Page:B20442294.djvu/177

Rh the validity of their thoughts, as the directors of their process of thinking, whether they make or do not make these the rule of conduct and the principle of judgment. A woman cannot grasp that one must act from principle; as she has no continuity she does not experience the necessity for logical support of her mental processes. Hence the ease with which women assume opinions. If a woman gives vent to an opinion, or statement, and a man is so foolish as to take it seriously and to ask her for the proof of it, she regards the request as unkind and offensive, and as impugning her character. A man feels ashamed of himself, feels himself guilty if he has neglected to verify a thought, whether or no that thought has been uttered by him; he feels the obligation to keep to the logical standard which he has set up for himself. Woman resents any attempt to require from her that her thoughts should be logical. She may be regarded as "logically insane."

The most common defect which one could discover in the conversation of a woman, if one really wished to apply to it the standard of logic (a feat that man habitually shuns, so showing his contempt for a woman's logic) is the quaternio terminorum, that form of equivocation which is the result of an incapacity to retain definite presentations; in other words the result of a failure to grasp the law of identity. Woman is unaware of this; she does not realise the law nor make it a criterion of thought. Man feels himself bound to logic; the woman is without this feeling. It is only this feeling of guilt that guarantees man's efforts to think logically. Probably the most profound saying of Descartes, and yet one that has been widely misunderstood, is that all errors are crimes. The source of all error in life is failure of memory. Thus logic and ethics, both of which deal with the furtherance of truth and join in its highest service, are dependent on memory. The conception dawns on us that Plato was not so far wrong when he connected discernment with memory. Memory, it is true, is not a logical and ethical act, but it is a logical and ethical phenomenon. A man who has had a vivid and deep perception regards it as a fault, if some half-