But, secondly, those women and men who assert the doctrine of the identity of the sexes are led to err, not because it can really be hidden from the most casual observer that there is a profound distinction between the sexes, apart from the case of the defeminized woman--but because, by a surprising fallacy, they confuse the doctrine of sex-equality with that of sex-identity; or, rather, they believe that only by demonstrating the doctrine that the sexes are substantially identical, can they make good their plea that the sexes should be regarded as equal. The fallacy is evident, and would not need to detain us but for the fact that, as has been said, the whole tendency of the time is towards accepting it--the recent biological proof of the fundamental and absolute difference between the sexes being unknown as yet to the laity. Yet surely, even were the facts less salient, or even were they other than they are, it is a pitiable failure of logic to suppose, as is daily supposed, that in order to prove woman man's equal one must prove her to be really identical in all essentials, given, of course, equal conditions. Controversialists on both sides, and even some of the first rank, are content to accept this absurd position. The one party seeks to prove that woman is man's equal because Rosa Bonheur and Lady Butler have painted, Sappho and George Eliot have written, and so forth; in other words, that woman is man's equal because she can do what he can do: any capacities of hers which he does not share being tacitly regarded as beside the point or insubstantial. The other party has little difficulty in showing that, in point of fact, men do things admittedly worth doing of which women are on the whole incapable; and then triumphantly, but with logic of the order which this party would probably call "feminine," it is assumed that woman is not man's equal because she cannot do the things he does. That she does things vastly better and infinitely more important which he cannot do at all, is not a point to be considered; the baseless basis of the whole silly controversy being the exquisite assumption, to which the women's party have the folly to assent, that only the things which are common in some degree to both sexes shall be taken into account, and those peculiar to one shall be ignored.