This disposes of the old myth that women are more sensitive than men. And De Quincy, in his essay on _False Distinctions_, refutes the equally absurd notion that “women have more imagination than men.” He comes to the conclusion that, “as to poetry in its highest form, I never yet knew a woman, nor yet will believe that any has existed, who could rise to an entire sympathy with what is most excellent in that art.” One proof of this statement lies in the fact that as a rule men of genius have been refused by the women they loved most deeply. Regarding the emotional sphere, we have seen that it is only in parental and conjugal feeling that woman surpasses man. In Romantic Love, in all the impersonal feelings for art and nature, she is vastly his inferior. Her superficial education gives her no intellectual interests, and that is the reason why so many married men prefer the club and friendship to home and conjugal devotion—even as did the ancient Greeks. It is in the seventh book of the _Laws_, p. 806, that Plato remarks: “The legislator ought not to let the female sex live softly and waste money and have no order of life, while he takes the utmost care of the male sex, and leaves half of life only blest with happiness, when he might have made the whole state happy.” Is it not humiliating to man, who loves to call himself a “reasoning animal,” to find that, after so many centuries, one of our greatest and most liberal thinkers, Professor Huxley, is obliged to write in this same Platonic tone that “the present system of female education stands self-condemned, as inherently absurd,” because it fosters and exaggerates instead of removing woman’s natural disadvantages? “With few insignificant exceptions,” Professor Huxley continues, “girls have been educated either to be drudges or toys beneath man, or a sort of angels above him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Clärchen and Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in the fair saint nor in the fair sinner; that women are meant neither to be men’s guides nor their playthings, but their comrades, their fellows, and their equals, so far as Nature puts no bar to their equality, does not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls” (_Lay Sermons_, p. 25). Woman, in short, is a failure; and let any disappointed lover ask himself, Is it businesslike to begin life with a failure? FOCUSSING HER FAULTS Love being a magic emotional microscope which ignites passion by magnifying the most beautiful features of the beloved, leaving everything else indistinct and blurred, it follows that the simplest way of arresting this flame is to _change the focus of this microscope_, to fix the attention deliberately on her faults, while throwing her merits and charms into an unfavourable light.