It is this same passionate attachment to the concrete, where ideas are concerned, which makes women poor critics, though they are keen observers. If there is one application of the intellect where a comprehensive outlook is necessary, it is criticism. The individual judging and the individual thing judged are in themselves such infinitesimal portions of the whole of reality, that the one cannot seize the other unless they become magnified in the imagination so as to display the infinite connection of relations which is the condition of them both. In woman the personal element so enormously preponderates, both in her appreciations and her dislikes, that her critical judgment usually shoots out into the world through a distorted lens only partially illuminating the objects on which it is bent. Nevertheless, it may be a sad day for men if this feminine lens is rectified. The very distortion is one that serves his comfort, since it focusses so much light upon him and his home. I would not personally exchange the eye of the English wife and the English mother which sheds so warm and loving a beam upon the home for any more searching ray which illuminated a whole distant world and left a home in comparative darkness. It is hopelessly foolish idealism to wish for the combination of every virtue in one atom of humanity: we English with our excellent habit of compromise do not habitually act as if such a thing were possible. Yet there are certain idealists in this country who, in their anxiety to secure equality of opportunity for women, seem to assume that progress can be made without profound changes in the thing progressing, and as though by taking thought women could attain to all that men have got without losing some of their own peculiar and valuable possessions. Unfortunately it is not so. Men and women will never be practically interchangeable beings, and, perhaps, the limit of desirable progress would be that any individual should have the chance of deciding what admixture of the male and female qualities and possessions will suit him or her best. Freedom of choice is after all the great essential of liberty: the use of this liberty can only be well guided by what is greater than liberty, wisdom.