Woman Movement — The Influence of the Woman Movement upon Motherhood, Part 1

CHAPTER VII THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MOTHERHOOD

Because it has increased the culture of woman and her feeling of personal responsibility, the woman movement has had its influence, both directly and indirectly, upon the postponement of the legal and customary marriage age.

Since young girls have exercised their brains as much as the boys have, they are no longer so far in advance of the boys in physical development.

But when modern girls finish their studies they are physically as well as psychically more universally developed than their grandmothers were.

They know much more of the difficulties and realities of life, not least of the sexual life.

And this knowledge has instilled in them a reluctance to undertake too early the serious and difficult task of motherhood.

They have greater need of truth and culture, and less tendency to erotic visionary dreaming than girls of their age in the middle of the previous century; their desire for work and their social feeling fix goals, and they work with all their might to attain them.

And because, as already explained, both sexes have for each other a more many-sided attraction than the merely erotic, young people are more careful, more choice, in their erotic decisions.

The finest young girls of to-day are penetrated by the Nietzschean idea, that marriage is the combined will of two people to create a new being greater than themselves.

But their joy does _not_ consist in the fact “that the man wills”; they are themselves “will,” and above all they have the will to choose the right father for their children, not only for their own sake but for the sake of the children.

If it be true that immediate, “blind,” erotic attraction is most instinctively correct in choice, then the present comrade life of young people and the increased clear-sightedness which it gives, as well as the increasing erotic idealism of young girls, are not unconditionally advantageous to the new race.

The question is, however, still undecided.

Here it may only be emphasised that the young girl of to-day, in spite of all intellectual development, is still won always by powerful spiritual-sensual love, which the woman movement has too long considered as a negligible quantity.

Under the influence of the doctrine of evolution, young girls begin to understand that their value as members of society depends essentially upon their value for the propagation of mankind; all the more they realise the duty of physical culture which will enable them to fulfil this function better; they no longer consider their erotic longing as impure and ugly but as pure and beautiful.

It is out of this soul condition that the different movements for the protection of mothers and children, theoretically considered, have proceeded.

These are at present the most important “woman movements,” although unrecognised by the older woman movement.

And this older movement has not yet recognised the fact that, because of present marriage conditions, the degenerate, uneducated, decrepit, have greater opportunity for propagating the race, both within and outside of marriage, than the young, sound, pure-minded, and loving; that it can therefore _be no sin_, from the point of view of the race, if the latter become parents without marriage, nor should it be a subject of shame from the social point of view.

All women’s rights have little value, until this one thing is attained: that a woman who through her illegitimate motherhood has lost nothing of her personal worth, but on the contrary has proved it, does not forfeit social esteem.

Our time can point to women who have been typical of the reform tendencies of the century in this respect.

Some of these women, if they really accomplished the unprecedented task of “a child and a work,” have drawn their strength for the task out of precisely the commonplace, homely qualities and sterling virtues, contrary to which they believed they were acting when they became mothers, driven by a power greater than their _conscious_ personality.

Others again became mothers with the consent of their whole personality.

They were clear that they thus made use of the masculine rights and freedom which feminism first brought home to women.

And although many advocates of women’s rights refrain from such consequences of their ideas, the women who in other respects determine their conduct of life by their own free personal choice recognise that this, their _real_ “emancipation,” is a fruit of the woman movement.

In Europe, however, most women under thirty still dare to dream of motherhood in a love marriage as the greatest happiness and the highest duty of life.

[5] But, as direct and indirect result of the woman movement, the fact none the less remains that there is found _among women an increasing disinclination for maternity_, a reluctance which deprives mankind of many superior mothers, while at the same time woman’s commercial work for self-support in all classes increases her sterility or makes her incapable of the suckling so vitally important for the children.

That the modern woman, because of individual fate or her own choice, often remains unmarried is no danger in and for itself.

This fact, as I have emphasised above, is connected with a number of cultural and material conditions, which sometime will be altered, and then woman’s desire for marriage will again increase.

The real danger has appeared only since women have begun to strengthen the tendency to celibacy by the amaternal theory, which now confuses the feminine brain and leads the feminine instinct astray.

The woman movement in and with this influence upon maternity sinks to the lowest point of the scale according to the criterion of worth employed here: the elevation of the life of the individual and of the race.

