It is for this reason--because she needs to defend purely emotional
positions against man, who uses intellectual weapons--that woman is so
much more easily than man attracted by new religions and new
philosophies--by Christian Science, by Higher Thought, by Theosophy, by
Eucken, by Bergson. Those religions are no longer spiritual; they have
an intellectual basis; they are not ideal religions like Christianity
and Mohammedanism and the like, which frankly ask you to make an act of
faith; what they do is to attempt to seduce the alleged soul through the
intellect. That is exactly what the aspiring woman demands: emotional
satisfaction and intellectual concession. Particularly in America, one
discovers her intellectual fog in the continual use of such words as
mental, elemental, cosmic, universality, social harmony, essential
cosmos, and other similar ornaments of the modern logomachy.
_Case 16_
Case 16 told me that my mind did not "functionalize" properly. And gave
me as an authority for the statement Aristotle, before whom, of course,
I bow.
A singular and suggestive fact is that woman generally displays pitiless
logic when she is dealing with things that she knows well. An expert
housekeeper is the type, and there are no lapses in her argument with a
tradesman. It is a platitude to mention the business capacity of the
Frenchwoman, and many women are expert in the investment of money, in
the administration of detail, in hospital management, in the rotation of
servants' holidays (which, in large households, is most complex). It
would appear that woman is unconcentrated and inconsequent only where
she has not been properly educated, and this has a profound bearing on
her future development. There is a growing class, of which Mrs. Fawcett,
Mrs. Havelock Ellis, the Countess of Warwick, Miss Jane Addams, are
typical, who have bent their minds upon intellectual problems; women
like Miss Emma Goldman; like Miss Mary McArthur, whose grasp of
industrial questions is as good as any man's. They differ profoundly
from the average feminine literary artist, who is almost invariably
unable to write of anything except love. I can think of only one modern
exception,--Miss Amber Reeves; among her seniors, Mrs. Humphry Ward is
the most notable exception, but not quite notable enough.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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