There is, however, a grave difficulty in the way of any such experiment, a difficulty that would probably foredoom it to failure from the start; and that is the probability that the appearance of such minds as Michelangelo’s or Kant’s in the male sex is due to a male characteristic which can by no human means, selectional, educational or otherwise, be transferred to woman. I refer to masculine variability. It is probable that the appearance of all great men is to be ascribed to the law of the greater variability of males than females, and that it never will be possible to achieve in woman that large gamut of endowments which separate, say, a Newton from an average suburban-dwelling newspaper-and-cabbage-fed clerk. The fact that while this greater male variability produces geniuses superior in every way to the highest woman, it also produces male fools whose standard of stupidity is far and away higher than any that woman has ever reached, is not denied; but we are bound to reckon with it notwithstanding. And if, as biologists assure us, the extreme variability of man is the ultimate cause of the genius, then it seems unlikely that in the experiment above outlined, anything more could be achieved than the deterioration of woman as woman. Apart from woman’s natural lack of originality, and her absence of initiative, or of that spirit of bold and confident conviction—all of which derive from her necessary rôle in the relation of the sexes—her indifference to truth is what chiefly incapacitates her for scientific pursuits, as it does for all undertakings where truthfulness is of pre-eminent importance; while her constant subjection to her emotions makes her an untrustworthy judge of all those facts or questions, to which she may be inclined to bear an emotional relation.