been so far purified from the dross of a brutal ancestry as genuinely to appreciate, to admire, and to reverence the greatness, the beauty, and the strength which have been made perfect in the weakness of womanhood.

I will now pass on to consider the causes which have probably operated in producing all these mental differences between men and women. We have already seen that differences of the same kind occur throughout the whole mammalian series, and therefore we must begin by looking below the conditions of merely human life for the original causes of these differences in their most general form. Nor have we far to seek. The Darwinian principles of selection -both natural and sexual-if ever they have operated in any department of organic nature, must certainly have operated here. Thus, to quote Darwin himself :

Among the half-human progenitors of man, and among savages, there have been struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy. To avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to fashion weapons, requires reason, invention, or imagination.

...

These latter faculties, as well as the former, will have been developed in man partly through sexual selection-that is, through the contest of rival males and partly through natural selection that is, from success in the general struggle for life; and as in both cases the struggle will have been during maturity, the characters gained will have been transmitted more fully to the male than to the female offspring. . . . Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to

woman as the peacock is in ornamental plu

mage to the pea-hen.

cess, would be cut quite short, and the race would degenerate through the absence of that sexual selection for which the protracted preliminaries of love-making give opportunity. The willy-nilly disposition of the female is as apparent in the butterfly as in the man, and must have been continually favored from the earliest stages of animal evolution down to the present time. Coyness and caprice have in consequence become a heritage of the sex, to

gether with a cohort of allied weaknesses and petty deceits, that men have come to think venial, and even amiable, in women, but which they would not tolerate among themselves.

We see, then, that the principles of selection have thus determined greater strength, both of body and mind, on the part of male animals throughout the whole mammalian series; and it would certainly have been a most unaccountable fact if any exception to this rule had occurred in the case of mankind. For, as regards natural selection, it is in the case of mankind that the highest premium has been placed upon the mental faculties-or, in other words, it is here that natural selection has been most busy in the evolution of intelligence-and therefore, as Mr. Darwin remarks, we can only regard it as a fortunate accident of inheritance that there is not now a greater difference between the intelligence of men and of women than we actually find. Again, as regards sexual selection, it is evident that here also the psychologically segregating influences must have been exceptionally strong in the case of our own species, seeing that in all the more advanced stages of civilization-or in the stages where mental evolution is highest, and, therefore, mental differences. most pronounced-marriages are determined quite as much with reference to psychical as to physical endowments; and as men always admire in women what they regard as distinctively feminine qualities of mind, while women admire in men the distinctively masculine, sexual selection, by thus acting directly as well as indirectly on the mental qualities of both, is constantly engaged in moulding the minds of each upon a different pattern.

Such, then, I take to be the chief, or at least the original, causes of the mental differences in question. But besides these there are sundry other causes all For working in the same direction. example, as the principles of selection

ways.

have everywhere operated in the direction of endowing the weaker partner with that kind of physical beauty which comes from slenderness and grace, it follows that there has been everywhere a general tendency to impart to her a comparative refinement of organization; and in no species has this been the case in so high a degree as in man. Now, it is evident from what has been said in an earlier part of this paper, that general refinement of this kind indirectly affects the mind in many Again, as regards the analogous, though coarser, distinction of bodily strength, it is equally evident that their comparative inferiority in this respect, while it self one of the results of selection, becomes in turn the cause of their comparative timidity, sense of dependence, and distrust of their own powers on the part of women, considered as a class. Hence, also, their comparative feebleness of will and vacillation of purpose: they are always dimly conscious of lacking the muscular strength which, in the last resort, and especially in primitive stages of culture, is the measure of executive capacity. Hence, also, their resort to petty arts and pretty ways for the securing of their aims; and hence, in large measure, their strongly religious bias. The masculine character, being accustomed to rely upon its own strength, is self central and self contained to it the need of external aid, even of a supernatural kind, is not felt to be so urgent as it is to the feminine character, whose only hope is in the stronger arm of another." The position of man is to stand, of woman to lean; and although it may be hard for even a manly nature to contemplate the mystery of life and the approach of death with a really stoic calm, at least this is not so impossible as it is for the more shrinking and emotional nature of a woman. Lastly, from her abiding sense of weakness and consequent dependence, there also arises in woman that deeply-rooted desire to please the opposite sex which, beginning in the terror of a slave, has ended in the devotion of a wife.

