Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/27

Rh in the evolution of crafts and arts, including the important one of healing; and point out the absolute necessity, since an original parity of muscular development in the animal world was lost, of their meeting physical coercion by the help of keen, penetrative, resourceful wits, and the "conning" which (from the temptation of weakness to serve by deception) became what we now mean by "cunning." To these I think we may add the woman's leading part in the evolution of language. While her husband was the " man of action," and in the heat of the chase and of battle, or the labor of building huts, making stockades, weapons, etc., the "man of few words," she was necessarily the talker, necessarily the provider or suggester of symbolic sounds, and with them of pictorial signs, by which to describe the ever-growing products of human energy, intelligence, and constructive-ness, and the ever-growing needs and interests of the race; in short, the ever-widening range of social experience.

We are all, men and women, apt to be satisfied now as we have just been told, for instance, in the Faraday Lecture with things as they are. But that is just what we all came into the world to be dissatisfied with. And while it may now be said that women are more conservative than men, they still tend to be more adaptive. If the fear of losing by violent change what has been gained for the children were removed, women would be found, as of old, in the van of all social advance.

Lastly I would ask attention to the fact that throughout history, and I believe in every part of the world, we find the elderly woman credited with wisdom and acting as the trusted adviser of the man. It is only in very recent times and in highly artificial societies that we have begun to describe the dense, even the imbecile, man as an " old woman." Here we have a notable evidence indeed of the disastrous atrophy of the intellectual heritage of woman, of the partial paralysis of that racial motherhood out of which she naturally speaks ! Of course, as in all such cases, the inherited wisdom became associated with magic and wonder-working and sybilline gifts of all kinds. The always shrewd and often really originative, predictive, and wide-reaching qualities of the woman's mind (especially after the climacteric had been passed) were mistaken for the uncanny and devil-derived powers of the sorceress and the witch. Like the thinker, the moralist, and the healer, she was tempted to have recourse to the short-cut of the "black arts," and appeal to the supernatural and miraculous, as science would now define these. We still see, alas, that the special insight and intelligence of women tends to spend itself at best on such absurd misrepresentations of her own instincts and powers as " Christian Science ; " or worse, on clairvoyance and fortune-telling and the like. Then, it may be, elaborate theories of personality mostly wide of the mark, and constructed upon phenomena which we could learn to analyze and interpret on strictly scientific and really philosophical principles, and thus to utilize at every point. We are, in short, failing to enlist for true social service a natural reserve of intelligence which mostly lying unrecognized and unused in any healthy form, forces its way out in morbid ones. And let us here remember that we are not merely considering a question of sex. No mental function is entirely unrepresented on either side.

The cjuestion then arises : How is civilized man to avail himself fully of this reserve ot power? The provisional answer seems to be: By making the most of it through the training of all girls for the resumption of a lost power of race- motherhood which shall make for their own happiness and well-being, in using these for the benefit of humanity ; in short, by making the most of it through truer methods in education than any which have yet, except in rare cases, been applied. Certainly until we do this many social problems of the highest importance will needlessly continue to baffle and defeat us.

BY MR. HOBHOUSE.

I feel a good deal of difficulty in intervening in this extremely interesting discussion at this stage. I, like many of you, am only a listener to what the biologists have to tell us in this matter. Until we have very definite information as to what heredity can do, I think those of us who are only students of