Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/311

Rh a capacity to love in woman's psychical nature, and its greater power to impress itself profoundly upon the deliberate acts of her life over that of man. Madame de Staël truly said that "love is the history of woman's life; it is an episode in man's."

Love defeated in the attainment of its object becomes in man an incident to be forgotten, or to be remembered with impatience. A defeated love with woman is too often a defeat of her intellectual life. An emotion, the misdirection or disappointment of which is capable of inducing a large per centum of insane in one sex over the other, must surely differ in degree and kind. Certainly we must credit this excess on the part of women with an important physical factor, aside from that of sex proper—being of a less hardy development than man—but these physical peculiarities permit sex to assert its most potent psychical effect to the degree of shaping the actions or destiny of woman. It will suffice, to illustrate the fact referred to, to take the figures from the report of two asylums for the insane—the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, and the Michigan Asylum. Of 141 insane men and women received into these institutions, whose supposed cause of insanity could be traced to disappointed affections, 84 were women, and 57 were men. These figures are taken from an excess of 454 male over female inmates. Now, the figures, as we gather them from asylum reports, show that women are no more prone to insanity than men. It is natural to conclude that a specific cause leading to this excess of insanity in one sex over the other exists with greater force in one than the other, and not that one sex is less able to bear the operation of the specific cause.

There are many well-known facts in physiology, some of them brought out with remarkable force during the employment of anæsthetics, other facts obtained from a state of organic disease, and others from functional derangements, which tend to prove the sexual origin of love, but which would be out of place in a paper of this character. But there is really no doubt expressed by modern writers on physiology or psychology that this emotion is due to a sexual origin. Proof, such as I have advanced, becomes necessary from the popular scope of this paper, and that I have grouped a series of mental acts, and applied to them the name of sexual cerebration.

I offer, in conclusion, some general facts tending to define a fundamental difference in the mental operations of men and women. M. Quetelet has shown that the propensity to crime existing in a mass of people bears a mathematical ratio, both as to its degree and the sex of the perpetrators, to the total of population year by year. The certainty of this ratio is the result of law, which has its origin in the forces which cement together a mass of men under the name of society. Now, the fixed ratio existing between men and women of the same community, as to the nature and extent of the commission of crime, must be the product of the mental and physical peculiarities of sex.