We must next observe another psychological lever of enormous power in severing the mental structures of men and women. Alike in expanding all

the tender emotions, in calling up from the deepest fountains of feeling the flow of purest affection, in imposing the duties of rigid self-denial, in arousing under its strongest form the consciousness of protecting the utterly weak and helpless consigned by nature to her charge, the maternal instincts are to woman perhaps the strongest of all influences in the determination of character. And their influence in this respect continues to operate long after the child has ceased to be an infant. Constant association with her growing childrenround all of whom her affections are closely twined, and in all of whom the purest emotions of humanity are as yet untouched by intellect-imparts to the mother a fulness of emotional life, the whole quality of which is distinctively feminine. It has been well remarked by Mr. Fiske that the prolonged period of infancy and childhood in the human species must from the first "have gradually tended to strengthen the relations. of the children to the mother," and, we may add, also to strengthen the relations of the mother to the childrenwhich implies an immense impetus to the growth in her of all the altruistic feelings most distinctive of woman. Thus, in accordance with the general law of inheritance as limited by sex, we can understand how these influences became, in successive generations, cumulative; while in the fondness of little girls for dolls we may note a somewhat interesting example in psychology of the law of inheritance at earlier periods of life, which Mr. Darwin has shown to be so prevalent in the case of bodily structures throughout the animal kingdom.

The

There remains, so far as I can see, but one other cause which can be assigned of the mental differences between men and women. This cause is education. Using the term in its largest sense, we may say that in all stages of culture the education of women has differed widely from that of men. state of abject slavery to which woman is consigned in the lower levels of human evolution clearly tends to dwarf her mind ab initio. And as woman gradually emerges from this her primitive and long-protracted condition of slavery, she still continues to be dom

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inated by the man in numberless ways, which, although of a less brutal kind, are scarcely less effectual as mentally dwarfing influences. The stunting tendency upon the female mind of all polygamous institutions is notorious, and even in monogamous, or quasimonogamous, communities so highly civilized as ancient Greece and pagan Rome, woman was still, as it were, an intellectual cipher-and this at a time when the intellect of man had attained an eminence which has never been equalled. Again, for a period of about 2,000 years after that time civilized woman was the victim of what I may term the ideal of domestic utility-a state of matters which still continues in some of the continental nations of Europe. Lastly, even when woman began to escape from this ideal of domestic utility it was only to fall a victim to the scarcely less deleterious ideal of ornamentalism. Thus Sydney Smith, writing in 1810, remarks: A century ago the prevailing taste in female education was for housewifery; now it is for accomplishments. The object now is to make women artists-to give them an excellence in drawing, music, and dancing." It is almost needless to remark that this is still the prevailing taste: the ideal of female education still largely prevalent in the upper classes is not that of mental furnishing, but rather of mental decoration. For it was not until the middle of the present century that the first attempt was made to provide for the higher education of women, by the establishment of Queen's College and Bedford College in London. Twenty years later there followed Girton and Newnham at Cambridge; later still Lady Margaret and Somerville at Oxford, the foundation of the Girls' Public Day Schools Company, the opening of degrees to women at the University of London, and of the honor examinations at Cambridge and Oxford.

women continues to be, as a general rule, widely different from that of men. And this difference is not merely in the positive direction of laying greater stress on psychological embellishment : it extends also in the negative direction of sheltering the female mind from all those influences of a striving and struggling kind, which constitute the practical schooling of the male intellect. Woman is still regarded by public opinion all the world over as a psychological plant of tender growth, which needs to be protected from the ruder blasts of social life in the conservatories of civilization. And, from what has been said in the earlier part of this paper, it will be apparent that in this practical judgment I believe public opinion to be right. I am, of course, aware that there is a small section of the public-composed for the most part of persons who are not accustomed to the philosophical analysis of facts-which argues that the conspicuous absence of women in the field of intellectual work is due to the artificial restraints imposed upon them by all the traditional forms of education; that if we could suddenly make a leap of progress in this respect, and allow women everywhere to compete on fair and equal terms with men, then, under these altered circumstances of social life, women would prove themselves the intellectual compeers of

man.

