child who experiences it will be of the stuff out of which philosophers and sages are made. CHAPTER VI. RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG WOMEN. Are women inherently predisposed toward religion and even toward superstition?—The nature of feminine intelligence—Predominance of the imagination—Credulity—Conservatism—Feminine sensibility—Predominance of sentiment—Tendency to mysticism—Is the moral sentiment among women based upon religion?—Influence of religion and of non-religion upon modesty and love—Origin of modesty—Love and perpetual virginity—M. Renan’s paradoxes on the subject of monastic vows—How woman’s natural proclivities may be turned to account by free-thought—Influence exercised by the wife’s faith over the husband—Instance of a conversion to free-thought. Among free-thinkers themselves there are a certain number who believe that women are by the very nature of their minds devoted to superstition and to myth. Is the incapacity of the female mind for philosophy more demonstrable than that of the child’s mind to which it has so frequently been compared? [Sidenote: Woman’s attention to details.] We are not obliged to decide the question whether women’s mental powers are or are not inferior to those of men.[91] We are obliged to consider only whether the limits of female intelligence are so tightly drawn that religion, and even superstition, are for it inevitable. Those who maintain that women are in some sort condemned to error argue from certain essential elements in her character; let us examine accordingly the peculiarity of her intelligence and of her sensibility. The female mind, it has been said, is less abstract than that of the male; women are more impressionable on the side of the senses and of the imagination, are more readily appealed to by what is beautiful and striking and coloured: thence arises their need for myths, for symbols, for a cult, for rites that speak to the eye. We reply that this need is not absolute: are not Protestant women content with a cult which does not appeal to the senses? And in any event, an imaginative spirit is not necessarily superstitious. Superstition is a matter of education, not of nature; there is a certain maturity of mind which lends no encouragement to superstition. I have known a number of women who did not possess one superstition among them and were incapable of acquiring one; there was no distinction in this respect to be observed between their intelligence and that of a man; the conception of the world as an orderly succession of phenomena, once really accepted by the human mind, maintains itself by its own power, without aid from without, as the fact in the long run always does.