218 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



thought and speech. A series of conditions, social, intellectual, 

 and physiological, have forced this habit upon her as a means of 

 self-defense. 



Woman's religious nature is stronger than man's. She pos- 

 sesses in a marked degree the qualities of reverence, dependence, 

 devotion, trust, and fidelity. Fear and timidity are feminine 

 qualities, while faith is so natural to woman that she is disposed 

 to credulity rather than to skepticism. 



Let us pause a second time to see what theory, if any, our 

 results establish. Here, again, from her mental differences the 

 doctrine of woman's inferiority receives no support inferior, no 

 doubt, in philosophy, science, and invention, and in her conception 

 of abstract truth and justice, but superior in intuition, in charity, 

 in temperance, in fidelity, in balance. But here again, as in her 

 physical peculiarities, woman approaches the child type. This is 

 seen in the preponderance of the emotional life over the discrimi- 

 native, and of the impulsive over the voluntary. So also the 

 quick perception and the retentive memory remind us of the child 

 more than do the stern logical processes of the man. Woman's 

 mental associations, selecting the concrete, the individual, the 

 whole rather than the part, relations in space rather than in time, 

 are also those of the child. Woman's receptivity, her faith and 

 trust, her nai've freedom from skepticism, her fear and timidity, 

 her feeling of dependence, her religious instincts, are all child 

 traits. Children, like women, have slower reaction-time and 

 lesser motor ability, are more easily hypnotized, have more num- 

 ber forms and color associations, have less power of inhibition, 

 express their emotions more in their faces, and more readily give 

 way to tears and smiles. Modern child study has shown that 

 children are more cruel than adults and have little power to dis- 

 criminate between truth and falsehood. They also are sympa- 

 thetic and changeable, and act with reference to present rather 

 than remote ends. Woman in respect to her altruism, pity, and 

 charity has less resemblance to the child, but these traits are so 

 intimately connected with her duties of motherhood as to have 

 little bearing upon the theory of her naturally infantile consti- 

 tution. 



The hypothesis that woman approximates to the primitive 

 rather than to the child type, that she represents arrested develop- 

 ment, may be said to receive a certain amount of confirmation 

 from her mental traits. Indifference to physical and psychical 

 pain, freedom from color blindness, the preponderance of memory 

 and intuition over reason, lack of mechanical inventiveness, con- 

 servatism and adherence to custom, precocity, changeableness, 

 cruelty, tact, deceitfulness, emotional expression, religious feeling, 

 are all traits conspicuous among primitive races, and, as we have 



