INTUITION AND REASON.
The question whether we act more frequently from intuition or reason,
and the question that follows it, which faculty is the more noble
guide to conduct, would have no more interest for the general public
than any other of the subjects which the metaphysician exercises his
ingenuity upon,—than the question, for instance, whether we execute a
greater number of analytic or of synthetic judgments in the course of
the day,—were it not that there is an ancient opinion to the effect that
reason and intuition are marks respectively of the manner of working of
men’s and of women’s minds. The opinion is wholly unfounded, and could
only have had its origin at a time when the psychology of the working of
the human mind was thoroughly misunderstood. As the very terms in which
the opinion is expressed make plain, it dates from the period when it
was the custom to speak of the human mind as having a lot of separate
“faculties” under its control, and of calling up now one and now another
of them to do its bidding. It is time that the belief in the different
quality of men’s and of women’s minds should follow the whole antiquated
machinery of “faculties” into the limbo of old and worn-out fashions of
thought and of speech.
This illusion, however, like most of the illusions that have had a firm
foot-hold in their day, has a perfectly comprehensible reason for its
existence. It is not true that men’s minds and women’s minds have a
different way of working; but it is true that upon certain occasions
(and by far, the greatest number of occasions) we all—men, women, and
negroes alike—act from intuition, and that the circumstances of women’s
lives have hitherto been such as to make their interests lie somewhat
more exclusively in those regions in which conduct is intuitive than in
those in which it is long thought out. It is not true that the Creator
has made two separate kinds of mind for men and for women; but it is true
that society, as at present constituted, offers two somewhat separate
_fields of interest_ for men and for women, and that the nature of their
conduct is of necessity determined by the character of the action which
is demanded of them.
What is the difference for the psychologist, between the mental state
of a being who acts from reason, and of one who acts from intuition?
It is not a difference of the _kind of mind_ which controls him, but
of the _kind of knowledge_ upon which his present conduct is based. If
one individual has got at his command a lot of general propositions
bearing upon the case in hand, and if his familiarity with them is not
such that they flow together without conscious effort, then he must
laboriously piece them together, and think out the conclusions which they
necessitate. If another individual, having led a different life, has had
a lot of experiences which cover just such cases as this, and if he has
been taught by thousands of instances that under these circumstances a
certain course of conduct will nearly always lead to good results, then
he can trust to his hands or his feet to execute that course of conduct
without a moment’s aid from conscious reflection; he can go on with his
novel, or whatever other pleasant occupation engages his attention,
without the wear and tear of mind which is involved in consciously
thinking about the circumstances in question.
Now the differences in the mental processes of men and women are exactly
of this nature. They are differences dependent upon the fact that the
_knowledge_ at their command—that is, the stored up premises upon which
action is based—is, to a certain extent, of a different kind, and got
from different sources. So far as the knowledge is not of a different
kind, the character of the action is not of a different kind. There is
an immense number of conclusions which men and women alike “jump at,”
every hour in the day; and some of them represent reasoning so fixedly
instinctive, that even the closest attention does not enable us to drag
it up into the light of consciousness. How many people know that a
certain feeling of strain in the muscles which move the eyes is a sign of
a certain distance of an object looked at, and a different feeling of
strain, a sign of a different distance; and that when the eyes are fixed
upon one point, objects in the lateral field of view are judged to be
nearer or farther away than that point, according as the two disparate
images which they cast upon the two retinas are, the right-hand one or
the left hand one, the brighter? The common man _knows_ that one object
is near and the other far, but he is not _conscious_ even of the feeling
of strain, nor of the existence of double images; the physiological
psychologist knows the unconscious syllogism by which he _must_ reach
his conclusion, but even he cannot, by any possibility, make it cease
to be instinctive,—that is, make himself conscious of its different
steps. On the other hand, no one, whether man or woman, can pass from
one proposition in geometry to another by a process which is in any
sense unconscious, though one person may be obliged to give a much more
strained attention to what he is doing than another.
