39 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for the securing of their aims ; and hence, in large measure, their 

 strongly religious bias. The masculine character, being accustomed to 

 rely upon its own strength, is self-central and self-contained : to it the 

 need of external aid, even of a supernatural kind, is not felt to be so 

 urgent as it is to the feminine character, whose only hope is in the 

 stronger arm of another. " The position of man is to stand, of woman 

 to lean " ; and although it may be hard for even a manly nature to 

 contemplate the mystery of life and the approach of death with a 

 really Stoic calm, at least this is not so impossible as it is for the more 

 shrinking and emotional nature of a woman. Lastly, from her abid- 

 ing sense of weakness and consequent dependence, there also arises 

 in woman that deeply-rooted desire to please the opposite sex which, 

 beginning in the terror of a slave, has ended in the devotion of a wife. 



We must next observe another psychological lever of enormous 

 power in severing the mental structures of men and women. Alike in 

 expanding all the tender emotions, in calling up from the deepest fount- 

 ains of feeling the flow of purest affection, in imposing the duties of 

 rigid self-denial, in arousing under its strongest form the consciousness 

 of protecting the utterly weak and helpless consigned by Nature to 

 her charge, the maternal instincts are to woman perhaps the strongest 

 of all influences in the determination of character. And their influence 

 in this respect continues to operate long after the child has ceased to 

 be an infant. Constant association with her growing children round 

 all of whom her affections are closely twined, and in all of whom the 

 purest emotions of humanity are as yet untouched by intellect imparts 

 to the mother a fullness of emotional life, the whole quality of which is 

 distinctively feminine. It has been well remarked by Mr. Fiske that 

 the prolonged period of infancy and childhood in the human species 

 must from the first "have gradually tended to strengthen the relations 

 of the children to the mother," and, we may add, also to strengthen 

 the relations of the mother to the children which implies an immense 

 impetus to the growth in her of all the altruistic feelings most dis- 

 tinctive of woman. Thus, in accordance with the general law of in- 

 heritance as limited by sex, we can understand how these influences 

 became, in successive generations, cumulative ; while in the fondness 

 of little girls for dolls we may note a somewhat interesting example 

 in psychology of the law of inheritance at earlier periods of life, which 

 Mr. Darwin has shown to be so prevalent in the case of bodily struct- 

 ures throughout the animal kingdom. 



There remains, so far as I can see, but one other cause which can be 

 assigned of the mental differences between men and women. This 

 cause is education. Using the term in its largest sense, we may say 

 that in all stages of culture the education of women has differed widely 

 from that of men. The state of abject slavery to which woman is con- 

 signed in the lower levels of human evolution clearly tends to dwarf 

 her mind ab initio. And as woman gradually emerges from this her 



