If we turn to the more accurate and measurable determination of sexual differences in the formation of sense-judgments, it is possible to find a few though not many attempts to measure accuracy of motor response to sensory impressions. A few tests were applied at the Anthropometric Laboratory during the Bath meeting of the British Association. It was found that in dividing a line in half women's eyes were absolutely correct in 10 per cent more cases than those of men — ie., 35.6 per cent of the men were successful against 45.5 per cent of the women. The division of a line into thirds was done about equally correctly by both sexes, while the men were consider- ably more accurate than the women in estimating a right angle — i.e., 63 per cent men were correct against 33.7 per cent, women. Professor Jastrow, in experimenting on the male and female students of 1 S. Webb, "Alleged Differences, etc.," Economic Journal, 189 1.
2 Pall Mall Gazette, 27th September 1886. The authority for this statement is not given.
Google MOTION. 163 Wisconsin University, devised a series of tests of sense-judgments, though he was only able to complete a small portion of them, namely, those relating to pressure and one relating to the space-sense of the skin. The subjects were first required to pour as much shot in the palm of their right hands as they thought would weigh an ounce; the men on the average decided on 47 gm. — an exaggeration of 65 per cent; the women on the average chose 22 gm. — an under -estimation of 2 1 per cent. The subjects were next asked to pour shot into a box so that both shot and box should weigh an ounce; in this test a well- recognised illusion was involved, as a stimulus appears less intense when spread over a larger area; both men and women largely exaggerated the amount necessary, but the exaggeration was somewhat greater in the case of the men. When the operation was repeated with the intention of making box and shot weigh one pound there was a slight exaggeration with the men, but the women's error was very small The subject was then given the box which he considered to weigh one pound, and asked to put sufficient shot into another box to make it weigh double the first; in this test the women were very slightly more success- ful than the men. The space-test consisted in separating the points of the aesthesiometer on the back of the subject's hand until he regarded the distance between the points to be one inch; both men and women over-estimated the separation necessary, the men slightly more than the women. 1 We thus find that at Bath men and women were about equal in accuracy of sense-judgment, with a trifling advan- tage in favour of the men. Professor Jastrow's 1 Jastrow, " Studies from University of Wisconsin," Amer. Journal Psyche April 1892, Light will probably be thrown on some of the points dealt with in this chapter, as well as in Chapters VI. and VIII., when the results of the Psychological Laboratory at the Chicago Ex- position (of which Professor Jastrow was director) have been worked out. A detailed account of the tests used at Chicago will be found in the Official Catalogue, Department M, pp. 50-56.
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observations without exception show greater accuracy of judgment on the part of the women; here, however, it must be borne in mind that the experiments were made through the medium of the dermal sensations of the hand, and, as has already been pointed out, such experiments place men at a disadvantage from the outset, and have little value in determining sexual differences in natural faculty. They have, however, a certain value in relation to the practical affairs of a world in which men and women must be accepted as they stand, since it is thus demonstrated that the coarsening of the skin by rough usage is a real disadvantage in forming sense-judgments.
On the whole, there seems no reason to believe that women are inferior to men in forming accurate sense- judgments, while, when the hand is concerned, women, for obvious reasons, are at an advantage.
Google CHAPTER VIII.
THE INTELLECTUAL IMPULSE.
THERE IS NO PURELY ABSTRACT THOUGHT — DIFFICULTY OF ACCURATELY INVESTIGATING INTELLECTUAL PROCESSES — JASTROW's INVESTIGATIONS INTO THOUGHT-HABITS AND ASSOCIATIONS — RAPIDITY OF PERCEPTION — RE- ACTION TIME — WOMEN READ RAPIDLY — THE READY WIT OF WOMEN — THEIR TENDENCY TO RUSE, AND ITS CAUSES — PRECOCITY — MORE MARKED IN GIRLS— THE INVESTIGATION OF SCHOOL CHILDREN — INDUSTRIAL AND BUSINESS CAPACITY — EXPERIENCES OF THE POST OFFICE — ABSTRACT THOUGHT — THE GREATER INDEPENDENCE OF MEN— WOMEN AS PHILOSOPHERS AND MATHEMA- TICIANS—RELIGION — RELIGIOUS SECTS FOUNDED BY WOMEN — THEIR GENERAL CHARACTER — WOMEN'S CON- TRIBUTIONS TO THE STRUCTURE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH — THE INTELLECTUAL DIFFERENCES OF MEN AND WOMEN CANNOT YET BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED — PSYCHOLOGY STILL IN ITS INFANCY.
