- We observe an identical difference between men as a whole and women
as a whole. A young woman of twenty reacts with intuitive promptitude
and security in all the usual circumstances in which she may be placed.
Her likes and dislikes are formed; her opinions, to a great extent, the
same that they will be through life. Her character is, in fact,
finished in its essentials. How inferior to her is a boy of twenty in
all these respects! His character is still gelatinous, uncertain what
shape to assume, "trying it on" in every direction. Feeling his power,
yet ignorant of the manner in which he shall express it, he is, when
compared with his sister, a being of no definite contour. But this
absence of prompt tendency in his brain to set into particular modes is
the very condition which insures that it shall ultimately become so much
more efficient than the woman's. The very lack of preappointed trains
of thought is the ground on which general principles and heads of
classification grow up; and the masculine brain deals with new and
complex matter indirectly by means of these, in a manner which the
feminine method of direct intuition, admirably and rapidly as it
performs within its limits, can vainly hope to cope with.
- Women take offense and get angry, if
anything, more easily than men, but their anger is inhibited by fear
and other principles of their nature from expressing itself in blows.
- The consciousness of how one stands
with other people occupies a relatively larger and larger part of the
mind, the lower one goes on the scale of culture. Woman's intuition, so
fine in the sphere of personal relations, is seldom first-rate in the
way of mechanics. Hence Dr. Whately's jest, "Woman is the unreasoning
animal, and pokes the fire from the top."
