4 ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE INQUIRY. 



Neither is there any feature of character which is 

 peculiar to one sex. The fidgetty and querulous wife 

 who involuntarily provokes a foolish husband, is often 

 in body, mind, and character, the counterpart of her 

 fidgetty and querulous father. The quiet easy-going 

 man is often the repetition of his tranquil and affec- 

 tionate mother. The difference of sex is small and 

 secondary when compared with the fundamental 

 differences of character. 



The potency of nerve organisation is not enforced 

 here for the purpose of extenuating domestic cruelty, or 

 excusing the domestic savage. But every truth, if it is a 

 truth, explains other truths for there is no truth glean - 

 able by moral methods which ought not to be gleaned, 

 and no sin greater (our scientific ethical teachers 

 tell us) than the sin of forming judgments on insuffi- 

 cient and untested data. Look at two men of average 

 certainly not strong character and organisation. 

 They may be much alike in many ways. Both are but 

 moderately wise and self-restrained. One marries a 

 certain combination of skin, and hair, and bone, and 

 nerve ; he is happy and content, and thinks that 

 everybody else, if they were only as wise and virtuous 

 as he, would also be happy and content. The other, 

 marrying quite another sort of anatomical combination, 

 finds life arid and burdensome and gradually turns to 

 violence and folly. The first often does not know why 

 lie is happy and good ; the second but dimly perceives 

 why he is unhappy and bad. Both are to a certain 

 degree the creatures of organisation and parentage. 

 The first has usually no charity for the second ; per- 

 haps he sits in a judicial, or editorial, or other chair of 

 authority, and proclaims his own virtue by denouncing 

 the shame of his neighbour. A change of place on the 



