Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/363

 secret of influence is a vivid appreciation of the established motives and incentives to conduct.

The relative power of persuasion of the two sexes, then, may be tabulated as follows:

According to our hypothesis, the first line of the table should give the arrangement in which the difference is greatest. In the next line the difference is less; still less in the next; and least of all in the last case. In all cases, however, the superiority of women in this respect should be very marked.

Since our feelings are necessarily much more numerous than our judgments, we should expect to find it much more easy to persuade either a man or a woman than to convince; but, if our theory is correct, the advantage of influence over argument should be much greater when a woman is to be moved than when the effort is directed to a man.

Another difference between the sexes will at once be seen to follow from the above parallel. Since male character has the variable element, and may vary toward either good or bad, it follows that the ideally perfect male character will be more hard to define and more seldom realized than the ideal female character. It is difficult to prove such a statement as this, for the sentiments upon which individual opinion of the subject is based hardly admit of exact statement, but that there is an accepted standard of female excellence, and that the women who realize it are not rare exceptions, can, I think, be shown by the study of female character as depicted by dramatists, novelists, and poets. An appeal to this test is unfavorable to our hypothesis, for characters are selected for novels or poems on account of their originality; but I think that any one who will review Shakespeare, Thackeray, or George Eliot with the subject in mind, and who will compare the more important female characters, will find that they might be transposed from one novel or play to another with much less violence than would attend the transposition of the male characters.

It is hardly necessary to call attention to the obvious fact that our conclusions have a strong leaning to the conservative or old-fashioned view of the subject—to what many will call the "male" view of women. The positions which women already occupy in society and the duties which they perform are, in the main, what they should be if our view is correct; and any attempt to improve the condition of women by ignoring or obliterating the intellectual differences between them