Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Great intellect, pure and simple, may exist in man or woman without or
with only a fractional leaven of Mind. This is seen in the abstractions
of scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, astronomers,
financiers, and others. Such brains are special organs of a high order
of Intellection, clear, calculating and precise of observation and
reflection; rational, deductive; admirable in their unswerving
rectitude, pitiless in their impregnable emotionlessness; rejecting all
but incontestable evidences, scrupulously aggregating and faithfully
interpreting their dry bones of numbers and data and vestiges--skeletons
of Life long since extinct, or scaffoldings of Life that lives and moves
and laughs and weeps, and bears no more semblance to their bloodless
tabulations of its modes and processes than warm, creative Mother-Earth
resembles the geological strata they describe in her; or than a
beautiful flower-garden blooms in botanical treatises; or than living
men and women are pourtrayed in text-books of Anatomy and Physiology.
Many men of Science--and all the great ones--have been men of Mind as
well as of Intellect. But the intellectual processes of Abstract Science
are no more operations of Mind than the paths by which we climb to
sun-illumined peaks are the Light upon those peaks. Mind is Spiritual
Illumination--a glimmering of The Infinite, reflected in the highest and
most subtle order of the brain-cells. Rays from it are deflected toward
the concrete, to function as Intellection. But these rays enter the
brain at a different angle from that of Mind-rays.
Like woman its medium, Mind is inspirational, wayward and elusive. It
comes we know not whence. It goes we know not whither. Receptive,
intuitive, creative, colourful, it may be unwitting of Astronomy, yet it
roams amid the stars. Ignorant of Geology, in it Immortal, the dry-bones
of The Past become immortal--arise eternally in everlasting re-creation.
Its Biology is in the lives and loves, the hopes and fears, the throes
and tears of human souls and stories. It inspires the poet, priest,
historian, romancist, artist; the seer and statesman; the philosopher
and wondering child. It exalts the humble and meek. It may be lacking in
the cleverest and most learned of men. It is found in the most ignorant
and simple women; in whom it is dumb, however, failing the intellectual
talent of expression.
VI
The Woman brain-half being medium, in its higher region, of that
_Supra_-conscious emotionalism which engenders Mind, and in its lower
region, of that _Sub_conscious emotionalism which engenders vital
impulse in the body, woman's range of mentality is wider than is that
of man; extending both higher and lower in its opposite reaches.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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