Tlie Evidence from Intellectual Differences. 267 



growth, origiiuite in the mule, and are then preserved by 

 women, and the context leaves no room to doubt that 

 the " really superior woman'' which filled the author's 

 memory at the time this passage was written, was a wo- 

 man in whom this feminine characteristic was well de- 

 veloped; that she was a woman filled with the fruits of 

 human exi)erience; and it is a little strange that he fails 

 to see that the relation with which, for a man of specu- 

 lation, there is nothing comparable, may have a wider 

 value, and be of the greatest importance to humanity as 

 a whole. 



The next passage which I shall quote is still more to 

 the point. He says: "Let us now consider another of 

 the admitted superiorities of clever women, greater 

 quickness of apprehension. Is this not pre-eminently a 

 quality which fits a person for practice? In action every- 

 thing depends upon deciding promptly. l\\ speculation 

 nothing does. A mere thinker can wait, can take time 

 to consider, can collect additional evidence; he is not 

 obliged to complete his philosophy at once lest the op- 

 portunity should go by. The power of drawing the best 

 conclusion possible from insufficient data is not, indeed, 

 useless in philosophy; the construction of a provisional 

 hypothesis consistent with all known facts is often the 

 needful basis for further inquiry. But this faculty is 

 rather serviceable in ])hilosophy than the main qualitica- 

 tion for it; and for the auxiliai*y as well as for the main 

 question the philosopher can allow himself any time he 

 pleases. He is in no need of doing rapidly what he does; 

 what he rather needs is patience to work on slowly until 

 imperfect lights have become perfect, and a conjecture 

 has ripened into a theorem. For those, on the contrary, 

 whose business is with the fugitive and perishable — with 

 individual facts, not kinds of facts— rapidity of thought 



