But
it is an influence to which the most modest women are, at all events in
some degree, susceptible. It has, indeed, been said that a woman is always
more her real self in the dark than in the glare of daylight; this is part
of what Chamberlain calls her night-inspiration.
"Traces of the night-inspiration, of the influence of the
primitive fire-group, abound in woman. Indeed, it may be said
(the life of Southern Europe and of American society of to-day
illustrates this point abundantly) that she is, in a sense, a
night-being, for the activity, physical and moral, of modern
women (revealed e.g. in the dance and the nocturnal
intellectualities of society) in this direction is remarkable.
Perhaps we may style a good deal of her ordinary day-labor as
rest, or the commonplaces and banalities of her existence, her
evening and night life being the true side of her activities"
(A.F. Chamberlain, "Work and Rest," _Popular Science Monthly_,
March, 1902). Giessler, who has studied the general influence of
darkness on human psychic life, reaches conclusions which
harmonize with these (C.M. Giessler, "Der Einfluss der Dunkelheit
auf das Seelenleben des Menschen," _Vierteljahrsschrift fuer
wissenschaftliche Philosophie_, 1904, pp. 255-279). I have not
been able to see Giessler's paper, but, according to a summary of
it, he comes to the result that in the dark the soul's activities
are nearer to its motor pole than to its sensitive pole, and that
there is a tendency for phenomena belonging to the early period
of development to be prominent, motor memory functioning more
than representative memory, attention more than apperception,
imagination more than logical thinking, egoistic more than
altruistic morals.
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