Feminine intelligence properly deserves a separate section. Intelligence
is a function that has in both sexes some basis and purpose and proceeds
according to the same rules, but the meaning of intelligence must be
abandoned if we are to suppose it so rigid and so difficult to hold,
that the age-long differences between man and woman could have had no
influence on it. The fundamentally distinct bodies, the very different
occupations of both sexes, their different destinies, must have had
profound mutative influence on their intelligence. Moreover, we must
always start with a difference of attitude in the two sexes, in which
the purely positive belongs to one only, and we must see whether it is
not intensified by the negative of the other. When one body presses on
another the resulting impression is due, not only to the hardness of the
first, but also to the softness of the second, and when we hear about
the extraordinary wit of a woman we must blame the considerable idiocy
of the men she associates with. How many women are to be trusted for
intelligence, is a question of great importance for the criminalist,
inasmuch as right judgment depends on the attitude and good sense of the
witnesses, and must determine the value of the material presented us.
We wish to make no detailed sub-divisions in what follows. We shall
merely consider in their general aspects those functions which we are
accustomed to find in our own work.