Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/861

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my fortune to consider seriously. The author takes himself and his subject seriously, and while he is obviously prepared for his work neither on the psychological, biological, nor yet the ethnological side, yet he is almost prepared in all of these fields, and brings to the subject a most astonishing originality. There is exhibited the most acute and subtle mental play throughout, but the whole argu- ment is characterized by downright unreasonableness. The man (he was almost a boy) was a genius, a German genius, and the volume is remarkable, not as a contribution to science but as a work of the imagination, and an exhibition of what fantastic antics the human mind is capable of. The form also is as bizarre as the con- tent. There are parts so poor, obscure, illogical, and stupid that they would not be accepted in a college boy's essay, and other parts worthy of Kant or Schopenhauer.

We almost feel that such a mind is detached from its environment and is creating a world of its own, but that this is not and cannot be so is shown in a most interesting manner by the fact that in the concrete illustrations which he uses to illustrate the traits of woman- kind in general (as he thinks) he is really speaking always of Ger- man Gretchen or her mother. He falls into the same error as Karl Vogt who some years ago, in a description of the mental traits of women students at Zurich, denied woman in general the ability to understand certain subjects in which American university women were already confessedly conspicuously proficient So Weininger reflects vaguely, indeed, and fantastically, as a dream reflects reality the character of the German woman. The American wo- man, however, is quite a different thing, and presents characters the very opposite of what Weininger claims are and must be the char- acters of woman universally and in perpetuity. It has not even, seemingly, occurred to him that the status of woman, as of the lower races, is in a measure dependent on the run of habit in her group and the limited range of her attention.

But impossible and extra-phenomenal as the book certainly is, it is yet worth the while. Jevons has remarked that the greatest inventor is the one whose mind is visited by the largest number of random guesses. Anything which brings more points of view into the case is valuable, and this book is rich in this respect That no one is either completely male or completely female is for instance, a good thesis, and the bearing of this view on the phenomena of sexual inversion is very suggestively stated and argued. And two