In this we stand in our time before a twofold mystery, which lies in the circumstance that not only women—women “with breasts made right to suckle babes”—emphasise this stultifying influence, but that there are men, each the son of a mother, who also propagate it.

These men have allowed themselves to be blinded by the false logic concerning women, which declares that since rich mothers do not wish to fulfil the duties of a mother and the poor cannot fulfil them, superior social organisations must be created for that purpose; in other words, instigated by a mere temporary unpleasant discrepancy, we will create a new, a different order of things.

But, if this obtained universally, it would inflict incomparably greater injury upon mankind than do present unhappy conditions.

Upon the whole, however, it is precisely as a result of this tendency that the deepest hostility of men against feminism has developed.

The fact that the idea of evolution is now beginning to enter into the flesh and blood of man also contributes its share to this feeling.

Just as formerly a man wished heirs for his personal and real estate and for his name, he now desires inheritors of his being; he desires an eternal life, which becomes a certainty only by means of parenthood, whereby the individual as father or mother lives on physically and spiritually, in body and soul, in his children and grandchildren down to the last of his descendants.

This conception has made the sex instinct again holy, as it was for the pagans.

This new reverence for their duty as beings of sex now induces many young men to guard their sexual health and strength by an asceticism the motive of which is the exact opposite of that which determined the asceticism called forth by Christianity, the asceticism which was fear of the sex instinct as impure and as a temptation to sin.

Now the innermost aim of young men’s creative desire is the higher development of mankind.

Love becomes for them the condition by which they can most perfectly redeem their religious certainty of being part of a great design, their religious longing for harmony with life’s creative desire, with the infinite.

There are now men who work most zealously for the ennoblement of the race—“eugenics,” as this effort is called in England—as well as for the protection of mother and child—“puericulture,” as this endeavour is called in France.

There are men who write excellent works upon the psychology of the child, and upon sexual instruction; men, who, in art and poetry, give expression to the new veneration for the sanctity of generation, for motherhood, for the child.

The finest thing written about the child as a cultural power is written by an American.

[6] Painting has now new devotional pictures of the Mother with her Child, especially those conceived by a Frenchman and an Italian.

[7] The most beautiful representation of youth’s new desire for love is by a German sculptor.

[8] Likewise a German, Nietzsche, has the most profound conception of parenthood and education as the means whereby humanity will cross over the bridge of the men of to-day to the superman.

Only when all this is realised can one conceive what the feelings of these new men must be when they meet those new women “who are no longer willing to be slaves of the instinct for the propagation of the race;”

who see in motherhood “a loss of time from their work;” “an attack upon their beauty;” an obstacle to the refined conduct of life;—a conduct of life certain to debase woman’s worth as a child-bearing being, but to elevate her to that exquisite, perfect product of culture, a “woman of the world;” an obstacle also for woman as creator of other objective cultural values.

If a man with a father’s desires finds himself united with such a woman, he finds himself in marriage quite as much a prostitute as innumerable wives have felt themselves to be when they were mere tools of a man’s desire.

On the contrary the desire for the elevation of mankind on the part of the new woman and the new man, is evinced in the idea that not the quantity but the quality of the children they give to humanity is most significant; that a land of fewer but more perfect men is a higher culture ideal than the principle still always maintained from the point of view of national competition, that the inhabitants of a country must only be numerous however inferior they may be.

To this wholly new evolutionary conception of life the amaternal women oppose the following train of thought which greatly influences the feeling and desire of women to-day[9]: Culture now sets new duties for woman, more significant than exclusively natural ones.

The more the individual life increases in value, the more the interest for the mere functions of sex declines, and with it also the value of woman _as woman_ for a society where, because of motherhood, she has become a being of secondary rank.

It evinces lack of ideality if one censures this tendency of the modern woman to renounce maternity for the sake of more spiritual interests.

While the mother concentrates herself upon her own child only, the woman who renounces motherhood can extend her being to embrace children as children in general.

As a mother, woman is only a being of nature.

But the personality, with its multiplicity of feelings and endeavours, demands an independent activity as well as maternity.

To put her entire personality into the education of her children is a twofold error.

First and foremost, most mothers are _bad_ educators and serve their children better if they entrust them to a born teacher; in the second place, _gifted_ children educate themselves best and should be spared all educational arts.

