part ii, ch. xlv) concerning a magistrate who, when a girl came

before him to complain of rape, ordered the accused young man either to marry her or pay her a sum of money. The fine was paid, and the magistrate then told the man to follow the girl and take the money from her by force; the man obeyed, but the girl defended herself so energetically that he could not secure the money. Then the judge, calling the parties before him again, ordered the fine to be returned: "Had you defended your chastity as well as you have defended your money it could not have been taken away from you." In most cases of "rape," in the case of adults, there has probably been some degree of consent, though that partial assent may have been basely secured by an appeal to the lower nervous centers alone, with no participation of the intelligence and will. Freud (_Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens_, p. 87) considers that on this ground the judge's decision in _Don Quixote_ is "psychologically unjust," because in such a case the woman's strength is paralyzed by the fact that an unconscious instinct in herself takes her assailant's part against her own conscious resistance. But it must be remembered that the factor of instinct plays a large part even when no violence is attempted.

Such facts and considerations as these tend to show that the sexual impulse is by no means so weak in women as many would lead us to think. It would appear that, whereas in earlier ages there was generally a tendency to credit women with an unduly large share of the sexual impulse, there is now a tendency to unduly minimize the sexual impulse in women.

FOOTNOTES:

[156] I have had occasion to refer to the historic evolution of male opinion regarding women in previous volumes, as, e.g., _Man and Woman_,