SCIENCE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 583 



of intellectual qualities in the female line will be lessened as culture 

 increases among mothers. Accordingly, the intellectual tendencies 

 which might have been acquired by the short and easy method of he- 

 redity will have to be acquired by the slower processes of application. 

 This, again, will require the expenditure of a proportionately larger 

 amount of energy in women than in men, supposing that men have a 

 higher average of intellect through heredity. Moreover, the proba- 

 bilities of marriage, or, at least, of early marriage, are lessened in 

 cases of intellectual women ; so that the chances are, not only that in- 

 tellectual women will have few daughters, and so be unable to add to 

 the general average of female intellect by sex-transmission, but also 

 that they will be unable to add anything whatever to the sum of he- 

 reditary intellect in either sex. 



Man has two powerful advantages over woman : the admitted su- 

 periority in the size and weight of body and brain, and the certainty 

 of the continuance of conditions which insure that superiority, for the 

 conditions of masculine superiority are the very ones upon which the 

 preservation of the species depends. The necessary outcome of an 

 absolute intellectual equality of the sexes would be the extinction of 

 the human race. For, if all food were converted into thought in both 

 men and women, no food whatever could be appropriated to the re- 

 production of the species. But, as an actual fact, women do not con- 

 sume so much food as men ; nor can they do so while their average 

 size remains so much smaller. Moreover, of this smaller amount of 

 food consumed by women some must always be spared for the contin- 

 uance of the race ; so that the sum total of food converted into thought 

 by women can never equal the sum total of food converted into thought 

 by men. It follows, therefore, that men will always think more than 

 icomen. 



Nevertheless, if it could be shown that the energy derived from food 

 in men were an energy of inferior quality, women might gain a com- 

 pensating factor in quality of thought. By the consent of competent 

 judges, the reasoning power and the creative imagination are the highest 

 and most complex forms of brain -energy. We have the most abundant 

 evidence that, while man possesses both these powers in large amount 

 and of superior quality, woman possesses them in much smaller amount 

 and of inferior quality ; so that the distinction of exceptional women, 

 of whom a list could be made, would add little to the general low av- 

 erage of feminine power. We hear the power of intuition quoted as 

 a higher one than reason. Women possess this power in a higher de- 

 gree than men, and are sometimes rated above them in consequence of 

 it. Very little study has been bestowed on this faculty, which has 

 been the occasion of so much self-congratulation to women. But there 

 is considerable evidence that it is acquired by heredity, that it is closely 

 akin to instinct, and that some modification of it is the common pos- 

 session of women, children, and the lower animals. It is possessed in 



