Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/98

88 to the metaphysical school of thought, as much as any dogma of a medieval schoolman. They start from the assumption that living women either conform, or should be forced to conform, to some a priori definition of woman, evolved from the inner consciousness of a human being. They ignore all the ascertained facts of anatomy and physiology. They are directed not toward the perfection of womanhood in all its functions, but toward the transformation of woman into something different. They suggest not the study of natural laws, nor the observation of facts in Nature, but the worthlessness of all facts, and all laws, in comparison with a dictum issued from the study. It is not wonderful that ignorant enthusiasts should have placed woman in a false position through their inability to comprehend their own religion, but it is perhaps the strangest feature of the nineteenth century that thousands of persons advocate a still more unnatural revolution of the sexes in blind obedience to a purely metaphysical proposition.

The stages into which Auguste Comte divided the progress of human thought are admirably illustrated by modern attempts to alter the position of woman. Seventeen hundred years ago she was a stumbling block in the way of the religious enthusiasts; to the metaphysicians of today she is no more than an abstraction. The early fathers of the Christian Church regarded her physically as a temptation to sin; some modern philanthropists regard her intellectually as the equal of man. It is possible that there may be truth in both opinions, but it is certain that the whole truth is not to be found in either. The religious doctrine is intelligible enough at first sight, but the metaphysical doctrine takes us back to the middle ages, to the conflict between the realists and the nominalists, to the verbal quibbling in which great minds, for want of better occupation, frequently expended all their energies. The woman for whom a vote is demanded is not, when carefully inspected, a woman of flesh and blood, but an abstract or archetypal idea for which the realists of the nineteenth century claim a positive existence.

The process by which such ideas were arrived at in former times, and by which, in all probability, they are arrived at now, is of the following character: Men and women possess certain attributes, or a certain attribute, in common, and to this attribute, or to these attributes collectively, may be given the name of humanity. All points of difference are by the very nature of the process disregarded, or drawn off, or in technical language abstracted; or rather the point of resemblance is abstracted from the point of difference. Now, when humanity and similar abstract terms had been thus invented by men who perceived their value as a species of mental shorthand, they were invested with a substantial existence by Plato and many of his medieval followers. The "humanity" which is reached by this mental operation is, of course, divested of sex along with all other differences. If the