WOMEN AS INSPIRERS 387 



power, women the vivid, far-reaching imagination; men 

 generalizing from facts, women from ideas; men working 

 chiefly by induction, women principally by deduction. For 

 thus collaborating, each with his or her predominant facul- 

 ties, the two combined possess in a measure the elements 

 which go to make up a man or woman of genius and which 

 enable them to achieve far more for the advancement of 

 science than would otherwise be possible. 



No one has ever given more eloquent expression to this 

 truth than* John Stuart Mill, who was as keen as an ob- 

 server as he was profound as a thinker. Writing on the 

 subject under discussion, he does not hesitate to say: 

 "Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man of 

 theory and speculation who employs himself, not in collect- 

 ing materials of knowledge by observation, but in working 

 them up by processes of thought into comprehensive truths 

 of science and laws of conduct, than to carry on his specu- 

 lations in the companionship and under the criticism of a 

 really superior woman. There is nothing comparable to 

 it for keeping his thoughts within the limits of real things 

 and the actual facts of nature. A woman seldom runs 

 wild after an abstraction. . . . Women 's thoughts are 

 thus as useful in giving reality to those of thinking men as 

 men's thoughts in giving width and largeness to those of 

 women. In depth, as distinguished from breadth, I greatly 

 doubt if even now women, compared with men, are at any 

 disadvantage. ' n 



We have already learned, from his own avowal, how 

 much Mill was beholden to his wife for her active coopera- 

 tion in the production of those works of his which have 

 exerted so profound an influence on many phases of mod- 

 ern thought. A more striking illustration of the value of 

 woman's assistance, but in the domain of biology, is found 

 in the biography of the late Professor Huxley. By those 



i The Subjection of Women, ut sup., p. 87. 



