The Evidence from Intellectual Differences. 267 



growth, originate in the male, 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 experience; 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. In 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 philosophy than the main qualifica- 

 tion for it; and for the auxiliary 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 docs; 

 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 



