Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/406

392 for the securing of their aims; and hence, in large measure, their strongly religious bias. The masculine character, being accustomed to rely upon its own strength, is self-central and self-contained: to it the need of external aid, even of a supernatural kind, is not felt to be so urgent as it is to the feminine character, whose only hope is in the stronger arm of another. "The position of man is to stand, of woman to lean"; and although it may be hard for even a manly nature to contemplate the mystery of life and the approach of death with a really Stoic calm, at least this is not so impossible as it is for the more shrinking and emotional nature of a woman. Lastly, from her abiding sense of weakness and consequent dependence, there also arises in woman that deeply-rooted desire to please the opposite sex which, beginning in the terror of a slave, has ended in the devotion of a wife.

We must next observe another psychological lever of enormous power in severing the mental structures of men and women. Alike in expanding all the tender emotions, in calling up from the deepest fountains of feeling the flow of purest affection, in imposing the duties of rigid self-denial, in arousing under its strongest form the consciousness of protecting the utterly weak and helpless consigned by Nature to her charge, the maternal instincts are to woman perhaps the strongest of all influences in the determination of character. And their influence in this respect continues to operate long after the child has ceased to be an infant. Constant association with her growing children—round all of whom her affections are closely twined, and in all of whom the purest emotions of humanity are as yet untouched by intellect—imparts to the mother a fullness of emotional life, the whole quality of which is distinctively feminine. It has been well remarked by Mr. Fiske that the prolonged period of infancy and childhood in the human species must from the first "have gradually tended to strengthen the relations of the children to the mother," and, we may add, also to strengthen the relations of the mother to the children—which implies an immense impetus to the growth in her of all the altruistic feelings most distinctive of woman. Thus, in accordance with the general law of inheritance as limited by sex, we can understand how these influences became, in successive generations, cumulative; while in the fondness of little girls for dolls we may note a somewhat interesting example in psychology of the law of inheritance at earlier periods of life, which Mr. Darwin has shown to be so prevalent in the case of bodily structures throughout the animal kingdom.

There remains, so far as I can see, but one other cause which can be assigned of the mental differences between men and women. This cause is education. Using the term in its largest sense, we may say that in all stages of culture the education of women has differed widely from that of men. The state of abject slavery to which woman is consigned in the lower levels of human evolution clearly tends to dwarf her mind ab initio. And as woman gradually emerges from this her