The mediocre child, who is more susceptible to education, has ordinarily also only mediocre parents, who likewise benefit the children most if they put them in the care of excellent teachers.

Children who are _below_ mediocrity can also be best educated by specialists.

So there remains for the mother, after the first years’ care and training, no especial task as educator, at least none in which she can really put her personality.

To talk to a mother about the possibilities of a richer office of mother, as educator of her children, she calls lulling her into an illusion under which she must labour only to suffer.

A woman who can exercise her personality in another way should not therefore put it into the education of her children.

The amaternal advocates deny that motherliness is the criterion of womanliness; they find this criterion in the form, the external being of woman, in her manner and physical appearance—in a word, in the _outer_ expression of the inner disposition, which they deny as typical of womanliness!

“Womanliness” is thus reduced to an “æsthetic principle,” while woman’s spiritual attributes are considered as “universally human”; and the right is granted to the feminine sex to emancipate herself from the result of the heresy that _motherliness_ should be the ethical norm for the “being” or “essence” of womanhood.

The suitability of woman’s _psychic_ constitution for her work as mother is not acknowledged as proof that motherliness is the distinguishing characteristic of womanliness.

For this constitution is less conspicuous in the higher stages of differentiation.

Its suitability was then a phenomenon of adaptation and changed with the conditions of life.

Thus this constitution cannot be cited as a reason for limiting woman’s personal exercise of her powers.

Motherliness is no social instinct.

How can motherliness, which we have in common with beasts and savages, be considered as higher than, for example, justice, truth, and other gradually won spiritual values, which woman can promote by her personal activity?

The higher the forms of life woman attains, the less will her personality be determined by motherliness.

Why then should women bring to the domestic life the sacrifice of their personality, while no one demands this of men?

Why shall not woman, just as man, satisfy her demands as a sex being in marriage and, as for the rest, follow her profession, attend to her spiritual development, her social tasks?

Why condemn woman to remain a half-being—that is, with unexercised brain—only because certain of her instincts attract her to man, while he is not constrained to suppress his personality because he in like manner felt himself attracted to woman?

It is the old superstition of the family life as “woman’s sphere,” which still confuses the conception.

By the present form of family life woman is “oversexed.

” Her higher development, as well as that of her husband and children, will be promoted if woman guards her independence by earning her own living, in commercial work conducted beyond the portal of the home; if housekeeping becomes co-operative; if the education of the children is carried on outside the home, in which now the motherly tenderness emasculates the children and fosters in them family sentiment of an egoistic nature and not social feelings.

Thus are solved the difficulties which are entailed when the wife’s work is carried on outside the home; equipoise between her intellectual and emotional, her sexual and social nature follows, and her worth, as that of a man, will be measured by her human personality, not by her womanliness, her efficacy in the family, for the exercise of which she is now constrained to renounce her personality.

So runs in brief the programme of the amaternals.

* * * * * It has already been indicated that the woman movement, in its _inception_, could gather strength only by combating with all its power the prejudice that _woman is incapable of the same kind of activity as man_.

But now the whole woman movement has for a long time been emphasising the fact that woman is entitled, not only on her own behalf but more especially in her capacity as home-keeper, wife, and mother, to the full development of her powers and to equality with man in the family and in society.

In the amaternal programme sketched above, however, the fanaticism, which characterised the entire woman movement a generation ago, now evinces itself in the error that _equal rights_ for the sexes must mean also _equal functions_; that the development of women’s powers involves also their application in the same spheres of activity in which man is engaged; that _equality_ of the sexes implies _sameness_ of the sexes.

While moderate feminism begins to see that, if man and wife compete, this rivalry can benefit[10] neither the woman, the man, nor the children, amaternal feminism urges the keenest competition.

And if this is once accepted as advantageous to woman’s personality and to society, then it is obvious that she must, with all the energy of the attacked, defend herself from the duties of maternity, because of which she would obviously come off second-best in the competition.

From the point of view of individualism it is obvious that the _law_ must set no limitations to woman’s practice of a vocation, unless evident hygienic dangers menace either her or the coming generation.

Women must, for their own sake as well as for that of society, have free _choice of work_, for life and nature possess innumerable unforeseen possibilities.

Nevertheless, it does happen that a woman who gives superior children to humanity may, nevertheless, feel herself incapable of educating them; likewise it sometimes happens that a husband and wife who have exceptional children, cannot endure to live together.

