by reason of its somatic habit it can do most effectively.  Man’s exploits were, however, of a more striking and sensational character, appealed to the emotions more, and secured the attention and the admiration of the public more, than the “drudgery” of the woman.  The unusual esteem given by society to the destructive activities of the male can be very well understood in connection with a reference to the emotions.  The emotions of anger, fear, and joy, to take only these examples, represent a physiological change in the organism in the presence of dangerous situations.  Anger is a physiological preparation to resist, to crush a dangerous object; fear is an organic expression of inadequacy to avert the danger; and joy, in one of its aspects, is an organic revulsion answering to the recognition of the fact that the danger is safely passed.  The same type of situation incessantly recurring in the life of the race, and constantly met by the same organic changes, has resulted in a fixed relation of certain types of situation to certain types of emotion.

The forms of activity recognized first of all in the consciousness of the race as virtuous are simply those which successfully avert danger and secure safety.  Courage, intrepidity, endurance, skill, sagacity, an indomitable spirit, and a willingness to die in fight, are virtues of the first importance, vitally indispensable to the society in conflict with man and beast, and they are virtues of which man is by his organic constitution, by the very fact of his capacity for the rapid destruction of energy, particularly capable.  Man’s exploits, therefore, first of all had social attention.

The occupations of women were not of an emotional type, and, apart from sexual life, they got their excitements as spectators and approvers of the motor activities of the men.  The Hebrew girls who went out with harps and timbrels to meet a victorious army, and sang that Saul had slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands, represent the relation between mighty deeds and social attention and approval.  Thus the attention which the organism gives to situations of danger, through violent physiological readjustments fitted to meet the situation, has a parallel in the attention given by society to social means of meeting situations dangerous to the common life and welfare.  We have a very plain continuance of the primitive appreciation of the virtues of violence in the worship of military men nowadays, and it is significant, also, that the appreciation of the fighting quality still reaches its most animated expression in women—­the sex constitutionally most in need of social protection.  It can hardly be denied, therefore, that man both enjoyed this exciting kind of performance more than the labors which women were connected with, and that the women justified him (if we assume that they passed any judgment on his conduct at all) in refraining from doing many things which he could have done perfectly well without constitutional hurt.