Now it is very possible that a greater _number_ of the actions of women
have their ground in unconscious causes than of the actions of men.
The subjects upon which action is of vital concern to them have been
different subjects, and hence their stored-up stock of knowledge is
knowledge about different subjects. To the woman of the past, who was to
a great extent confined to her own home, the temper of her house-mates
was what her happiness depended upon more than anything else in the
world. It was impossible that she should not acquire a keen intelligence
in interpreting every slightest shade of expression upon the human face.
But this sort of knowledge is always instinctive, whether it is practised
by men or by women. If the eyes of the most reasonable man in the world
should chance to show him a certain curve of the lip and a certain
elevation of the posterior angle of the alæ of the nostrils on the face
of the fair lady to whom he was talking, would he try to call to mind the
pictures in Sir Charles Bell’s great work on expression and the general
theorems in Darwin’s book on the same subject, and piecing this and that
laboriously together, would he try to arrive at some just conclusion
regarding the contents of the fair lady’s mind? Would he not, rather,
instinctively change the subject of conversation, or even discreetly
beat a retreat, long before he had time to _think_? Women’s interests
have been so exclusively social that they have developed a sense for the
physical expression of emotion which makes society for them a matter of
complicated relations, of delicate susceptibility to play of feeling,
which—except in the hyper-sensitive period of courtship—is not common
among men. But there are men who are quite the equals of women in this
respect; and if any man is markedly deficient in these qualities, we
recognise him as belonging to a low and brutal type which is in process
of extinction. If a woman on the other hand, goes into business, she does
not fix the prices of her straw hats each morning in accordance with the
feelings which straw hats awaken in her when she first looks at them,
but in accordance with the fluctuations of the market. The President of
a New Hampshire Street Railway did not carry through her improvements by
her intuitions, but by a plain, common-sense weighing of reasons. Nor are
all masculine occupations under the guidance of the reasoning faculty. If
you go to a stove-man and ask him to mend your smoking chimney, does he
do it by reason? Not a bit of it! There may be stove-men who have enough
knowledge of the laws which regulate the movements of masses of hot air
to be able to apply general principles to particular instances, but in
the course of a long and checkered experience with stove-men, it has not
been my lot to fall in with them. Their knowledge of chimneys, such as it
is, is got by experience and applied by intuition, and nothing is farther
from their minds than any trace of deductive reasoning. It is not that
there are men’s minds and women’s minds, but that there are theoretical
subjects and practical subjects, and that knowledge is not the same kind
of knowledge in both.
Intuition, in the sense in which it is used when discussing male and
female minds, is a word of double meaning: it covers those actions
which we go through with by instinct, or inherited experience ingrained
from the beginning in our nervous structure, and those which we perform
automatically, or by individual experience become so familiar that
it can act as a guide without the aid of conscious reflection. The
relative distances of objects looked at we know instinctively; the
trained musician with mind intent upon expression, reads his notes
automatically; the beginner at the piano goes through a painful process
of syllogism before each key is struck. All is, at bottom, reason; in one
case it is conscious; in another it is unconscious, but can be forced
into consciousness; in another, it is unconscious and cannot by any
effort be made conscious. Because a woman’s interests lie more than a
man’s in regions in which thought is instinctive and automatic, it does
not follow that she has developed any peculiar powers of intuition. Nor
is there any possibility that mothers should occasionally transmit their
powers of intuition to favored sons, as Mr. Grant Allen, in the course of
his apotheosis of the uneducated woman, has somewhere suggested; some men
have poetic and æsthetic minds, and in regions of poetry and art mental
activity is largely of the instinctive kind. It is different with powers
of reasoning. Good powers of reasoning may be transmitted from mother to
son, but that is merely saying metaphorically that a good firm texture of
mind may be transmitted. Hume and James Mill are two men who are supposed
to owe much to their mothers, but their peculiar powers are not usually
considered to lie in regions of intuition. No mother has ever produced an
intuitive mathematician. Nor would any one who knew anything about the
higher mathematics for a moment suppose that when a great mathematician
leaves out intermediate steps in a printed book, he had jumped at his
conclusions by instinct. It is simply that, with his thorough knowledge
of this particular subject, the intermediate steps have seemed to him too
easy to set down. If his book is hard to read, it is simply because he
has assumed a greater amount of learning in his readers than they are in
possession of.
