In the sense of its being an _immediate road to knowledge_, however, I should doubt very much whether it could be proved that woman possesses intuition. The number of her guesses being infinite, it is only natural that occasionally they should be right.[239] But, in any case, even if we did grant that woman possessed intuition in this sense, we could not claim that she is alone in this possession. All great male poets have possessed it: Heraclitus, Theognis, Shakespeare, Gœthe! When Gœthe perceived the true morphology of the human cranium, after looking at a skull, he saw intuitively a fact which the science of a subsequent Age was only able to prove at the cost of much labour and research. Likewise, when the poet responsible for the opening chapter of Genesis wrote down the order in which the organic world appeared on earth, he perceived intuitively a fact which thousands of years afterwards the analysis and reasoning of science confirmed. We have not on record any such profound scientific fact that was originally discovered intuitively by woman. If, however, women really possessed intuition, in the sense of a power that enabled them immediately to perceive a hidden or hitherto undiscovered truth, the records of the sciences would surely be full of such cases; and we should expect to find the history of every science to consist of an early _intuitional_ period in which all the fundamental great truths were discovered by women, and a later _substantiating_ period, in which these female discoveries were proved and confirmed by the analytical and rational faculties of the male. This, however, is not what the history of any science reveals. It frequently records cases of correct guesses on the part of male poets and thinkers, which subsequent generations of male scientists have confirmed; but, to my knowledge, not one such case of a woman. Nevertheless, we are bound to treat with some respect a tradition of such hoary antiquity as is this one concerning woman’s peculiar mental powers, and although we may doubt whether they may be truly characterized by the one word intuition, it is at least incumbent upon us to find a better word, or to explain how the tradition arose, and on what feature of the female psyche it is based.