In neither case has law or custom a right to force upon a mother or a father a yoke that is intolerable or to demand of a mother or a father unreasonable sacrifices.

But the right to limit the choice of work, the law does not possess;

nature assumes that right herself: first of all from the axiom that no one can be in two places at the same time, and in the second place because no one can respond simultaneously and with full energy to two different spiritual activities.

One cannot, for example, count even to one hundred and at a certain number give a simple grasp of the hand without suspending the counting momentarily.

Although no one has ever been denied the privilege of solving a mathematical problem and of following carefully at the same time a piece of music, yet it is certain that the effectiveness of both intellectual activities would be thereby diminished.

These extremely simple observations can be continued until the most complex are reached.

If the observation be directed to the sphere of domestic life, every wife and mother who _is willing to institute impartial observations of self_, will affirm the difficulty of working with a divided mind.

If a mother carries on her work at home and must put it away in order to be beside the sick-bed of her child, or to make those arrangements which assure domestic comfort, or to help her husband, then she feels that her book or her picture suffers, that the activity which binds her more intimately to the home relaxes for a time the intimacy of her connection with her work.

One can by day carry on a dull industrial task, and by night produce an achievement of the soul; but one cannot let one’s soul radiate in one direction without impairing its energy in another.

A work needs exclusive devotion.

And this is, viewed externally, difficult to attain in joint action; viewed from within, it requires a renunciation that in the case of a loving soul evokes a continual inner struggle.

For that reason, also, literature with woman as its subject has for some decades been filled with the great conflict of modern woman’s life: the conflict between vocation and parents, between vocation and husband, between vocation and child.

Certainly the family has often been a torture chamber for individuality, as a consequence of laws and customs, which the future will regard as we now do the rack and the thumbscrew.

But nature is more severe than law and custom when she confronts us with a choice which, however it may turn out, tears a piece from our heart.

And now neither custom nor man demands of woman the “sacrifice of the personality.

” This sacrifice is required only by the law of limitations which rules over us all.

The creative man or the man working objectively must often condemn the emotional side of his personality to a partial development; he must for the sake of his work renounce many family values important for this emotional side of his being.

Even if shorter working hours could partially diminish this cultural offering, the _inner_ conflict, for the man or the woman, is not settled thereby.

Even if a man, in the consciousness of his wife’s endowment of talent, assumed a number of domestic duties, especially those pertaining to the children, the inner conflict would still continue.

And this conflict is in no way solved by the amaternal theory that the personal life must be placed above the instinct life.

For, as has been emphasised, the choice is not between the personal and the instinct life, but between the intellectual and the emotional side of woman’s personality.

And the solution of this choice has not been discovered by the amaternals, who would combine commercial work with marriage and maternity.

Women who remain unmarried or who give up commercial activity which they cannot carry on in the home, have not _settled the conflict_ either, but have only reduced its difficulties.

The fundamental error of the amaternal solution of the problem is that it characterises motherliness as a _non-social_ instinct, but, on the other hand, defines the “personal” activity of woman as an expression of the social instinct.

_For all social instincts have been developed by culture out of primitive instincts.

_ All cultural development lies between the sex impulse of the Australian negress and the erotic sentiment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets.

And when the amaternals assert that motherliness, which “we have in common with beasts and savages,” cannot be an expression of the personality, their argument has the same validity as that which would deny to the Sistine Chapel the quality of an expression of personality because beasts and savages also exhibit the decorative instinct.

The development of the mother instinct into motherliness is one of the greatest achievements in the progress of culture, a development by which the maternal functions have continually become more complex and differentiated.

Already in the case of the higher animals maternity involves much more than the mere act of giving birth; an animal not only faces death for her young, she gives them also a training which often indicates power of judgment.

A cat, for instance, which sought in vain to prevent her kitten from entering the water and which finally threw the kitten in and then pulled it out, thus obtaining the desired result of her pedagogy, had not, as have so many modern mothers, read Spencer, but could, nevertheless, put many of these mothers to shame.

Even the initial maternal functions, nursing and physical care, involve a culture of the spiritual life of the mother, not only through an increase in tenderness, but also in observation, discrimination, judgment, self-control; a woman’s character often develops more in a month during which she is occupied with the care of children, than in years of professional work.

