Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Masculine intellection, pure and simple, is initiative, vigorous,
enterprising; analytical, logical, critical; its outlook rational and
concrete, its disposition just and honest. Capable in the degree of its
virility, of strenuous and sustained endeavour, of keen concentration
and close application; taking nothing for granted, but questioning and
demanding proof of all things, it is an admirable executive agent of
Mind. _Per se_, however, it is rational and deductive, judicial and
judicious, rather than inspirational and creative. The blending with it
of the Woman-faculty in him quickens his male brain by contributing the
emotional element; endues it with intuitive sensibility, fructifies it
with female creativeness.
Thus it blossoms in Imagination--a new talent, which his natural
intellectual energy and executive ability enable him to raise to highest
issues in Inductive Science and the creative Arts.
Sex, with its phenomena of the characteristics of both sexes blended
but, nevertheless, distinctive in the totally dissimilar constitution of
members of both, presents an enigma which all the thinkers of all the
ages have left unsolved.
What is its significance--what its explanation? How has it been
possible--without miracle, but by way of biological sequences of form
and process, of function and faculty--for the divergent characteristics,
physical and mental, of the two sexes to have developed in both, not
only without either order of characteristics (normally) neutralising
those of the other, but, on the contrary, with both orders ever further
intensifying their differences in the sex to which they belong?
By hereditary transmission. True! But by what precise means? Because
Nature achieves her results always by the continuous operation of
unerring Law and intensifying processes, not by eccentricities or
deviations. When she seems to us to skip at random, it means that we
have missed some intermediate footprints linking her progressive
sequences in a long unbroken train.
This problem of human duality, physical and psychical, has baffled not
biologists only, but philosophers, religionists and seers. It fills both
life and literature with puzzles, paradoxes, incongruities. It has been
the source of perpetual misapprehension, misconception,
maladministration, personal and ethical.
It lies at the root of the whole Woman question. It has supplied the
motive--and has made the mischief of the Feminist propaganda and
practice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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