Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
He did not add the further truth, that--as with the prodigy boys--the
more you educate her to come at her conclusions by processes of
intellection, the more you rob her of her native woman-gift of
divination.
With the rising level of Faculty engendered by progressive evolution,
woman's powers of intellection have developed too.
While her own mental attributes are themselves of a very high order, and
give to her mentality an inductive subtlety and illumination lacking in
that of the male. And this high quality of brain it is that is now being
extinguished in her by straining her to masculine standards.
Progress awaits, indeed, the new and quickening impulse Life and Faculty
should derive from the Woman-mind fostered along its own inherent
lines--to supplement the mind of man. For as Bergson says, "it is to the
very inwardness of Life that Intuition leads us."
And Intuition is the woman-mode of Mind.
* * * * *
The women intellectuals who have done great work have been women who
inherited talents so far above the average, as spontaneously to have
reached high mental levels, without need to have sacrificed those
womanly traits which gave the noblest values to such work.
The woman of average brain, however, attains the intellectual standards
of the man of average brain only at cost of her health, of her emotions,
or of her morale.
V
Herbert Spencer said profoundly, "_Mind is as deep as the viscera_."
Indicating it as being vital and intrinsic, at one with the occulted
sources of Life.
Mind is of an order of mentality wholly different from that of
Intelligence or Intellect. Mind is of the nature of Emotion. It is
personal, is sympathy, is divination. It is the cerebration of the Soul.
The Soul, or essential Individuality, must abide amid infinitely
delicate and delicately infinite brain-cells attuned to those spiritual
vibrations whereof Mind is the reflex. And if Mind is Emotion, the Woman
brain-half, which is the department of human emotion, must be the
mainspring of the human mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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