Thus far through this essay I have by implication rather than direct statement contrasted genuine interest in intellectual things with the kind of intellectual life led by women. Let me say now that no intention is less mine than to contribute to the old controversy concerning the respective intellectual capacities of the two sexes. If I use the adjective “masculine” to denote a more valid type of intellectual impulse than is expressed by the adjective “feminine,” it is not to belittle the quality of the second impulse; it is a matter of definition. Further, the relative degree of “masculine” and “feminine” traits possessed by an individual are almost as much the result of acquired training as of native inheritance. The young, independent college girl of to-day is in fact more likely to possess “masculine” intellectual habits than is the average Y.M.C.A. director. I use the adjectives to express broad, general characteristics as they are commonly understood. For a direct examination of the intellectual life of women--which, I repeat, is practically the intellectual life of the nation--in the United States shows the necessity of terms being defined more sharply. Interest in intellectual things is first, last, and all the time _disinterested_; it is the love of truth, if not exclusively for its own sake, at least without fear of consequences, in fact with precious little thought about consequences. This does not mean that such exercise of the native disposition to think, such slaking of the natural metaphysical curiosity in all of us, is not a process enwrapped--as truly as the disposition to make love or to get angry--with an emotional aura of its own, a passion as distinctive as any other. It merely means that the occasions which stimulate this innate intellectual disposition are of a different sort than those which stimulate our other dispositions. An imaginative picture of one’s enlarged social self will arouse our instincts of ambition or a desire to found a family, whereas curiosity or wonder about the mystery of life, the meaning of death, the ultimate nature of God (objects of desire as truly as other objects) will arouse our intellectual disposition. These occasions, objects, hypotheses are of necessity without moral significance. The values inherent in them are the values of satisfied contemplation and not of practical result. Their immediate utility--although their ultimate, by the paradox that is constantly making mere common sense inadequate, may be very great--is only subjective. In this sense, they seem wayward and masculine; and, cardinal sin of all, useless.