If we attempt to apply a standard taken from the names of men who are of acknowledged value in philosophy, science, literature and art, to the long list of women who have achieved some kind of fame, there will at once be a miserable collapse. Judged in this way, it is difficult to grant any real degree of merit to women like Angelica Kaufmann or Madame Lebrun, Fernan Caballero or Hroswitha von Gandersheim, Mary Somerville or George Egerton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Sophie Germain, Anna Maria Schurmann or Sybilla Merian. I will not speak of names (such as that of Droste-Hülshoff) formerly so over-rated in the annals of feminism, nor will I refer to the measure of fame claimed for or by living women. It is enough to make the general statement that there is not a single woman in the history of thought, not even the most manlike, who can be truthfully compared with men of fifth or sixth-rate genius, for instance with Rückert as a poet, Van Dyck as a painter, or Scheirmacher as a philosopher. If we eliminate hysterical visionaries,[6] such as the Sybils, the Priestesses of Delphi, Bourignon, Kettenberg, Jeanne de la Mothe Guyon, Joanna Southcote, Beate Sturmin, St. Teresa, there still remain cases like that of Marie Bashkirtseff. So far as I can remember from her portrait, she at least seemed to be quite womanly in face and figure, although her forehead was rather masculine. But to any one who studies her pictures in the Salle des Etrangers in the Luxemburg Gallery in Paris, and compares them with those of her adored master, Bastien Lepage, it is plain that she simply had assimilated the style of the latter, as in Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” Ottilie acquired the handwriting of Eduard. [6] Hysteria is the principal cause of much of the intellectual activity of many of the women above mentioned. But the usual view, that these cases are pathological, is too limited an interpretation, as I shall show in the second part of this work. There remain the interesting and not infrequent cases where the talent of a clever family seems to reach its maximum in a female member of the family. But it is only talent that is transmitted in this way, not genius. Margarethe van Eyck and Sabina von Steinbach form the best illustrations of the kind of artists who, according to Ernst Guhl, an author with a great admiration for women-workers, “have been undoubtedly influenced in their choice of an artistic calling by their fathers, mothers, or brothers. In other words, they found their incentive in their own families. There are two or three hundred of such cases on record, and probably many hundreds more could be added without exhausting the numbers of similar instances.” In order to give due weight to these statistics it may be mentioned that Guhl had just been speaking of “roughly, a thousand names of women artists known to us.”