Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/179

 intellectual pursuitsby keeping up a constant correspondence with pure and agreeable moral sentiments (while boys are led on, far and wide, in paths thoroughly abstracted from any such ideas)by having much more to do with the concrete, with instances and particular facts, than with abstract principlesby employing thoughts and hours principally with the observation, collection, and manipulation, of actual forms, species, and specimens; and by allowing more time to the elegancies of literature (beside female accomplishments) than to what passes under the term erudition.

In the next place, the two methods of culture should differ in regard to the difference of Power, which distinguishes the male and female mind. Every day, in society, we may meet with women equal to, or surpassing men in intelligence ; but if male and female minds, of apparently equal intelligence, are brought into comparison, very few instances will occur in which the latter are not far inferior to the former in power. This disparity may be attributed in part to habit and exercise; but it is seen to attach, nearly in the same proportion, to the earliest age. It would be a cruelty therefore to require girls to perform the tasks that should be exacted of their brothers. This mental power isa power of continued application, and a power of grasping and of retaining complex notions: itis strength, and it is force.

Again: some allowance ought, as I am inclined to think, to be made in the culture of the female mind for what I would not call an organic difference of structure, if I could find a term, near to my meaning, and not so liable to misconstruction. I am not however attempting to treat the subject in the abstract, but practically: and in relation to practice it comes nearly to the same, whether we assume an organic mental difference, or only suppose certain faculties to be much less strongly developed in the one class of