Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/365

 nature by intuition, or arrived at a general rule of duty or prudence by it. These are results of slow and careful collection and comparison of experience; and neither the men nor the women of intuition usually shine in this department, unless, indeed, the experience is such as they can acquire by themselves. . . . To discover general principles belongs to the speculative faculty; to discern and discriminate the particular cases in which they are or are not applicable constitute practical talent; and for this women, as they now are, have a peculiar aptitude." It is only necessary to change two or three words in this last sentence in order to show its complete agreement with the demands of our theory. Its meaning will not be altered by the following reading, which serves to bring out more clearly its implications: To discover general principles belongs to the progressive aspect of the mind, which is most strongly developed in men; to. preserve and apply the general principles which are already established belong to the conservative side of the mind, and for this women, as they have been made by the evolution of the race, have and should have a peculiar aptitude. Mill continues as follows: "I admit that there can be no good practice without principles, and that the predominant place which quickness of observation holds among a woman's faculties makes her particularly apt to build over-hasty generalizations upon her own observation, though at the same time no less ready in rectifying these generalizations as her observation takes a wider range. But the corrective to this defect is access to the experience of the human race; general knowledge—exactly the thing which education can best supply."

This sentence, when viewed in connection with our present theory of the relations of the sexes, gives the key to the question of female education—for that form of education which supplies the general knowledge which is so important for the correct application of principles to special cases is culture, as distinguished from the technical training which looks to the discovery of new laws.

The next passage which I shall quote is of the greatest importance, for, founded as Mill's autobiography and numerous passages in his various works tell us it is, upon the personal experience of his life, it contains the germ of the idea which, if fully investigated, might have led him to entirely remodel his essay upon women; the idea that the sexes do not naturally stand in the relation of superior and inferior, nor in that of independent equals, but are the complemental parts of a compound whole. He says: "This gravitation of women's minds to the present, to the real, to actual fact, while in its exclusiveness it is a source of errors, is also a most useful counteractive of the contrary error. The principal and most characteristic aberration of speculative minds, as such, consists precisely in the deficiency of this lively perception and ever-present sense of objective fact. . . . Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man of theory and speculation, who employs himself, not in collecting materials of knowledge by observation,