Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/367

 very clear although somewhat narrow statement, by the strongest advocate of the fundamental likeness of the sexes, of what I take to be the most important psychological difference between them.

According to Mill—and I think that universal experience will justify his view—the highest type of woman is distinguished by her power of intuition, by her concrete acquaintance with the laws and principles which have been established by experience and generalization, by a constitutional knowledge of these laws which amounts to habit, so that she is able to recognize in actual practical life the action which is proper in any given case, without the necessity for a slow process of comparison and thought; by that immediate command of the faculties which is necessary for action.

This power of correctly and promptly applying the established scientific laws, which are the result of all the experience of the past, to the actions of ordinary practical life, is common sense, as distinguished from originality.

The highest type of male intelligence, on the other hand, is distinguished by the power to abstract and compare, and by a slow process of thought to reach new generalizations and laws, and to see these in their abstract and ideal form, freed from all the complications of their concrete manifestations. To this power is often joined a woeful and disastrous lack of common sense, or power of prompt and proper decision and action in special cases.

Lecky, in his "History of European Morals," gives an excellent summary of the most marked differences between the male mind and the female; and, although we do not agree with him in thinking that a departure from the male type is in all cases to be regarded as an inferiority, we can not fail to note how exactly his account agrees with the demands of our hypothesis.

He says: "Intellectually a certain inferiority of the female sex can hardly be denied when we remember how almost exclusively the foremost places in every department of science, literature, and art have been occupied by men; how infinitesimally small is the number of women who have shown in any form the very highest order of genius; how many of the greatest men have achieved their greatness in defiance of the most adverse circumstances, and how completely women have failed in obtaining the first position, even in music and painting, for the cultivation of which their circumstances would appear most propitious. It is as impossible to find a female Raphael or a female Handel as a female Shakespeare or a female Newton. Women are intellectually more desultory and volatile than men; they are more occupied with practical instances than with general principles; they judge rather by intuitive perception than by deliberate reasoning or past experience. They are, however, usually superior to men in nimbleness and rapidity of thought, and in the gift of tact, the power of seizing rapidly and faithfully the finer impulses of feeling, and they have therefore often