in 8, in one case (of a woman aged 31 who had had four children) being indeed only present during pregnancy, when it was considerable; in only 7 cases was there diminution or disappearance of sexual feeling.[199] Pregnancy may produce mental depression;[200] but on the other hand it frequently leads to a change of the most favorable character in the mental and general well-being.  Some women indeed are only well during pregnancy.  It is remarkable that some women who habitually suffer from various nervous troubles—­neuralgias, gastralgia, headache, insomnia—­are only free from them at this moment.  This “paradox of gestation,” as Vinay has termed it, is specially marked in the hysterical and those suffering from slight nervous disorders, but it is by no means universal, so that although it is possible, Vinay states, to confirm the opinion of the ancients as to the beneficial action of marriage on hysteria, that is only true of slight cases and scarcely enables us to counsel marriage in hysteria.[201] Even a woman’s intelligence is sometimes heightened by pregnancy, and Tarnier, as quoted by Vinay, knew many women whose intelligence, habitually somewhat obtuse, has only risen to the normal level during pregnancy.[202] The pregnant woman has reached the climax of womanhood; she has attained to that state toward which the periodically recurring menstrual wave has been drifting her at regular intervals throughout her sexual life[203]; she has achieved that function for which her body has been constructed, and her mental and emotional disposition adapted, through countless ages.

And yet, as we have seen, our ignorance of the changes effected by the occurrence of this supremely important event—­even on the physical side—­still remains profound.  Pregnancy, even for us, the critical and unprejudiced children of a civilized age, still remains, as for the children of more primitive ages, a mystery.  Conception itself is a mystery for the primitive man, and may be produced by all sorts of subtle ways apart from sexual connection, even by smelling a flower.[204] The pregnant woman was surrounded by ceremonies, by reverence and fear, often shut up in a place apart.[205] Her presence, her exhalations, were of extreme potency; even in some parts of Europe to-day, as in the Walloon districts of Belgium, a pregnant woman must not kiss a child for her breath is dangerous, or urinate on plants for she will kill them.[206] The mystery has somewhat changed its form; it still remains.  The future of the race is bound up with our efforts to fathom the mystery of pregnancy.  “The early days of human life,” it has been truly said, “are entirely one with the mother.  On her manner of life—­eating, drinking, sleeping, and thinking—­what greatness may not hang?"[207] Schopenhauer observed, with misapplied horror, that there is nothing a woman is less modest about than the state of pregnancy, while Weininger exclaims:  “Never yet has a pregnant woman given expression in any form—­poem, memoirs, or gynaecological monograph—­to her sensations or feelings."[208] Yet when we contemplate the mystery of pregnancy and all that it involves, how trivial all such considerations become!  We are here lifted into a region where our highest intelligence can only lead us to adoration, for we are gazing at a process in which the operations of Nature become one with the divine task of Creation.