Under.this heading we may conveniently consider various tendencies to think and to act according to what are usually considered rational motives. As a matter of fact even our most abstract mental pro- cesses are not abstractly rational. The dryest light of the intellect is coloured in infinite ways. If we could conveniently investigate, for example, the multiplication table — an apparently abstract possession common to most persons — as it exists in individual Google 1 66 MAN AND WOMAN.
minds from early childhood onwards, we should find it curiously tinged with emotional and pictured associations, from the simplest shadings up to the elaborate visions of the colour-hearer. It may be safely said that no two persons possess the same multiplication table.
The fact that even in so simple a shape the intellect- ual impulse is highly complicated makes the definite objective knowledge of psychic processes a very vast and difficult field. It is the more difficult because to get reliable results we must secure uni- formity and simplicity of method working on a large body of subjects. Introspection frightens and paralyses our psychic processes; they are, as Pro- fessor Jastrow well expresses it, like children who romp and express themselves freely in the privacy of the family circle, but become bashful, silent, and conventional before strangers. At present an objec- tive knowledge of mental processes has been sought at so few points and by so few investigators, each of them usually adopting his own methods, that our knowledge of sexual differences in the manipulation of the intellectual impulse is fragmentary and incom- plete, and this character will be reflected in the present chapter. What has been said as to the comparatively little light thrown on sexual difference by the study of the brain applies, at present, in a still higher degree to the study of intellectual processes.
To arrive at any reliable knowledge of mental sexual differences it is no longer enough to formulate suggestive impressions or brilliant theories. These have a certain interest and value, it is true, but they have no part in any knowledge that can be called science. It is along the lines of precise experiment that we may reasonably hope to obtain a more definite and objective knowledge of sexual mental differences. Two series of investigation by Pro- fessor Jastrow, one of the first to inaugurate such Google THE INTELLECTUAL IMPULSE. 167 investigations, may here be mentioned. 1 They were carried out on male and female university students. The first investigation was into community of ideas and thought-habits, the nature of the more usual types of associations, and the time-relations of these processes. Fifty students (twenty-five of each sex) were asked to write down one hundred words as rapidly as possible, and to record the time. Words in sentences were not allowed. There were thus obtained 5000 words, and of these nearly 3000 were the same, showing how great is the community of our thoughts. This community of thought is greater in the women; while the men use 1375 different words, their female class-mates use only 11 23. Of 1266 unique words used, 29.8 per cent were male, only 20.8 per cent female. If the words are all divided into classes it is seen that among the men there was a much more frequent occurrence of words referring to the Animal Kingdom, Proper Names, Verbs, Implements and Utensils, Adjectives, Vegetable Kingdom, Abstract Terms, Meteorological and Astronomical, Occupations and Callings, Convey- ances, Other Parts of Speech, Geographical and Landscape Features. Among the women there was a decidedly greater tendency than among the men to use words referring to Wearing Apparel and Fabrics, Interior Furnishings, Foods, Buildings and Building Materials, Mineral Kingdom, Stationery, Educational, Arts, Amusements, Kinship. The re- maining classes of words which were used with almost equal frequency by both sexes were Parts of Body, Miscellaneous, and Mercantile Terms. The group into which the largest number of the men's words fall is Animal Kingdom (254 to 178); the group into which the largest number of the women's words fall is Wearing Apparel and Fabrics (224 to 129); 1 " A Study in Mental Statistics," New Review, December 1891; •• A Statistical Study of Memory and Association," Educational Review, New York, December 1891.