The question whether intuition or reason is the nobler faculty is an
exceedingly meaningless question. All knowledge which finds frequent
occasion to be put in practice has a tendency to become first automatic
and then instinctive. Human progress consists in making conscious
action automatic as soon as it can be done with safety, and in setting
free consciousness to attend to more and more complicated combinations
of circumstances. After the musician has learned to read his notes
mechanically, shall we urge him to go back to the period of conscious
linking of note to key, because reason is a diviner gift than intuition?
Is it desirable to turn the act of walking into a conscious fitting of
muscular tension to variations in the position of the centre of gravity
in order to distinguish ourselves the more effectually from the brutes
that perish? Reason is merely intuition in its formative stage, and
the sooner all our present reasoned convictions become mechanical, and
conscious thought is set free to bring in more and more far reaching
considerations to bear upon our actions (including in that term our
conclusions), the sooner will a higher form of life be reached.
Wundt’s students have made some experiments in his laboratory in the
last two or three years, which throw a great deal of light upon this
question,—they have caught automatism in the very act of formation. It
has been noticed that different observers differed very much in the
reaction time which they assigned to the several senses,—that is, the
time required, for instance, to hear the tap of a bell, and to press a
button in response. Wundt’s students found that there are two different
reaction times,—in one, time is taken to bring the tap of the bell into
the focus of consciousness and to decide consciously what to do in
response; in the other, the process is unconscious. The first is nearly
twice as long as the second, and both are very constant quantities, for
the same sense. The exact figures are, in seconds:
FULL. SHORT.
Sound .216 .127 N. Lange
” .235 .121 Belkin
” .230 .124 L. Lange
Light .290 .172 L. Lange
” .291 .182 Martius
It may be inferred from this that, even in the simplest matters intuition
is very nearly twice as valuable a “faculty” as reason, as far as
economy of time is concerned. (It would be interesting to determine
the difference in fatigue.) But the interesting point is that the
experimenter can teach himself to give either reaction time at his
pleasure. If he thinks of his ears, he has a feeling of strain in them,
and a long reaction time; if he directs his attention to his fingers (or
if he thinks of indifferent matters) he is unconscious of what is going
on, and his reaction time is short. It is plain that the more of these
educated brain-reflexes we can produce, the fuller and more complicated
lives we shall be capable of carrying on. It may also be assumed that
the ideal human being is the one who has many brain-reflexes, but who
is capable of bringing them all into consciousness upon occasion.
Connections that we cannot make conscious are a frequent source of
illusion. When we move the eye-ball about by the will, objects seem to
remain stationary; but when, putting the finger on the under eyelid, we
push the eye-ball up and down in the socket, we cannot help _perceiving_
that objects are moving up and down. Prof. William James suggests as
a good experiment that some one who has eyes that he is not afraid of
injuring should do this pushing several hours a day, and see if he cannot
force conscious reason to do her work and to make him _see_ that the
objects are not moving.
For perfectly regular circumstances,—that is, for the world of nature
or of human character so far as is governed by fixed laws,—reflex
action presents an immense economy of time and work. To provide against
extraordinary emergencies, it would seem to be desirable that we
should have the power of interposing consciousness in the chain which
begins with stimulus and ends in action. Whenever a large number of
considerations, or considerations of an abstract character, have to be
weighed and balanced, then reason is the only sufficient guide.
