But, although women now enjoy advantages in the pursuit of science which were undreamed of only a generation ago, the age-old prejudices respecting woman's mental powers and her capacity for the more abstract branches of science still prevail. It is useless to cite instances of women who have attained eminence in astronomy, mathematics, archaeology, or in any other science whatever. Such instances, we are assured, are only exceptions and prove nothing. Men like Lombroso are willing to admit the existence of an occasional woman of talent, but they deny the existence of genius in one who is truly a womanly woman.[90] For, with Goncourt, they flippantly assert, _Il n'y a pas de femmes de genie: lorsqu'elles sont des genies, elles sont des hommes_--there are no women of genius; when they have genius they are men. The reasons that now influence men for affirming the intellectual disparity of the sexes are, it must be observed, quite different from what they were in the time of Christine de Pisan--quite different from what they were half a century ago. Our forebears, in their endless disputations regarding woman's mental inferiority, based their arguments on _a priori_ deductions, or on metaphysical considerations which proved nothing and which were often irrelevant, if not absurd. Thus the Aristotelians, accepting as true the doctrine of the four elements as well as the superimposed doctrine of the four elemental qualities, sought to explain the properties of all compound bodies by these primal qualities. In this way they explained the various virtues of drugs and medicines. And by the same process of reasoning they explained the assumed difference between male and female brains. They assumed, to begin with, that there was a difference between the intellectual capacities of men and women. They then assumed that this difference in capacity was due to the difference in character and texture of the female as compared with those of the male brain. They next further assumed that the doctrines of the four elements and of the four elemental qualities were established beyond question, and then assumed again that the reason of woman's inferior capacity was due to the fact that her brain was moister and softer, and, therefore, more impressionable than that of man. No wonder that the old Spanish Benedictine, Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, in his chivalrous _Defensa de la Mujer_, lost all patience with such fantastic theorizers and wrote: "Did I write ... to display my wit, I could easily, by deducting a chain of consequences from received principles, shew that man's understanding, weighed in the balance with female capacity, would be found so light as to kick the beam."[91]