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" the inference from this that dress is the predominant category of the feminine (or the privy feminine) mind is valid with proper reservations; but we should remember that the dress of a woman is more con- spicuous, more complex, and more various than that of a man, and that she has more to do with the making of it" In regard to Foods the difference is very great, much greater in fact than in regard to almost any other class of words; while the men only use S3 words belonging to this class, the women use 179; whether the part played by women in the preparation of food is sufficient to account for this great disproportion Professor Jastrow refrains from deciding. " In general," Professor Jastrow concludes, "the feminine traits revealed by this study are an attention to the immediate surroundings, to the finished product, to the ornamental, the individual, and the concrete; while the masculine preference is for the more remote, the constructive, the useful, the general, and the abstract" Another point worth mention is the tendency to select words that rhyme, and alliterative words; both these tendencies were decidedly more marked in men than in women. In regard to the time taken by the whole process there was practically no sexual difference.
Another series of experiments was made by Pro- fessor Jastrow in order to test the processes of memory and association. The withdrawal of a screen revealed a word upon the blackboard, whereupon each mem- ber of the class wrote upon a slip of paper the first word suggested by the word on the board, and then folded the paper so as to conceal what had been written; another word was then shown and the process repeated until each student had written ten words. (The ten words on the blackboard, it should be said, were simple monosyllables, including most of the words which the previous experiment had shown to be most generally uppermost in thought) Ex- actly two days later, and without the slightest Google THE INTELLECTUAL IMPULSE. 1 69 expectation on their part, the students were asked to write as many as possible of the words they had written forty-eight hours previously, and in the same order. The original ten words were then again written on the board, and the students asked to write as many as possible of the associations recorded two days before. The results of the first test may be called the " original lists," of the second the " A lists," of the third the "B lists." The first showed the most accessible associations to ten common words; the " A " lists show to what extent such can be recalled by memory alone, upon short notice, and when written with no expectation of future use; the " B " lists show to what extent the recollection is aided by the presence of the suggesting words. It was found that of the words written by the men 40 per cent were completely forgotten, and 50 per cent correctly recalled, while the women forgot only 29 per cent and correctly remembered 58 per cent; that is to say, that the women showed distinct superiority in memory. On the other hand, the " B " lists are substantially alike in both men and women; in other words, the furnishing of the original word aids the men more than the women, and this makes the proportion of totally forgotten and correctly recalled words the same for both sexes. It was also found that while men favour associations by sound and from part to whole, women prefer asso- ciations from whole to part and from object to quality. Professor Jastrow also organised some experiments on similar lines at the Milwaukee High School, and here also was shown, and in a still higher degree, the superiority of the feminine mind in the matter of memory. Here, also, the difference between the sexes was lessened when the suggesting word was supplied. The sexual differ- ence was clearly greater in the high school; it also appears that while university boys remember better than high school boys, high school girls remember Google 170 MAN AND WOMAN.
better than university girls. In many small points curious and unexpected sexual differences were found to be identical at the university and at the high school. In both, finally, there was found as usual greater community of association in girls than in boys. In a subsequent series of experiments to test the nature of associations (the results of which Pro- fessor Jastrow has kindly communicated to me) each student wrote five words to each of the same ten words. A comparison of the men and the women suggested that masculine preferences are probably for associations by sound (as man-can), from whole to part (as tree-leaf), from object to activity (as pen- write), from activity to object (as write -pen), and perhaps by natural kind (as cat-dog); while feminine preferences are for associations from part to whole (as hand-arm), object to quality (as tree-green), quality to object (as blue-sky), and miscellaneous (including all that are ambiguous or not easily classi- fied). This more special study of sexual differences in the association-element in thought does not entirely confirm the results suggested by the previous study; and it need scarcely be remarked that a few series of investigations can only lead to provisional results. Such investigations place our knowledge of psych- ology upon a sure and positive foundation, but they need to be extended to a very large number of indi- viduals before any wide-reaching generalisations can be attained.