That women have no deficiency in the power of putting this and that
together, when _this_ and _that_ are pieces of knowledge which are in
their possession, is absolutely proved by a single circumstance. Geometry
is a branch of learning which is entirely built up out of abstract
reason, pure and undefiled. Geometry is studied, in the United States, in
high schools, and it must not be forgotten that there are in this country
(according to the Report of the Bureau of Education) _three times_ as
many girls as boys who take the high school course. It cannot be said,
therefore, (as is said of girls who go to college) that the girls who go
to the high school are a selected lot; they are the very bone and fibre
of the women who make up the country. Now if women could not reason, we
ought to hear a great hue and cry from the teachers of the geometry
classes about the difficulty of teaching that subject to girls, and the
girls ought to lament and moan over the impossibility of getting safely
through with their demonstrations. Is this the case? I have never met
with a teacher of geometry who thought his boys did better than his
girls,—I have met with several who thought the reverse. As long ago as
1865, Her Majesty’s Inspector of schools, after travelling through this
country, said: “The teachers all tell me that the girls do fully as well
as the boys in mathematics,—fully.” Nor are any sad effects noticeable
upon health or spirits. Day after day an army of girls goes smiling into
the class-room and comes smiling out, utterly unaware that an unnatural
wrench has been given to their delicate minds, and that they are being
rapidly transformed into monstrous products of over-reason.
If girls show no defect in reason in the class-room, neither do boys show
any defect in intuition,—in fact, their intuition about stretched strings
and lines on balls are usually better than those of girls. I have kept
a record for many years of errors committed by boys and by girls, and I
have not been able to detect any difference in their character. It is
true that it was a boy who once failed to get a problem in trigonometry
for a week, because it was not expressly stated in the book that the
milestones to which the problem related were a mile apart. My intimate
acquaintance with the character of his mind prevented me, however, from
attributing this failure in intuition to his superior reasoning powers.
The simple matter is that a good _mind_ has good reasons and good
intuitions both. Both qualities are summed up in the expressive popular
phrase, “having your wits about you.” If you are in full possession of
your wits, you will trust to your instincts, when you must; to your
acquired reflexes, when there is no sign of danger; and to your reason,
when the question requires debate. It would be greatly for the good of
the race if the common virtues should become more instinctive in men;
and if women should be put into a position in which they can reflect
more wisely upon the virtues which are only just in process of getting
known to be such. The only reason that women do not guide themselves by
far-reaching principles in their every-day conduct, is that they have
not made themselves acquainted with the doctrines of political economy
and of abstract ethics. When women are in full possession of the higher
education, there is no danger that they will not put it into practice,
so far as it leads to practice. The human mind is so constituted that
it cannot help taking account of all its knowledge. Propositions merely
learned by rote, or the truth of which it is not absolutely convinced
of, it may leave one side, but not what it really _knows_. Nor is
there any danger that woman will lose her powers of intuition. The
knowledge and skill which she has acquired in social matters will not
desert her because she has made herself familiar with the speculations
of philosophers, and can turn to them for guidance in the intricate
questions of conduct which the complexities of modern life give rise to.
So long as a woman’s highest duty was to please her lord and master,
her task was simple, but women are now awake to a sense of wider
responsibilities. They are now aware that it is their highest duty _to
be_ the best possible kind of a human being, and _to do_ whatever lies
within their strength towards making the world the best possible kind of
a world to live in. For this end they have urgent need of _all_ the gifts
that God has given them; and he who would cripple their reason on the
ground that intuition is a pleasing and a poetic guide, would do them a
grievous wrong.
CHRISTINE LADD FRANKLIN.
CRUELTY AND PITY IN WOMAN.
I.
CRUELTY.
Spencer says[24] that among savage nations the women are as perverse as
the men, and that if they do not work so much evil it is because they
are less able to do so. This is not entirely true; doubtless women among
savages are much more inclined to cruelty than to pity, but, generally
speaking, woman even at the very beginnings of human evolution is less
cruel than man.
