Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/228

218 thought and speech. A series of conditions, social, intellectual, and physiological, have forced this habit upon her as a means of self-defense.

Woman's religious nature is stronger than man's. She possesses in a marked degree the qualities of reverence, dependence, devotion, trust, and fidelity. Fear and timidity are feminine qualities, while faith is so natural to woman that she is disposed to credulity rather than to skepticism.

Let us pause a second time to see what theory, if any, our results establish. Here, again, from her mental differences the doctrine of woman's inferiority receives no support—inferior, no doubt, in philosophy, science, and invention, and in her conception of abstract truth and justice, but superior in intuition, in charity, in temperance, in fidelity, in balance. But here again, as in her physical peculiarities, woman approaches the child type. This is seen in the preponderance of the emotional life over the discriminative, and of the impulsive over the voluntary. So also the quick perception and the retentive memory remind us of the child more than do the stern logical processes of the man. Woman's mental associations, selecting the concrete, the individual, the whole rather than the part, relations in space rather than in time, are also those of the child. Woman's receptivity, her faith and trust, her nai've freedom from skepticism, her fear and timidity, her feeling of dependence, her religious instincts, are all child traits. Children, like women, have slower reaction-time and lesser motor ability, are more easily hypnotized, have more number forms and color associations, have less power of inhibition, express their emotions more in their faces, and more readily give way to tears and smiles. Modern child study has shown that children are more cruel than adults and have little power to discriminate between truth and falsehood. They also are sympathetic and changeable, and act with reference to present rather than remote ends. Woman in respect to her altruism, pity, and charity has less resemblance to the child, but these traits are so intimately connected with her duties of motherhood as to have little bearing upon the theory of her naturally infantile constitution.

The hypothesis that woman approximates to the primitive rather than to the child type, that she represents arrested development, may be said to receive a certain amount of confirmation from her mental traits. Indifference to physical and psychical pain, freedom from color blindness, the preponderance of memory and intuition over reason, lack of mechanical inventiveness, conservatism and adherence to custom, precocity, changeableness, cruelty, tact, deceitfulness, emotional expression, religious feeling, are all traits conspicuous among primitive races, and, as we have