There are many attempts to determine the difference between the feminine
and masculine psyche. Volkmar in his “Textbook of Psychology” has
attempted to review these experiments. But the individual instances show
how impossible is clear and definite statement concerning the matter.
Much is too broad, much too narrow; much is unintelligible, much at
least remotely correct only if one knows the outlook of the discoverer
in question, and is inclined to agree with him. Consider the following
series of contrasts.
_Male_ _Female_
Individuality Receptivity (Burdach, Berthold)
Activity Passivity (Daub, Ulrici, Hagemann)
Leadership Imitativeness (Schleiermacher)
Vigor Sensitivity to stimulation (Beneke)
Conscious activity Unconscious activity (Hartmann)
Conscious deduction Unconscious induction (Wundt)
Will Consciousness (Fischer)
Independence Completeness (Krause, Lindemann)
Particularity Generally generic (Volkmann)
Negation Affirmation (Hegel and his school)
None of these contrasts are satisfactory, many are unintelligible.
Burdach’s is correct only within limits and Hartmann’s is approximately
true if you accept his point of view. I do not believe that these
explanations would help anybody or make it easier for him to understand
woman. Indeed, to many a man they will appear to be saying merely that
the psyche of the male is masculine, that of the female feminine. The
thing is not to be done with epigrams however spirited. Epigrams merely
tend to increase the already great confusion.
Hardly more help toward understanding the subject is to be derived from
certain expressions which deal with a determinate and also with a
determining trait of woman. For example, the saying, “On forbidden
ground woman is cautious and man keen,” may, under some circumstances,
be of great importance in a criminal case, particularly when it is
necessary to fix the sex of the criminal. If the crime was cautiously
committed a woman may be inferred, and if swiftly, a man. But that maxim
is deficient in two respects. Man and woman deal in the way described,
not only in forbidden fields, but generally. Again, such characteristics
may be said to be ordinary but in no wise regulative: there are enough
cases in which the woman was much keener than the man and the man much
more cautious than the woman.
The greatest danger of false conceptions lies in the attribution of an
unproved peculiarity to woman, by means of some beautifully expressed,
and hence, apparently true, proverb. Consider the well known maxim: Man
forgives a beautiful woman everything, woman nothing. Taken in itself
the thing is true; we find it in the gossip of the ball-room, and in the
most dreadful of criminal cases. Men are inclined to reduce the conduct
of a beautiful sinner to the mildest and least offensive terms, while
her own sex judge her the more harshly in the degree of her beauty and
the number of its partisans. Now it might be easy in an attempt to draw
the following consequences from the correctness of this proposition: Men
are generally inclined to forgive in kindness, women are the unforgiving
creatures. This inference would be altogether unjustified, for the maxim
only incidentally has woman for its subject; it might as well read:
Woman forgives a handsome man everything, man nothing. What we have at
work here is the not particularly remarkable fact that envy plays a
great rôle in life.
Another difficulty in making use of popular truths in our own
observations, lies in their being expressed in more or less definite
images. If you say, for example, “Man begs with words, woman with
glances,” you have a proposition that might be of use in many criminal
cases, inasmuch as things frequently depend on the demonstration that
there was or was not an amour between two people (murder of a husband,
relation of the widow with a suspect).
Now, of course, the judge could not see how they conversed together, how
he spoke stormily and she turned her eyes away. But suppose that the
judge has gotten hold of some letters--then if he makes use of the
maxim, he will observe that the man becomes more explicit than the
woman, who, up to a certain limit, remains ashamed. So if the man speaks
very definitely in his letters, there is no evidence contradictory to
the inference of their relationship, even though nothing similar is to
be found in her letters. The thing may be expressed in another maxim:
What he wants is in the lines; what she wants between the lines.
The great difficulty of distinguishing between man and woman is
mentioned in “Levana oder Erziehungslehre,” by Jean Paul, who says, “A
woman can not love her child and the four continents of the world at the
same time. A man can.” But who has ever seen a man love four continents?
