236 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



men, but these studies do not take him far below the 

 surface of the problem, and his published opinions of 

 women will be almost surely based on the general 

 view of them which he has formed from an intimate 

 acquaintance with his wife. If he is an unmarried 

 man and has never had a mistress, his views on the 

 comparative psychology of man and woman will 

 necessarily be of an unreliable nature and liable to 

 smack of the pedantries of science. 



There is, in reality, nothing surprising about our 

 ignorance of the actual psychology of man and 

 woman. The bare fact is that the attempt to point 

 out the differences between the masculine and the 

 feminine mind is a resort to that comparative method 

 in science which always serves so well to expose the 

 limits of our knowledge. In this case, it convincingly 

 shows us how scant is our real acquaintance with the 

 psychology of the most fundamental instincts. Why 

 should we deceive ourselves into the belief that it 

 is otherwise? When we consider the unparalleled 

 complexity of cerebral structure and the short time 

 that we have known even the most elementary forces 

 in chemical and physical science, what reason have 

 we to think that even the most accessible functions 

 of the brain should have been solved? 



The appeals which have been made to anatomy 

 and to physiology for the solution of this question 

 have been, in my judgment, about equally fatuous. 

 From anatomy we learn that the female cerebrum 

 appears to be a little smaller, on the average, than in 