Mother love and the reciprocal love which it awakens in the child, not only exercise the first deep influence upon the individual’s life of feeling, but this love is _the first form of the law of mutual help—it is the root of altruism, the cotyledon_ of a now widely ramified tree of “social instincts.

” Although woman through the mere _physical_ functions of motherhood makes a great social contribution, the importance of her contribution is greatly enhanced if one also takes into consideration her _spiritual_ nature.

And notwithstanding the fact that fatherhood has also, to a certain degree, developed in man the qualities of tenderness, watchfulness, patience, yet the enormous predominance of woman’s _physical_ share in parenthood, in comparison with man’s, is in itself enough to create, in course of time, the intimate connection which still exists to-day between mother and child, as well as the difference between the personality of woman and man.

The physical functions of motherhood were the fundamental reasons for the earliest division of labour.

And this division of labour, the aim of which, next to self-preservation, was for both sexes the protection of posterity, augmented and strengthened the qualities which each sex employed for its special functions.

All human qualities lie latent in each.

But they have been so specialised by this division of labour, or, on the other hand, suppressed by it, that they now appear in varying proportions: in woman, a careful, managing, supervising, lifeguarding, inward-directed sense of love; in man, courage, desire for action, force of will, power of thought, an activity subduing nature and life, became the distinguishing characteristics; and fatherhood became psychologically, as it is physiologically, something different from motherhood.

Even if culture continues to efface the sharp lines of demarcation, so that it becomes more and more impossible to generalise about “woman” and “man,” and increasingly more necessary for each and every woman to solve the “woman question” individually, yet from the point of view of the race, the _division of labour must on the whole remain the same as that which hitherto existed_, if the higher development of mankind shall continue in uninterrupted advance to more perfect forms.

It is necessary for _these higher ends of culture_ that woman _in an ever more perfect manner shall fulfil what has hitherto been her most exalted task_: the bearing and rearing of the new generation.

The amaternal assertion, that motherliness can be no higher than justice and truth, is an infuriating antithesis.

It is as if one should assert that “air is better than water, or both better than bread.

” Both assertions place the fundamental condition of life counter to other needs of life!

Who shall exercise justice and truth when no new men are born?

And, moreover, how shall justice and truth increase in mankind if children are not trained to a greater reverence for justice and a deeper love of truth?

In order to fulfil this one office _of education_ well, mothers need their _universal human culture in its entirety_.

But even if this were not so, if motherhood did not require the concentration of woman’s personality; even if motherliness remained only “primitive instinct,” yet this instinct, in the women who have guarded it, is more valuable for mankind than the universal human development of power of the women who have lost this instinct.

No social nor individual activity of women could compensate for the extinction of this “instinct,” which only recently in Messina drove hundreds of mothers to shield their children with their own bodies; this “instinct,” which recently impelled a mother, who learned before she gave birth to her child that her own life must be the price for the saving of that of the child, to cry: “I have lived, but the life of my child belongs now to mankind—save the child!

” So the mother died without even having seen the beautiful being for whom she gave her life.

In the world of “personally” developed women, however, after a new Messina catastrophe the mothers would be found with their manuscripts and their pictures in their arms.

And confronted with a choice like that related above, the mother would answer: “Let the child die, I will live my personal life to the end.

” The amaternal type must persist for the present.

There are in reality in our time many women who with unresponsive eyes can pass by a lovely child, among them even mothers who do not feel the pure sensuousness, the wise madness, the intoxicating delight which such a child awakens in every motherly woman; mothers who have no conception what a fascinating subject for study the soul of a child can offer.

Jean Paul, who scourged worthless mothers and tried to awaken the repressed maternal instinct of his time with the charge that a woman who is bored when she has children, is a contemptible creature, would find to-day many mothers who are bored only if they have their children about them.

And these cerebral, amaternal women must obviously be accorded the freedom of finding the domestic life, with its limited but intensive exercise of power meagre, beside the feeling of power which they enjoy as public personalities, as consummate women of the world, as talented professionals.

But they have not the right to _falsify life values_ in their own favour so that they themselves shall represent the highest form of life, the “human personality” in comparison with which the “instinctively feminine” signifies a lower stage of development, a poorer type of life.

