and hands, i.e., centripetal.  Woman’s instinctive and unconscious gestures are towards herself, man’s are away from himself.  The physiologist might hold that the anatomical differences between the sexes result from their difference in function in the reproduction and conservation of the race, and this is a true view, but the lesser truth need not necessarily exclude the greater.  As Chesterton says, “Something in the evil spirit of our time forces people always to pretend to have found some material and mechanical explanation.”  Such would have us believe, with Schopenhauer and Bernard Shaw, that the lover’s delight in the beauty of his mistress dwells solely in his instinctive perception of her fitness to be the mother of his child.  This is undoubtedly a factor in the glamour woman casts on man, but there are other factors too, higher as well as lower, corresponding to different departments of our manifold nature.  First of all, there is mere physical attraction:  to the man physical, woman is a cup of delight; next, there is emotional love, whereby woman appeals through her need of protection, her power of tenderness; on the mental plane she is man’s intellectual companion, his masculine reason would supplement itself with her feminine intuition; he recognizes in her an objectification, in some sort, of his own soul, his spirit’s bride, predestined throughout the ages; while the god within him perceives her to be that portion of himself which he put forth before the world was, to be the mother, not alone of human children, but of all those myriad forms, within which entering, “as in a sheath, a knife,” he becomes the Enjoyer, and realizes, vividly and concretely, his bliss, his wisdom, and his power.

Adam and Eve, and the tree in the midst of the garden!  After man and woman, a tree is perhaps the most significant symbol in the world:  every tree is the Tree of Life in the sense that it is a representation of universal becoming.  To say that all things have for their mother prakriti, undifferentiated substance, and for their father purusha, the creative fire, is vague and metaphysical, and conveys little meaning to our image-bred, image-fed minds; on the physical plane we can only learn these transcendental truths by means of symbols, and so to each of us is given a human father and a human mother from whose relation to one another and to oneself may be learned our relation to nature, the universal mother, and to that immortal spirit which is the father of us all.  We are given, moreover, the symbol of the tree, which, rooted in the earth, its mother, and nourished by her juices, strives ever upward towards its father, the sun.  The mathematician may be able to demonstrate, as a result of a lifetime of hard thinking, that unity and infinity are but two aspects of one thing; this is not clear to ordinary minds, but made concrete in the tree—­unity in the trunk, infinity in the foliage—­any one is able to understand