It is not legitimate, as we have seen, to argue that men have distinguished themselves more than women in all these fields _because_ women have been suppressed and wilfully stunted. In this respect the Feminists have wished to prove too much, and in doing so have overreached the truth. Specialization of function must be accompanied by specialization of instinct, impulse, and outlook. The highly specialized functions of woman in the long line of evolution, therefore, must be taken into account, in any inquiry into the striking disparity existing between her performances and man’s, in such important departments of life as Art, Philosophy and Science. And if, by taking the said specialization into account, we are able to explain this disparity, what need is there of a hypothesis so very much at variance with historical fact, according to which it is claimed that the difference between the intellectual capacities of man and woman are the outcome of a warping or of a stultification of the female mind, somewhere and somewhen, in the development of the race? In connexion with this differentiation of the sexes from the standpoint of their respective capacity in matters of artistic production, it should, however, always be borne in mind that the positive man is distinguished from the positive woman (_vide_ Chapter IV) by the possession of a developed social instinct which, in itself, is a sufficient basis for all his powers of order and arrangement. The relative importance of the social instinct in man—that instinct to which everything in the nature of civilization and ordered human society is to be traced—its power in him to act freely and independently of the reproductive and self-preservative instincts, and sometimes even to act against them (as in its control of male lust and its recognition of the responsibilities of that lust) is certainly an important factor in man’s superiority over woman in the matter of art production. For Art is not only a social function in the sense that it is an expression of one man’s feelings to another, it also partakes, in the forms it adopts, of those elements of order and arrangement which reach their highest manifestation in the ordering and arranging of society.[233] Men, as social animals, are therefore possessed of the necessary sex tradition to produce great artists; whereas women, as pointed out in Chapter IV, not only have no sex tradition in the forming of society, i.e. in the creative aspect of the social instinct, to which order, form and arrangement belong, but they are also too much overpowered by one instinct (the reproductive) to allow their rudimentary social instinct free play. As I have already shown, woman only inclines to art, therefore, when (_a_) her reproductive instinct is prepared to stand aside, because it is not as strong as it might be, owing to some flaw in her ancestry or in the tone or correlation of her bodily parts; or (_b_) she wishes to wield an extra weapon in