228 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
imposed on all in the form of physical, intellectual and moral 
qualities and aptitudes, inherent in the individual] as such. Whether 
it be surgery or poetry, acting or nursing, teaching in a kindergarten or 
research, domestic administration or scavenging, aviation or dressmaking, 
a trained woman may be the equal of a trained man or she may be a great 
deal worse than an untrained man. But itis, also, becoming clearer every 
day that for certain activities the average woman, if trained, is better than 
the average trained man, and vice-versa, and the difference in each case 
rests on a functional sex differentiation, of the criteria of which we are 
as yet amazingly ignorant. But until this obscure and baffling field of 
vast inquiry has been cleared up, social and, therefore, educational re- 
construction continues to be like the game of billiards on an Atlantic liner 
in a storm—the truly hit ball may go into the pocket at which it is aimed 
or into the eye of the rival competitor, with a ripped tablecloth into the 
bargain. 
Mark, I beg you,-the educational consequences. Already many wise 
teachers are questioning seriously whether the education of girls from 
eleven plus ought not to be freed from the barnacles that have accumulated, 
since the ship of female education was brought to a static anchorage in the 
centuries-old harbour of male education. One of our greatest needs, 
therefore, to-day, is another Miss Buss or another Miss Beale, as free as 
were those great women from the inherited superstitions of their own sex 
and from the cramping complexes that obsess the male mind, with a new 
mission to start a second and even more revolutionary chapter in the 
emancipation of women and the reorganisation of Society. . 
This does not mean, of course, that any sane man or woman desires 
to wrench the clock back to tick out demoralising hours in the dreary 
wastes of ‘accomplishments’ or to substitute an amateurish sloppiness 
for a bracing intellectual discipline : still less does it imply that there can 
be feminine, as distinct from male, mathematics, Greek or logic. But 
when that woman reformer comes—or perhaps it will be a man—we shall, 
as usual with all reforms, not be surprised at the results but only wonder 
that the reform had not been made fifty years earlier. 
I repeat that psychology, like physiology, is only in itsinfaney. Fifty 
years hence, neither the Behaviourists nor the Subjectivists nor any other 
of the present camps which end in an ‘ist’ will demand unfaltering sub- 
scription to provisional and half-worked-out hypotheses dressed up as 
infallible decrees of a Nature which may prove to be neither a radio- 
active force definable in mathematical symbols, only intelligible to a 
Newton or an Einstein, nor an accidental entity leaping into a void, after 
a fortuitous collision of electro-magnetic units in an imaginary etheric 
universe. 
Thirdly and lastly, as the preachers are supposed to say, the end and 
purpose of education has not yet been settled and, in the nature of things, 
can never be settled once and for all. We may, if we choose, hold differing 
views as to what mind is or how it originated or how, in the terms of a 
really scientific psychology, it works and can be distinguished from its 
manifestations. We may refuse to believe that mind can operate apart 
from the material medium analysed by the pathologist, and the neuro- 
logist, or we may be convinced that the material medium is simply an 
