Women -- Economic conditions; Women -- Employment; Women -- Social and moral questions
much beskirted female. Were the structural differences between male and
female really one half as marked as the artificial visual differences,
they would be greater than those dividing, not merely any species of man
from another, but as great as those which divide orders in the animal
world. Only a mind exceedingly alert and analytical can fail ultimately
to be misled by habitual visual misrepresentation. There is not,
probably, one man or woman in twenty thousand who is not powerfully
influenced in modern life in their conception of the differences,
physical and intellectual, dividing the human male and female, by the
grotesque exaggerations of modern attire and artificial manners.)
No study of the mere physical differences between individuals of
different races would have enabled us to arrive at any knowledge of
their mental aptitude; nor does the fact that certain individuals of a
given human variety have certain aptitudes form a rational ground for
compelling all individuals of that variety to undertake a certain form
of labour.
No analysis, however subtle, of the physical conformation of the Jew
could have suggested a priori, and still less could have proved, apart
from ages of practical experience, that, running parallel with any
physical characteristics which may distinguish him from his fellows, was
an innate and unique intellectual gift in the direction of religion. The
fact that, during three thousand years, from Moses to Isaiah, through
Jesus and Paul on to Spinoza, the Jewish race has produced men who
have given half the world its religious faith and impetus, proves that,
somewhere and somehow, whether connected organically with that physical
organisation that marks the Jew, or as the result of his traditions and
training, there does go this gift in the matter of religion. Yet, on
the other hand, we find millions of Jews who are totally and markedly
deficient in it, and to base any practical legislation for the
individual even on this proven intellectual aptitude of the race as a
whole would be manifestly as ridiculous as abortive. Yet more markedly,
with the German--no consideration of his physical peculiarities, though
it proceeded to the subtlest analysis of nerve, bone, and muscle, could
in the present stage of our knowledge have proved to us what generations
of experience appear to have proved, that, with that organisation which
constitutes the German, goes an unique aptitude for music. There is
always the possibility of mistaking the result of training and external
circumstance for inherent tendency, but when we consider the passion for
music which the German has shown, and when we consider that the greatest
musicians the world has seen, from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart to
Wagner, have been of that race, it appears highly probable that such a
correlation between the German organisation and the intellectual gift of
music does exist. Similar intellectual peculiarities seem to be connoted
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