But the answer to this argument is almost painfully obvious. Although it is usually a matter of much difficulty to distinguish between nature and nurture, or between the results of inborn faculty and those of acquired knowledge, in the present instance no such difficulty obtains. Without again recurring to the anatomical and physiological considerations which bar à priori any argument for the natural equality of the sexes, and without remarking that the human female would but illustrate her own deficiency of rational development by sup posing that any exception to the general laws of evolution can have been made in her favor-without dwelling on any such antecedent considerations, it is enough to repeat that in many departments of intellectual work the field has been open, and equally open, to both sexes. If to this it is answered that the

traditional usages of education lead to a higher average of culture among men, thus furnishing them with a better vantage-ground for the origin of individual genius, we have only to add that the strong passion of genius is not to be restrained by any such minor accidents of environment. Women by tens of thousands have enjoyed better educational as well as better social advantages than a Burns, a Keats, or a Faraday; and yet we have neither heard their voices nor seen their work.

If, again, to this it be rejoined that the female mind has been unjustly dealt with in the past, and cannot now be expected all at once to throw off the accumulated disabilities of ages-that the long course of shameful neglect to which the selfishness of man has subjected the culture of woman has necessarily left its mark upon the hereditary constitution of her mind-if this consideration be adduced, it obviously does not tend to prove the equality of the sexes: it merely accentuates the fact of inequality by indicating one of its causes. The treatment of women in the past may have been very wrong, very shameful, and very much to be regretted by the present advocates of women's rights; but proof of the ethical quality of this fact does not get rid of the fact itself, any more than a proof of the criminal nature of assassination can avail to restore to life a murdered man. We must look the facts in the face. How long it may take the woman of the future to recover the ground which has been lost in the psychological race by the women of the past, it is impossible to say; but we may predict with confidence that, even under the most favorable conditions as to culture, and even supposing the mind of man to remain stationary (and not, as is probable, to advance with a speed relatively accelerated by the momentum of its already acquired velocity), it must take many centuries for heredity to produce the missing five ounces of the female brain.

In conclusion, a few words may be added on the question of female education as this actually stands at the present time. Among all the features of progress which will cause the present century to be regarded by posterity as

beyond comparison the most remarkable epoch in the history of our race, I believe that the inauguration of the socalled woman's movement in our own generation will be considered one of the most important. For I am persuaded that this movement is destined to grow ; that with its growth the highest attributes of one half of the human race are destined to be widely influenced; that this influence will profoundly react upon the other half, not alone in the nursery and the drawing-room, but also in the study, the academy, the forum, and the senate; that this latest yet inevitable wave of mental evolution cannot be stayed until it has changed the whole aspect of civilization. In an essay already alluded to, Sydney Smith has remarked, though not quite correctly, that up to his time there had been no woman who had produced a single notable work, either of reason or imagination, whether in English, French, German, or Italian literature. A few weeks ago Mrs. Fawcett was able to show us that since then there have been at least forty women who have left a permanent mark in English literature alone. Now, this fact becomes one of great significance when we remember that it is the result of but the earliest phase of the woman's movement. For, as already indicated, this movement is now plainly of the nature of a ferment. When I was at Cambridge, the then newly established foundations of Girton and Newnham were to nearly all of us matters of amusement. But we have lived to alter our views; for we have lived to see that that was but the beginning of a great social change, which has since spread and is still spreading at so extraordinary a rate, that we are now within measur able distance of the time when no English lady will be found to have escaped its influence. It is not merely that women's colleges are springing up like mushrooms in all quarters of the kingdom, or that the old type of young ladies' governess is being rapidly starved out of existence. It is of much more importance even than this that the immense reform in girls' education, which has been so recently introduced by the Day Schools Company working in conjunction with the University Board and Local examinations, has already shaken