WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 219 



Yet even in such conditions in which the access 

 of woman's mind to the larger world of affairs has 

 been walled up at all the principal approaches the 

 results have been remarkable. It is one of the most 

 pregnant facts in the upward progress of the race 

 that the emotion of the ideal in its relation to 

 Power has always had its chief and deepest ex- 

 pressions in the mind of woman. Even with all 

 the disabilities under which her sex has laboured, 

 woman's mind in the past has been the principal 

 source of the creative idealism of the world. When 

 all other channels have been closed to her, woman 

 has carried the creative capacity of the emotion 

 of the ideal into the practical world of affairs mainly 

 through her influence on the mind of the young. 

 She has done this to an extent of which a large part 

 of the world is quite unconscious. 



If it were possible in periods of unusual growth 

 and crisis in the history of the world to uncover the 

 foundations of events and to get a view of causes 

 and origins, it would be found that the creative 

 and sustaining influence of woman's mind in the 

 formative stages preceding action is enormous. A 

 knowledge of the methods by which the standards 

 and ideas of the time are imposed on successive 

 generations of men leaves no doubt that the influ- 

 ence of woman on the cultural inheritance has 



