Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/550

 had as many if not more opportunities of perfecting herself than man, she has rarely proved his equal and never his superior.

The intellectual powers of woman not only differ in degree from those of man but also in character. Her mind participates with her physical constitution in being endowed with great sensibility, and hence her acuteness, perception, and tact. She seizes with rapidity objects which come before her, and observes by instinct an infinity of shades of meaning in details which might escape the most observant of men. She often arrives at conclusions with great celerity and adroitness, but then her results are as frequently wrong as right. Her perception is fine and penetrating rather than extended or profound. She readily occupies herself with small impressions and details, but is arrested there, being less capable of grasping general principles. Although her mind may thus embrace a variety of particulars, it is to little practical purpose, from an intellectual point of view, as she can not fix her attention on any idea or train of ideas for any length of time, and reason out a logical conclusion. Woman dislikes and avoids that hard work which requires long and profound meditation, her character being adverse to the study of abstract science. Her thoughts wander, she becomes impatient, and her too mobile imagination is unable to rivet the attention on the dry details of a practical subject. She enters with enthusiasm and often with unnecessary vigor at first into any new project, philanthropic, educational, or otherwise, but rarely carries it steadily out to a successful termination. Her opinions are formed by her feelings rather than by the operations of reason. Her forte is that species of knowledge which requires more tact than science, more vivacity than force, more imagination than judgment. Her chief moral philosophy is directed to the study of individuals and society, and the sagacity of a woman in acquiring traits of character and penetrating true motive is what the logic of a man rarely acquires. Wise women—the so-called blue-stocking—as a rule know nothing profoundly. Their natural acuteness of perception enables them to seize a number of details and isolated particulars, they fancy they understand them thoroughly, they confound theory with fact, the real difficulties they do not surmount, they can not fix the attention long and deeply, or persevere in overcoming obstructions, and they feel no pleasure in habits of profound meditation. They therefore remain with their acquired superficial knowledge, pass rapidly from one thing to another, and there only rest in their minds certain crude and incomplete notions, with which they are quite satisfied, and of which they make the most, but which in consequence lead to false and illogical conclusions.

These observations are not for the purpose of merely lauding one sex at the expense of the other, but for a definite practical object, as will subsequently be seen. They serve to indicate that the average woman has been by nature endowed with a brain and nervous system