A quality which singularly contrasts with woman's vague idealism is the
accuracy she displays in business. This is due to her being
fundamentally inaccurate. It is not the accurate people who are always
accurate; it is the inaccurate people on their guard.[3] Woman's
interest in the particular predisposes her to the exact, for accuracy
may be defined as a continuous interest in the particular. I suspect
that it indicates a probability that by education, and especially
encouragement, woman may develop a far higher degree of concentration
than she has hitherto done. In her way stands a fatal facility, that of
grasping ideas before they are half-expressed. It is a quality of
imagination, natural rather than induced. Any schoolteacher will confirm
the statement that in a mixed class, aged eleven to twelve, the essays
of the girls are better than those of the boys. This is not so in a
mixed university. I suspect that this latter is quite as much due to the
academic judgment, which does not recognize imagination, as to the fact
that in the later years of their lives the energies of girls are
diverted from intellectual concentration (and also expression) toward
the artistic and the social. This untrained concentration produces a
certain superficiality and an impetuousness which harmonize with the
intrusion of side issues,--to which I have referred,--and with the
burgeoning of side issues on the general idea.
[3] I have observed for two years the steady growth in the accuracy of
the work of Case 33, due to her having concentrated upon her instinctive
inaccuracy.--THE AUTHOR.
Nowhere is this better shown than in the postscript habit. Men do not,
as a rule, use postscripts, and it is significant that artists and
persons inclined toward the arts are much more given to postscripts than
other kinds of men. One might almost say that women correspond by
postscript; some of them put the subject of the letter in the
postscript, as the scorpion keeps his poison in his tail. I have before
me letters from Case 58, with two postscripts, and one extraordinary
letter from Case 11, with four postscripts and a sentence written
outside the envelope. This is the apogee of superficiality. The writers
have run on, seduced by irrelevance, and have not been able to stop to
consider in all its bearings the subject of the letter. Each postscript
represents a development or qualification, which must indicate the waste
by bad education of what may be a very good mind.
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