I say, among the men.  To comprehend a witch-mania, you must look at it as—­what the witch-literature confesses it unblushingly to be—­ man’s dread of Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of woman.

She is to the barbarous man—­she should be more and more to the civilised man—­not only the most beautiful and precious, but the most wonderful and mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the author of his physical being.  She is to the savage a miracle to be alternately adored and dreaded.  He dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, which often takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous; her quicker instincts, her readier wit, which seem to him to have in them somewhat prophetic and superhuman, which entangled him as in an invisible net, and rule him against his will.  He dreads her very tongue, more crushing than his heaviest club, more keen than his poisoned arrows.  He dreads those habits of secrecy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savage and degraded woman always has recourse.  He dreads the very medicinal skill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and slave.  He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious initiations which no man may witness, which he has permitted to her in all ages, in so many—­if not all—­barbarous and semi-barbarous races, whether Negro, American, Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage to the mysterious importance of her who brings him into the world.  If she turns against him—­she, with all her unknown powers, she who is the sharer of his deepest secrets, who prepares his very food day by day—­what harm can she not, may she not, do?  And that she has good reason to turn against him, he knows too well.  What deliverance is there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute force?  Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of the day.  Woman must be crushed, at all price, by the blind fear of the man.

I shall say no more.  I shall draw a veil, for very pity and shame, over the most important and most significant facts of this, the most hideous of all human follies.  I have, I think, given you hints enough to show that it, like all other superstitions, is the child—­ the last born and the ugliest child—­of blind dread of the unknown.

SCIENCE {229}

I said, that Superstition was the child of Fear, and Fear the child of Ignorance; and you might expect me to say antithetically, that Science was the child of Courage, and Courage the child of Knowledge.

But these genealogies—­like most metaphors—­do not fit exactly, as you may see for yourselves.

If fear be the child of ignorance, ignorance is also the child of fear; the two react on, and produce each other.  The more men dread Nature, the less they wish to know about her.  Why pry into her awful secrets?  It is dangerous; perhaps impious.  She says to them, as in the Egyptian temple of old—­“I am Isis, and my veil no mortal yet hath lifted.”  And why should they try or wish to lift it?  If she will leave them in peace, they will leave her in peace.  It is enough that she does not destroy them.  So as ignorance bred fear, fear breeds fresh and willing ignorance.