The brain, if it is to fully develop its powers, must be diligently
exercised, the same as any other organ, and also correspondingly fed.
Where this is not done, or where the training is turned into wrong
channels, instead of the sections of the understanding being developed,
those are developed in which imagination has its seat. In such cases,
_not only is the organ stunted, but even crippled. One section is
developed at the expense of another._
No one, approximately familiar with the history of the development of
woman, will deny that, for thousands of years, woman has been and
continues to be sinned against in that direction. When Prof. Bischoff
objects that woman could have trained her brain and intelligence as well
as man did, he reveals unpardonable and unheard of ignorance on the
subject. The sketch, drawn in this work, of the position of woman in the
course of the progress of civilization, explains fully how the thousands
of years of continued male supremacy over woman are mainly responsible
for the great differences in the mental and physical development of the
two sexes.
Our naturalists should recognize that the laws of their science are
applicable to man also, and to his evolution. The laws of evolution, of
heredity, of adaptation, hold good with human beings as with all other
creatures of nature. Seeing that man is no exception in nature, the law
of evolution must be applied to him also: forthwith light is shed upon
what otherwise remains confused and dark, and, as such, becomes the fit
subject for scientific mysticism, or mystic science.
The training of the brain took its course with the different sexes
wholly in conformity with the difference in the education of the two--if
such a term as "education" is at all allowable, with regard to woman in
particular, during long stretches of the past, and the term "bringing
up" is not the correcter. Physiologists are agreed that the organs of
thought are located in the front part of the brain, and those especially
of feeling and sentiment are to be looked for in the middle of the head.
With man the front, with woman the middle of the head is more developed.
_The ideal of beauty, male and female, shaped itself accordingly._
According to the Greek ideal, which is standard to this day, _woman has
a narrow, man a high and, particularly, broad forehead_,--and this ideal
an expression of their own degradation, is so stamped on their minds,
that our women bewail a forehead that exceeds the average, as a
deformity in their appearance, and seek to improve nature by art,
drawing their hair over the sinning forehead, to make it look lower.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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