Farewell, great heart, and great leader! On your coffin I laid a wreath of immortelles for friendship, for the homage of America, and for the sake of this free English Society. For your victory is ours also: your triumph is that of every independent mind on earth. MONCURE D. CONWAY. INTUITION AND REASON. The question whether we act more frequently from intuition or reason, and the question that follows it, which faculty is the more noble guide to conduct, would have no more interest for the general public than any other of the subjects which the metaphysician exercises his ingenuity upon,—than the question, for instance, whether we execute a greater number of analytic or of synthetic judgments in the course of the day,—were it not that there is an ancient opinion to the effect that reason and intuition are marks respectively of the manner of working of men’s and of women’s minds. The opinion is wholly unfounded, and could only have had its origin at a time when the psychology of the working of the human mind was thoroughly misunderstood. As the very terms in which the opinion is expressed make plain, it dates from the period when it was the custom to speak of the human mind as having a lot of separate “faculties” under its control, and of calling up now one and now another of them to do its bidding. It is time that the belief in the different quality of men’s and of women’s minds should follow the whole antiquated machinery of “faculties” into the limbo of old and worn-out fashions of thought and of speech. This illusion, however, like most of the illusions that have had a firm foot-hold in their day, has a perfectly comprehensible reason for its existence. It is not true that men’s minds and women’s minds have a different way of working; but it is true that upon certain occasions (and by far, the greatest number of occasions) we all—men, women, and negroes alike—act from intuition, and that the circumstances of women’s lives have hitherto been such as to make their interests lie somewhat more exclusively in those regions in which conduct is intuitive than in those in which it is long thought out. It is not true that the Creator has made two separate kinds of mind for men and for women; but it is true that society, as at present constituted, offers two somewhat separate _fields of interest_ for men and for women, and that the nature of their conduct is of necessity determined by the character of the action which is demanded of them.