“He loves the concept, she the appearance, the particular.” What lawyer
understands this? And this? “So long as woman loves, she loves
continuously, but man has lucid intervals.” This fact has been otherwise
expressed by Grabbe, who says: “For man the world is his heart, for
woman her heart is the world.” And what are we to learn from this? That
the love of woman is greater and fills her life more? Certainly not. We
only see that man has more to do than woman, and this prevents him from
depending on his impressions, so that he can not allow himself to be
completely captured by even his intense inclinations. Hence the old
proverb: Every new affection makes man more foolish and woman wiser,
meaning that man is held back from his work and effectiveness by every
inclination, while woman, each time, gathers new experiences in life. Of
course, man also gets a few of these, but he has other and more valuable
opportunities of getting them, while woman, who has not his position in
the midst of life, must gather her experiences where she may.
Hence, it remains best to stick to simple, sober discoveries which may
be described without literary glamour, and which admit of no exception.
Such is the statement by Friedreich[254]: “Woman is more excitable, more
volatile and movable spiritually, than man; the mind dominates the
latter, the emotions the former. Man thinks more, woman senses more.”
These ungarnished, clear words, which offer nothing new, still contain
as much as may be said and explained. We may perhaps supplement them
with an expression of Heusinger’s, “Women have much reproductive but
little productive imaginative power. Hence, there are good landscape and
portrait painters among women, but as long as women have painted there
has not been any great woman-painter of history. They make poems,
romances, and sonnets, but not one of them has written a good tragedy.”
This expression shows that the imaginative power of woman is really more
reproductive than productive, and it may be so observed in crimes and
in the testimony of witnesses.
In crimes, this fact will not be easy to observe in the deed itself, or
in the manner of its execution; it will be observable in the nature of
the plan used. To say that the plan indicates productive creation would
not be to call it original. Originality can not be indicated, without
danger of misunderstanding, by means of even a single example; we have
simply to cling to the paradigm of Heusinger, and to say, that when the
plan of a criminal act appears more independent and more completely
worked out, it may be assumed to be of masculine origin; if it seeks
support, however, if it is an imitation of what has already happened, if
it aims to find outside assistance during its execution, its originator
was a woman. This truth goes so far that in the latter case the woman
must be fixed upon as the intellectual source of the plan, even though
the criminal actually was a man. The converse inference could hardly be
held with justice. If a man has thought out a plan which a woman is to
execute, its fundamental lines are wiped out and the woman permits the
productive aspect of the matter to disappear, or to become so indefinite
that any sure conclusion on the subject is impossible.
Our phenomenon is equally important in statements by witnesses. In many
a case in which we suppose the whole or a portion of a witness’s
testimony to be incorrect, intentionally invented, or involuntarily
imagined, we may succeed in extracting a part of the testimony as
independent construction, and thus determining what might be incorrect
in it. If, when this happens, the witness is a man and his lies show
themselves in productive form, and if the witness is a woman and her
lies appear to be reproduced, it is possible, at least, that we are
being told untruths. The procedure obviously does not in itself contain
anything evidential, but it may at least excite suspicion and thus
caution, and that, in many cases, is enough. I may say of my own work
that I have often gained much advantage from this method. If there were
any suspicion that the testimony of a witness, especially the conception
of some committed crime, was untrue, I recalled Heusinger, and asked
myself “If the thing is untrue, is it a sonnet or a tragedy?” If the
answer was “tragedy” and the witness a man, or, if the answer was
“sonnet” and the witness a woman, I concluded that everything was
possibly invented, and grew quite cautious. If I could come to no
conclusion, I was considerably helped by Heusinger’s other proposition,
asking myself, “Flower-pictures or historical subjects?” And here again
I found something to go by, and the need to be suspicious. I repeat, no
evidence is to be attained in this way, but we frequently win when we
are warned beforehand.
(3) _Sexual Peculiarities._