It is not that there are men’s minds and women’s minds, but that there are theoretical subjects and practical subjects, and that knowledge is not the same kind of knowledge in both. Intuition, in the sense in which it is used when discussing male and female minds, is a word of double meaning: it covers those actions which we go through with by instinct, or inherited experience ingrained from the beginning in our nervous structure, and those which we perform automatically, or by individual experience become so familiar that it can act as a guide without the aid of conscious reflection. The relative distances of objects looked at we know instinctively; the trained musician with mind intent upon expression, reads his notes automatically; the beginner at the piano goes through a painful process of syllogism before each key is struck. All is, at bottom, reason; in one case it is conscious; in another it is unconscious, but can be forced into consciousness; in another, it is unconscious and cannot by any effort be made conscious. Because a woman’s interests lie more than a man’s in regions in which thought is instinctive and automatic, it does not follow that she has developed any peculiar powers of intuition. Nor is there any possibility that mothers should occasionally transmit their powers of intuition to favored sons, as Mr. Grant Allen, in the course of his apotheosis of the uneducated woman, has somewhere suggested; some men have poetic and æsthetic minds, and in regions of poetry and art mental activity is largely of the instinctive kind. It is different with powers of reasoning. Good powers of reasoning may be transmitted from mother to son, but that is merely saying metaphorically that a good firm texture of mind may be transmitted. Hume and James Mill are two men who are supposed to owe much to their mothers, but their peculiar powers are not usually considered to lie in regions of intuition. No mother has ever produced an intuitive mathematician. Nor would any one who knew anything about the higher mathematics for a moment suppose that when a great mathematician leaves out intermediate steps in a printed book, he had jumped at his conclusions by instinct. It is simply that, with his thorough knowledge of this particular subject, the intermediate steps have seemed to him too easy to set down. If his book is hard to read, it is simply because he has assumed a greater amount of learning in his readers than they are in possession of.