Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/225

Rh We come now to the well-worn theme of the purely mental differences between the sexes, and here I shall make a brief summary of the more important and well-recognized differences, citing experiments and statistics where they are possible. In perception, woman is in general decidedly quicker than man. She reads a paragraph or book more quickly, and, knowledge of the subject being equal, she grasps more of it. In perception of objects she grasps more quickly a number of wholes or groups, and has a rapid unreasoned perception of relations which has the appearance of intuition. Her perception of details, however, is less accurate than man's, and her rapid reference of things to their proper classes extends only to matters of common human experience. In apperception the subjective factor is larger in woman, and she sees things more from the standpoint of her own experience, wishes, and prejudices. Even more than in man, where feeling is strong, objective perception is blind. Hence women make poorer critics than men, and more rarely are they impartial judges. For the formation of concepts, especially the more abstract ones, woman's mind is less adapted than man's. She thinks more in terms of the concrete and individual. Hence number forms and the associations of colors with sounds are, as is found, more common among women. Differences in habits of thought between the sexes may be well illustrated by a simple experiment in association. If fifty men and fifty women be required to write as rapidly as possible one hundred words without time for thought, in the women's lists more than in the men's will be found words relating to the concrete rather than the abstract, the whole rather than the part, the particular rather than the general, and associations in space rather than in time. As Lotze keenly remarks, women excel in arranging things in the order of space, men in the order of time. Men try to bring things under a general rule, without so much regard to the fitness or symmetry of the result. Women care less for general rules, and are inclined to look only to the immediate end in view, aiming to make each thing complete in itself and harmonious with its surroundings.

In respect to memory, as far as any general statements can be made, woman is superior. In memory tests college girls surpass boys. In Gilbert's tests on New Haven school children, however, the boys were superior in the exact reproduction of an interval of time. In reasoning of the quick associative kind women are more apt than men, but in slow logical reasoning, whether deductive or inductive, they are markedly deficient. They lack logical feeling, and are less disturbed by inconsistency. Analysis is relatively distasteful to them, and they less readily comprehend the relation of the part to the whole. They are thus less adapted to the plodding, analytical work of science, discovery, or invention. Their