But for the woman, i.e., for love, the connection with this product of egoism means a descent, which can certainly be very useful for her life in material things, but is of dubious value for her spiritual greatness and sublimity. Pure love, born of heaven, the “Eternal Feminine” pulls us up. The egotistical common sense, searching for the satisfaction of its needs, is born of the “flesh” and always gravitates back to the material, the earth, its homeland.
If two things are to unite, one being high and the other low, it is in no other conceivable way than that either the higher descends to the lower, or the lower rises to the higher; otherwise they will not come together. But the lower cannot rise to the higher by its own power; this only happens when it is raised to it by the power of the higher.
If the higher descends completely to the lower and unites with it, it is thereby abased and can no longer rise. It is therefore necessary that the higher only turns down to the lower, as it were extends its hand to ennoble and elevate it, without this higher abandoning its standpoint or position. In the same way the sun sends its rays to the earth and enlivens everything on it, without therefore leaving its position in the firmament. If she descended to earth herself, it would be gone not only with her glory but with the glory of the earth as well. A similar thing happens when reason loses itself in animal passion, and a similar thing would happen if woman were to sink entirely from the throne of love into the swamp of mean thinking, into which a large proportion of earning a living nowadays run and revolve ambitious “science” is stuck.
The world longs for love as its Redeemer and cannot find him because it rejects him; for love would bring death to egoism, and egoism is the mainspring of all animal activity. In our view, salvation can come in no other way than through love’s representative, woman.
Now we see how everywhere in the world of women there has awakened a thirst for personal freedom and equality with men, and how women are striving to take part in men’s occupations. Equality between men and women can only be desirable for the male world, because this would introduce a female element into all branches of social life, which could only have an ennobling effect on the whole, provided that the woman does not lose her character in this descent.
The more the mind occupies itself with the multiplicity of things, the more it devotes itself entirely to the pettiness of individual phases, dissecting and destroying it, the more it runs the risk of losing that religious sense of the unity of the whole from which true knowledge springs. True science is not the enemy of religion, on the contrary, the heart’s knowledge of the greatness and glory of God in the universe is promoted precisely by recognizing the work of his creative spirit in nature, even in the smallest. But what does rationalism know about the spirit? He doubts and rejects everything he cannot grasp with his rough hands.
Our present times make it an absolute necessity that love must descend in order to free reason from its prison, but for the woman to do this descends into the filth of knowing everything, the task is difficult, because if she she does not want to lose herself in the process, should take on the knowledge and scholarly stuff and yet not give up her spiritual hold on the sublime and divine.
We live in an upside down world and everywhere we see the top turned down. Each of us has a Lucifer within who wants to be equal to God. The human mind has taken up its throne and risen above the knowledge of truth. His business should be to contemplate and examine the truth which is intuited in the heart, but instead he denies intuition and sets himself up as the knower and judge. “Science” knows neither about the soul nor about its cognition, and yet the truth is only understood and recognized with the soul, and when our brain has rotted away, only what our soul has in it will have value for us recorded and what she recognizes. The realm of brain speculation is the realm of moonlight, the heart the dwelling place of love, and the temple of God that houses the sun of wisdom. No sane person will doubt that exclusive mental work is detrimental to the development of nobler soul powers, and the reason for this is that a power cannot be wasted in one place and at the same time be used in another, as one might a certain amount of money spent on a useless thing cannot be spent on anything else. Spiritual faith and skepticism are opposed to each other. Great perspicacity, sophistication, and skill in dissecting and criticizing are seldom combined with goodness of heart, nobility, love of truth, and deep insight. There are far more followers than inventors, far more bookworms than geniuses.
Hitherto it had been so arranged in nature that female education was directed more towards the development of the qualities of the heart, male education towards the perfecting of the thinking machine, and God had made sure that no human being was neglected, because, like everyone else experts know that the true essence of man in his various incarnations on earth appears embodied now in a male, now in a female personality, and thus in one life the mind, in the other the heart could develop more. At the time of witchcraft in the Middle Ages, the heart went astray and the intellect had to come to its aid. Now intellectual speculation has skyrocketed unnaturally; the mind is overfed and the heart has become chronically exhausted. On the other hand, there is no other way than for the female to come to the aid of the male, and this is best done by the woman sinking down to the man, connecting with him and sharing his thoughts and actions. Then there is hope for the best for him; for she pulls him up with her, provided he does not pull her down and she perishes with him.
Notes
[1] The Principle of Sex [Das Prinzip der Geschlechter. Dr. Franz Hartmann. Theosophischer Wegweiser 3, no. 5 (February 1901), 126-132] This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos. Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}
[2] I. Moses, I, 27.
[3] {R.H.—According to the Ancients, 3rd Root Race humanity practiced kriyā-śakti or creation (power) through the use of thought towards action. Thus, through thought, things could manifest.}