Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/601

Rh of intellectual qualities in the female line will be lessened as culture increases among mothers. Accordingly, the intellectual tendencies which might have been acquired by the short and easy method of heredity will have to be acquired by the slower processes of application. This, again, will require the expenditure of a proportionately larger amount of energy in women than in men, supposing that men have a higher average of intellect through heredity. Moreover, the probabilities of marriage, or, at least, of early marriage, are lessened in cases of intellectual women; so that the chances are, not only that intellectual women will have few daughters, and so be unable to add to the general average of female intellect by sex-transmission, but also that they will be unable to add anything whatever to the sum of hereditary intellect in either sex.

Man has two powerful advantages over woman: the admitted superiority in the size and weight of body and brain, and the certainty of the continuance of conditions which insure that superiority, for the conditions of masculine superiority are the very ones upon which the preservation of the species depends. The necessary outcome of an absolute intellectual equality of the sexes would be the extinction of the human race. For, if all food were converted into thought in both men and women, no food whatever could be appropriated to the reproduction of the species. But, as an actual fact, women do not consume so much food as men; nor can they do so while their average size remains so much smaller. Moreover, of this smaller amount of food consumed by women some must always be spared for the continuance of the race; so that the sum total of food converted into thought by women can never equal the sum total of food converted into thought by men. It follows, therefore, that men will always think more than women.

Nevertheless, if it could be shown that the energy derived from food in men were an energy of inferior quality, women might gain a compensating factor in quality of thought. By the consent of competent judges, the reasoning power and the creative imagination are the highest and most complex forms of brain-energy. We have the most abundant evidence that, while man possesses both these powers in large amount and of superior quality, woman possesses them in much smaller amount and of inferior quality; so that the distinction of exceptional women, of whom a list could be made, would add little to the general low average of feminine power. We hear the power of intuition quoted as a higher one than reason. Women possess this power in a higher degree than men, and are sometimes rated above them in consequence of it. Very little study has been bestowed on this faculty, which has been the occasion of so much self-congratulation to women. But there is considerable evidence that it is acquired by heredity, that it is closely akin to instinct, and that some modification of it is the common possession of women, children, and the lower animals. It is possessed in