Only let us not talk of this ideal of impersonal, universal being in individual consciousness as an unverified dream.  Our sense and impatience of limitations are the guarantees that they are not final and insuperable.  Whence is this power of standing outside myself, of recognizing the worthlessness of the pseudo—­judgments, of the prejudices with their lurid colouring of passion, of the temporal interests, of the ephemeral appetites, of all the sensibilities of egoism, to which I nevertheless surrender myself so that they indeed seem myself?  Through and above this troubled atmosphere I see a being, pure, passionless, rightly measuring the proportions and relations of things, for whom there is, properly speaking, no present, with its phantasms, falsities, and half-truths; who has nothing personal in the sense of being opposed to the whole of related personalities:  who sees the truth rather than struggles logically towards it, and truth of which I can at present form no conception; whose activities are unimpeded by intellectual doubt, un-perverted by moral depravity, and who is indifferent to results, because he has not to guide his conduct by calculation of them, or by any estimate of their value.  I look up to him with awe, because in being passionless he sometimes seems to me to be without love.  Yet I know that this is not so; only that his love is diffused by its range, and elevated in abstraction beyond my gaze and comprehension.  And I see in this being my ideal, my higher, my only true, in a word, my immortal self.

—­C.C.  Massey

Chastity

Ideal woman is the most beautiful work of the evolution of forms (in our days she is very often only a beautiful work of art).  A beautiful woman is the most attractive, charming, and lovely being that a man can imagine.  I never saw a male being who could lay any claims to manly vigour, strength or courage, who was not an admirer of woman.  Only a profligate, a coward or a sneak would hate women; a hero and a man admires woman, and is admired by her.

Women’s love belongs to a complete man.  Then she smiles on him his human nature becomes aroused, his animal desires like little children begin to clamour for bread, they do not want to be starved, they want to satisfy their hunger.  His whole soul flies towards the lovely being, which attracts him with almost irresistible force, and if his higher principles, his divine spirit, is not powerful enough to restrain him, his soul follows the temptations of his physical body.  Once again the animal nature has subdued the divine.  Woman rejoices in her victory, and man is ashamed of his weakness; and instead of being a representation of strength, he becomes an object of pity.

To be truly powerful a man must retain his power and never for a moment lose it.  To lose it is to surrender his divine nature to his animal nature; to restrain his desires and retain his power, is to assert his divine right, and to become more than a man—­a god.