Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/633

 they may feel themselves called. While thus developing their individual powers, it is probable that all the industries and activities of life would also be bettered by the introduction into their management of the spirit of "greater tenderness and less selfishness" which it would seem that heredity and selection have bestowed upon her. Our courts of law are often characterized by scenes of harshness, and brutality even; and surely the professions of theology and medicine furnish fitting fields for the exercise and culture of these beneficent qualities. Without doubt the possession of these traits, in a somewhat higher degree, by woman than by man, will counterbalance her disabilities in other directions, so that, in the struggle for success, she will suffer no serious disadvantage.

While intellectual arenas may always furnish a neutral ground where the two sexes shall meet on the common basis of actual achievement—where all work shall be submitted to the common test of merit—in matters of general interest to society, qualities essentially masculine on the one hand, or peculiarly feminine on the other, will turn the balance of power according as the interests or necessities of the hour are best subserved thereby. The existence of war would seem to furnish an extreme case in which masculine traits would be in the ascendant, and receive supreme consideration; but the hospital and the ambulance—the sanitary commission and the nurses' field-staff—present the converse of the picture, where feminine qualities assert their natural supremacy. On the other hand, "the instinct and genius for charity," ascribed to woman, find their executive force in the masculine arm, always at her command in carrying out her most generous conceptions.

Thus the contrasting phases of human nature meet and blend, like the forces at the opposite extremes of the spectrum, which, presenting the unlike characteristics of heat and actinism, unite in the visible middle ground, and speak in the beautiful language of color. Unrefracted, the full white ray of perfect light is manifested as a unit.

Solicitude is sometimes expressed lest an enlargement of the activities of woman, and the consequent mingling in the ruder scenes of life, should impair the delicacy and refinement which belong to womanhood; but this would seem to be a needless anxiety. Traits of character so inwoven in the very fibre of the nature as those which distinguish the sexes will not be easily eradicated, and the same laws which are now at work to check the too great differentiation of both in the direction in which they have hitherto tended, will prevent any excess of reaction. In this imperfect review of a subject commensurate with the history of the human race, at least, and generally believed to extend its rootlets to the lowest grades of organic life, we have seen that the key to the history of the evolution of the race lies in the distinction of sex.

This distinction, making its appearance at the very threshold of development of organized structures, pari passu becomes more marked and intricate with increased complexity of form and function, till perfect dualism is reached and exemplified in man, the crowning result of creation by evolution.

Its two phases, male and female, are not opposed in the sense of being antagonistic, but complementary rather, and so related that each finds development only in and through the other.

In the eloquent language of Roehsig—"The law of polarity, which applies seemingly to all inorganic Nature and controls the realm of life, gains its crowning efflorescence in the distinction of sex, and asserts its dominion over the operations of mind itself."