CAPACITY FOR SCIENTIFIC PURSUITS 111 



recourse to the recent sciences of biology and psycho-physi- 

 ology to prove what they, too, assume to be true viz., 

 woman's incurable mental weakness. Like their predeces- 

 sors, they are dominated by passion, prejudice, the errors 

 of countless centuries, and, like them, they approach the 

 subject on which they are to pronounce judgment, with 

 minds warped by long ages of imperious instincts, ignorant 

 preconceptions and social bias. They will quote the opin- 

 ions of Proudhon and Schopenhauer as if they had the 

 value of mathematical demonstrations on the mental in- 

 feriority of women, and will declare with unblushing as- 

 surance that no woman has ever produced a single work of 

 any kind of enduring worth. With the German pessimist, 

 they will blatantly declare, taken as a whole, " women are 

 and remain thoroughgoing Philistines and quite incur- 

 able." 1 With the French socialist they will assert, as if 

 it were an axiomatic truth, that "thought in every living 

 being is proportional to force" that "physical force is 

 not less necessary for thought than for muscular labor. ' ' 



They have apparently no more doubt respecting the 

 truth of these assumptions than had their predecessors, 

 the Aristotelians, respecting their assumptions of the four 

 elements and their first qualities. Their process of reason- 

 ing is somewhat as follows: "Woman is smaller and 

 weaker than man. This is a matter of simple observation, 

 confirmed by the teachings of physiology. Therefore, 

 woman is physically and intellectually inferior to man. 

 Therefore she is incapable of any of those great concep- 

 tions and achievements in science or philosophy which have 

 so distinguished the male sex in every age of the world's^ 

 history. That she is thus weaker and inferior physically 

 and intellectually and forever incapacitated from success- 

 fully competing with man in the intellectual arena is a 

 fatality for which, we are gravely told, there is no remedy, 

 i Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, p. 115, London, 1891. 



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