78 Mr. George John Romanes ^ [March 18, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, March 18, 1887. 



SiE William Bowman, Bart. LL.D. F.R.S. Manager and Vice- 

 President in the Chair. 



George John Romanes, Esq. M.A. LL.D. F.R.S. M.B.L 



Mental Differences between Men and Women* 



After quoting sundry representative opinions upon the subject, from 

 Aristotle downwards, the lecturer proceeded to enumerate what 

 appeared to him the leading features of the distinction when men 

 and women were received as classes or en masse. The inferiority of 

 the female mind was displayed most conspicuously in a comparative 

 absence of originality, especially in the higher levels of intellectual 

 work. In her powers of acquisition the woman stood nearer to the 

 man, although even here she was behind him ; for, as soon as the 

 age of adolescence was reached, there was a greater power of amassing 

 knowledge on the part of the male. As musical executants, however, 

 and also as writers of fiction, equality could be fairly asserted. 



With regard to judgment, the female mind was apt to take superfi- 

 cial views, to be unduly biased from the side of the emotions, and in 

 general to display comparative weakness. On the other hand, their 

 greater refinement of nervous organisation led to more delicate powers 

 of sensuous perception and rapidity of thought on the part of women. 



In this connexion Mr. Romanes gave the results of experiments 

 which he had conducted on rapidity of reading, whereby it was shown 

 that, as a rule, women could read much faster than men. Passing on 

 to the emotions, he remarked that in women these were almost always 

 less under control of the will than in men, being usually more volatile 

 and displayed a greater tendency to childishness — the petty forms of 

 resentment which belonged to a shrew or a scold, caprice, vanity, 

 fondness of display, of social excitement, being all more characteristic 

 of the feminine than of the masculine temperament. 



On the other hand, the meritorious qualities wherein the female 

 mind stood pre-eminent were affection, sympathy, devotion, modesty, 

 long-suffering, reverence, religious feeling, and in general the 

 gentler virtues as distinguished from the heroic. Therefore, when a 

 woman performed an act of heroism, the prompting motives were 

 almost sure to be of an unselfish kind. Hence, also, it was women 

 who first flocked in numbers to the standard of the Cross, and became 

 followers of the religion which, by changing the whole ideal of ethics 

 — or assigning the highest place to the gentler and domestic 



* A full report of the discourse is published in the 'Nineteenth Century' 

 for May 1887. 



