Abandoning the Aristotelian method of envisaging the question under discussion, our modern philosophers have recourse to the recent sciences of biology and psycho-physiology to prove what they, too, assume to be true--viz., woman's incurable mental weakness. Like their predecessors, they are dominated by passion, prejudice, the errors of countless centuries, and, like them, they approach the subject on which they are to pronounce judgment, with minds warped by long ages of imperious instincts, ignorant preconceptions and social bias. They will quote the opinions of Proudhon and Schopenhauer--as if they had the value of mathematical demonstrations--on the mental inferiority of women, and will declare with unblushing assurance that no woman has ever produced a single work of any kind of enduring worth. With the German pessimist, they will blatantly declare, taken as a whole, "women are and remain thoroughgoing Philistines and quite incurable."[92] With the French socialist they will assert, as if it were an axiomatic truth, that "thought in every living being is proportional to force"--that "physical force is not less necessary for thought than for muscular labor." They have apparently no more doubt respecting the truth of these assumptions than had their predecessors, the Aristotelians, respecting their assumptions of the four elements and their first qualities. Their process of reasoning is somewhat as follows: "Woman is smaller and weaker than man. This is a matter of simple observation, confirmed by the teachings of physiology. Therefore, woman is physically and intellectually inferior to man. Therefore she is incapable of any of those great conceptions and achievements in science or philosophy which have so distinguished the male sex in every age of the world's history. That she is thus weaker and inferior physically and intellectually and forever incapacitated from successfully competing with man in the intellectual arena is a fatality for which, we are gravely told, there is no remedy, and to which women, consequently, must resign themselves as to one of the inexorable laws of nature."