WOMAN AND WAR.
Woman, even among savage nations, is rarely a warrior. In the Antilles,
the women watched over the safety of the islands whenever their husbands
went to war with the neighboring islands; they were brave, strong,
courageous, nearly equalling the men in their cleverness in handling
weapons.[25] Amongst the ancient Bretons, armies were always commanded by
women. In Dahomey, the élite of the army is composed of a troop of six
or seven thousand Amazons, who are very ferocious, particularly in the
mutilation of dead bodies; women then become tigers, is a popular saying.
Among the ancient Scots, women followed the army, and cruelly mutilated
the prisoners. Among the Botocudos, when war breaks out between the
tribes, the men fight the men with sticks, and the women fight the women,
by scratching and by tearing the _botoques_ (cylinders of wood) from
their ears and lips.[26] But these are all exceptional cases. Generally
speaking, the savage woman plays a secondary part in war; she acts as an
auxiliary, picks up arrows, throws stones from a distance, and carries
the provisions etc.
REVENGE.
It is above all in revenge, that feminine cruelty shows itself the most
terrible. Man is capable of destroying whole families or nations, to
satisfy a particular revenge; but nothing equals the ingenuity of woman,
in slowly tormenting her victim, in gloating over his sufferings and
lengthening them out in order that her enjoyment of vengeance may endure
as long as possible.
In Tasmania, when the _black war_ broke out between the English and the
aborigines, the Tasmanian women terribly tortured the prisoners, in order
to avenge their companions who had been carried off by the English. We
must also attribute to the desire for vengeance, the torments inflicted
by the women upon prisoners of war among the Red Indians.
Elizabeth of Russia, betrayed by her lover, obliged him to marry a
deformed dwarf, and to pass his wedding night in an ice palace, where
the furniture and the bed were all of ice. The next morning, attended by
her Court, she went to present the newly wedded pair with a bouquet. She
found them, stretched out upon their bed of ice, nearly frozen. She then
banished her rival to Siberia first causing her ears and nose to be cut
off.
A wealthy Russian Prince, in love with a very beautiful peasant girl of
fifteen, took her to live with him for five years; at the end of which
time, wishing to contract an alliance, he paid her a sum of money in
dower and obliged her to marry a peasant. The young girl made no sign
for ten years, until the death of her husband; but after the lapse of
that period, a rising having taken place among the peasantry against the
nobles, she excited them and led a body of peasants to the castle of her
ancient lover, had him taken and dragged into his _izba_, harnessed him
to the plough instead of the oxen, and for three days obliged him thus
to work, lashing him with the whip each time that he fell to the ground.
At night she led him to the stable and made him lie down with the oxen;
compelling him to eat fodder with the beasts and making merry over his
sorry plight. This amusement lasted for three days, at the end of which
time, the man fell dead in one of the furrows he was ploughing.[27]
A Russian, an idle and worthless fellow who had let his wife suffer
hunger, proposed to her that she should be sold as a slave to the
Sultan. After some hesitation, she accepted and they started off; but
when they had gone about half the way, the husband having fallen asleep
intoxicated, the idea came into her mind to sell him for a slave, in her
place. She then tied him on the horse, started off again on the road and
arriving at the place of rendezvous, she delivered her husband to the
merchant, and remained to watch the Turk push the half-awakened man into
the boat, laughing whilst he showered blows upon him.[28]
A young Russian peasant woman lived with a small land-owner, who betrayed
her; at last she took refuge with a band of brigands, who treated her
like a queen. One day she caused two of them to capture her old lover,
and had him brought to the camp where she used him as a kind of living
foot-stool: when she sat down she covered him with a carpet and put her
feet upon him, and when she wanted to go out she made him carry her on
his shoulders.
CRUELTY TO THE HELPLESS.