Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/112

106 take up higher education because they enjoy it; men because their careers depend upon it. Only men, broadly speaking, are capable of objective studies. Only men can learn to face fact without flinching, unswayed by feeling or preference. The reality with woman is the way in which the fact affects her. Original investigation, creative art, the 'resolute facing of the world as it is'—all belong to man's world, not at all to that of the average woman. That women in college do as good work as the men is beyond question. In the university they do not, for this difference exists, the rare exceptions only proving the rule, that women excel in technique, men in actual achievement. If instruction through investigation is the real work of the real university, then in the real university the work of the most gifted women may be only by play.

It has been feared that the admission of women to the university would vitiate the masculinity of its standards, that neatness of technique would replace boldness of conception, and delicacy of taste replace soundness of results.

It is claimed that the preponderance of high-school-educated women in ordinary society is showing some such effects in matters of current opinion. For example, it is claimed that the university extension course is no longer of university nature. It is a lyceum-course designed to please women who enjoy a little poetry, play and music, read the novels of the day, dabble in theosophy, Christian science, or physic psychology, who cultivate their astral bodies and think there is something in palmistry, and are edified by a candy coated ethics of self-realization. There is nothing ruggedly true, nothing masculine left in it. Current literature and history are affected by the same influences. Women pay clever actors to teach them—not Shakespeare or Goethe, but how one ought to feel on reading King Lear or Faust or Saul. If the women of society do not read a book it will scarcely pay to publish it. Science is popularized in the same fashion by ceasing to be science and becoming mere sentiment or pleasing information. This is shown by the number of books on how to study a bird, a flower, a tree, or a star, through an opera glass, and without knowing anything about it. Such studies may be good for the feelings or even for the moral nature, but they have no elements of that 'fanaticism for veracity,' which is the highest attribute of the educated man.

These results of the education of many women and a few men, by which the half-educated woman becomes a controlling social factor have been lately set in strong light by Dr. Münsterberg. But they are. used by him, not as an argument against coeducation, but for the purpose of urging the better education of more men. They form likewise an argument for the better education of more women. The