And there are variations of these four cases! A man investigating
woman's points of view often finds the response more emotional than
intellectual. Owing to the system under which we live, where man is a
valuable prey, woman has contracted the habit of trying to attract. Even
aggressive insolence on her part may conceal the desire to attract by
exasperating. These notes must, therefore, be taken only as hints, and
the reader may be interested to know that they are based on the
observation of sixty-five women, subdivided as follows: Intimate
acquaintance, five; adequate acquaintance, nineteen; slight
acquaintance, forty-one; married, thirty-nine; status uncertain, eight;
celibate, eighteen. Ages, seventeen to sixty-eight (average age, about
thirty-five).
2
It is most difficult to deduce the quality of woman's intellect from her
conduct, because her impulses are frequently obscured by her policy. The
physical circumstances of her life predispose her to an interest in sex
more dominant than is the case with man. As intellect flies out through
the window when emotion comes in at the door, this is a source of
complications. The intervention of love is a difficulty, for love,
though blind, is unfortunately not dumb, and habitually uses speech for
the concealment of truth. It does this with the best of intentions, and
the best of intentions generally yield the worst of results. It should
be said that sheer intellect is very seldom displayed by man. Intellect
is the ideal skeleton of a man's mental power. It may be defined as an
aspiration toward material advantage, absolute truth, or achievement,
combined with a capacity for taking steps toward successful achievement
or attaining truth. From this point of view such men as Napoleon,
Machiavelli, Epictetus, Leo XIII, Bismarck, Voltaire, Anatole France,
are typical intellectuals. They are not perfect: all, so far as we can
tell, are tainted with moral feeling or emotion,--a frailty which
probably explains why there has never been a British or American
intellectual of the first rank. Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, Cromwell, all
alike suffered grievously from good intentions. The British and American
mind has long been honeycombed with moral impulse, at any rate since
the Reformation; it is very much what the German mind was up to the
middle of the nineteenth century. Intellect, as I conceive it, is seeing
life sanely and seeing it whole, without much pity, without love; seeing
life as separate from man, whose pains and delights are only phenomena;
seeing love as a reaction to certain stimuli.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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