Women who have produced books and works of art, to be compared, as respects permanence of value, to confetti at a carnival, have, according to this viewpoint, proved themselves human individualities, while a mother who has contributed an endless amount of clear thought, rich understanding, warm feeling, and strong will to the education of a fine group of children, requires a public office in order to prove herself a “human personality”!

The brain work which a woman employs in a commercial concern bears witness to her individuality, but the brain work which a large, well-managed household demands, does not.

The woman physician who delivers a mother expresses her “personality,” but the mother has put no “personality” into the feelings with which she has borne the child, the dreams with which she has consecrated it, the ideas in accordance with which she has educated it!

The girl who has passed her examinations has proved herself a developed human being; but her grandmother, who is now filled with the kindness and wisdom which she has won in a life dedicated to domestic duties, a life in which the restricted sphere of her duties did not prevent the comprehensiveness of her cultural interests, nor her all-embracing sympathy with humanity—such a woman is not a personality!

When men advance as an argument against women’s rights the fear that women will lose their womanliness in public life, the older feminists answer that womanliness, especially motherliness, is rooted too firmly in nature to make it possible for this danger to exist.

Nothing has, however, become more clear in this amaternalistic time than that motherliness is _not_ an indestructible instinct.

Just as our time produces in increasing numbers sterile women and women incapable of nursing their children, so it produces more and more psychically amaternal women.

We can pass in silence the cases of children martyred in families or in children’s homes, for sexual perversity and religious fanaticism often play a rôle in such connections; we can also pass by the millions of mothers who bring about the abortion of their offspring, for the poor are driven to such practices largely by necessity, the rich mostly by love of pleasure.

There still remain a sufficient number of women in whom the mother instinct has faded away because of a course of thought like that just described.

Our time furnishes manifold proofs of the fact that the mother instinct can easily be weakened, or even entirely disappear, although the erotic impulse continues to live; that motherliness is not a spontaneous natural instinct, but the product of thousands of years not merely of _child-bearing_, but also of _child-rearing_; and that it must be strengthened in each new generation by the personal care which mothers bestow upon their children.

A woman learns to love the strange child whom she nurses as if it were her own;

a father who can devote himself to the care of his little children is possessed by an almost “motherly tenderness” for them, as are also older brothers and sisters for the little ones whom they care for.

But while those who advocate the cause of the amaternal women draw from such facts the conclusion that motherliness cannot be used as a criterion of womanliness, yet an entirely different conclusion forces itself upon everyone who sees in the united uplift of the individual and of mankind the criterion of the life-enhancing effect of the woman movement, the conclusion that the amaternal soul not only confirms the worst apprehensions of men in regard to the results of the woman movement, but also constitutes the greatest danger to the woman movement itself.

For the amaternal ideas will evoke a violent reaction _on the part of men_, in case such a reaction does not appear at an early stage on the part of women.

This latter reaction might also include a rebellion against the methods of industrial production, which exhaust the strength of mothers and children.

For the objection of industrialism, that “it cannot exist without women,” falls to the ground in face of the fact that a race cannot exist without sound and moral mothers.

And “moral” means, here, mothers capable and willing to bear sound children and to train children along moral lines.

If, on the contrary, Europe and America adhere to the economic and ethical principles which prevent a number of able and willing women of this type from becoming mothers, and if numbers of other women who could be mothers continue unwilling to assume the burden of motherhood, then this problem will finally become the problem of _a future for the European-American people_.

The woman movement must now with resolute determination abandon the narrow, biased attitude, psychologically natural a generation ago when the zealots of feminism had no other standard of value for an idea, an investigation, or a book, than whether they _advanced or did not advance_ the cause of woman; whether they _proved or did not prove_ woman’s equality with man.

For woman’s work, studies, and other accomplishments, no other standard was applied than that of equality with man’s work, man’s studies, and the accomplishments of man.

In a word, the proposition was that woman should be enabled to perform at the same time the life-work of a woman and of a man!

It is through these hybrids that the feminine sex transgresses against the masculine.

And this is one reason why our time is so filled with the tragic vicissitudes of women.

Truly, every progressive person must agree with Goethe’s aphorism, “I love him whom the impossible lures.

” For, thus allured, man has elevated his particular generation above the generation preceding.

But _in action_ every one must go down who is not imbued with the consciousness that whoever exceeds his limits is liable to tragic consequences, in the modern psychological view of the guilt attaching to one who undertakes more than his strength will allow.