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ALFRED T. SCHOFIELD, ESQ., M.D., ON 



woman's mind was better cultivated than man's, and her pre- 

 ponderance as a sex in spiritual matters was overwhelming. 

 When man, however, substituted machinery for manual labour 

 both in peace and war, in all processes of life, his bodily powers 

 were heavily discounted, and his success in life henceforth 

 depended upon his intellectual powers ; while at the same time, 

 relieved of constant physical exhaustion, his spiritual outlook 

 approximated more nearly to that of women. 



Since then his physical powers in which he differed most from 

 women being comparatively negligible, the resemblance of the 

 sexes has increased : machinery, as I have said, being a basic 

 factor. The result is everywhere seen, and is nowhere more 

 marked than in the typical presentment of John Bull. A 

 hundred years and more ago our streets were filled with portly, 

 rubicund men, stern or jovial of visage, and vastly different from 

 the more intellectual but slightly ansemic and attenuated in- 

 dividuals who fill their role to-day. I am quite willing to admit 

 that the substitution of tea and coffee for beer has been a minor 

 factor in the change. 



The preponderance of intuition in women and of reason in 

 men is, I think, generally accepted ; although like so many other 

 differences, it is becoming less marked. It is correlated with the 

 general dislike of women for prolonged arguments, which is by 

 no means in them the mark of intellectual inferiority, as is too 

 often hastily assumed, but is rather due to the fact that a woman, 

 more often arriving at her conclusions intuitively jper saltum, is im- 

 patient of the slower process of reasoning. There is another point. 

 Man's rational conclusion, so laboriously reached, is often wrong 

 through some defect in the premiss or in the argument, and the 

 woman is often right by a process of which she is wholly unconscious. 



The two methods, indeed, are those of the unconscious (sub- 

 conscious or subliminal [Myers] mind), and the ordinary con- 

 scious mind, to which our concept of mind till lately has been 

 restricted. Men possess intuition and instinct (a lower quality 

 than reason), but do not trust it or use it as much as women, 

 although its results are often the more correct. They like clearly 

 to see " the reason why," whereas a woman is content with the 

 conclusion reached. 



All this is, however, being modified ; and my own experiences 

 on the physical plane have led me to be very cautious in dogmatiz- 

 ing on sexual differences. I allude here to the differences in 

 respiration which fifty years ago were carefully described and 