In an article by Professor Stanley Hall on " The Contents of Children's Minds on entering School " (Pedagogical Semin- ary \ June 1 89 1; also Berlin Stadtisches Jahrbuch^ 1870, pp. 59-77)> a detailed summary is given of an investigation carried on at Berlin into the ideas and knowledge of several thousand children on entering school. Although the carrying out of this investigation was left to the teachers certain fairly reliable results seem to emerge. The familiarity of the children with 75 different objects and ideas was tested, and it was found that "the easy and widely diffused concepts are commonest among girls, the harder and more special or exceptional Google THE INTELLECTUAL IMPULSE. 171 ones are commonest among boys. The girls clearly excelled only in the following concepts: Name and calling of the father, thunder-shower, rainbow, hail, potato-field, moon, square, circle, Alexander Square, Frederick's Wood, morning-red, oak, dew, and Botanical Garden. The girls excel in space concepts, and boys in numbers. Girls excel in fairy tales [girls 60.5 per cent to boys 39.5], and boys in religious concepts [boys 60.3 to girls 39.7]. As the opportunities to learn both would not probably differ much, there seems here a difference of disposition. Rothkappchen was better known than God, and Schneewittchen than Christ. More boys could repeat sen* tences said to them, or sing musical phrases sung to them, or sing a song, than girls." Professor Hall proceeds to give an account of a more careful study on similar lines of several hundred children at Boston. The results, although not carried out on a sufficient number of children, confirm on the whole those reached at Berlin. " In 34 representative questions out of 49 the boys surpass the girls, as the German boys did in 75 per cent, of the Berlin questions. The girls excel in know- ledge of the parts of the body, home and family life, thunder, rainbows, in knowledge of square, circle, and triangle, but not in that of cube, sphere, and pyramid, which is harder and later. Their stories are more imaginative, while their knowledge of things outward and remote, their power to sing and articulate correctly from dictation, their acquaintance with numbers and animals, is distinctly less than that of the boys. The Berlin reports infer that the more common, near, or easy a notion is the more likely are the girls to excel the boys, and vice versd...Boys do seem more likely than girls to be ignorant of common things right about them." These interesting data bear on the respective capacity of men and women for abstract thought and for practical life, which it will be necessary to touch on later.
One other series of observations may be mentioned. Professor C. S. Minot sent out cards with the following request: — " Please draw ten diagrams on this card, without receiving any sugges- tions from any other person, and add your name and address." Five hundred sets were received from persons of both sexes. Circles were most common, then squares, then triangles, then four-sided figures, and so on. It was found that repetitions much preponderated among the women, though this is not true of all classes of diagrams; the men exhibit on the whole much more variety than the women. (C. S. Minot, "Second Report on Experimental Psychology: Upon the Diagram Tests," Proceedings Am. Soc. for Psych. Research, Rapidity of Perception. — This is an interesting 172 MAN AND WOMAN.
example of a characteristic which has been nearly always attributed to women, but which cannot be said to have yet been demonstrated in a very satisfactory manner. It cannot, however, be entirely passed over. We must for the most part speak of it as complicated with various motor and intellectual processes.
Herzen made a series of experiments at Florence into the influence of age and sex in modifying reaction- time. He was impressed by the slowness with which children co-ordinate or associate two movements, as of the hand and foot His figures show that girls react at first more quickly than boys, but while in the latter the reaction accelerates regularly up to adolescence, in the former it accelerates less rapidly, and stops short at a lower rapidity than that of the masculine sex. 1 At present, however, our knowledge of difference in reaction-time does not appear to be sufficiently extensive to enable us to speak very authoritatively as to the significance of a low rate. It is quicker (according to Buccola) among the educated than among the uneducated, but the recent investigation of some Italian men of genius has shown that in them reaction time is slow. 2 It is also very slow in the insane, and extremely slow in idiots. Some Japanese jugglers examined by Herzen reacted very slowly. The north Italians, he found, reacted more quickly than the south Italians, and a Norwegian reacted most quickly of all.
Reaction-time merely indicates the more or less rapid manner in which a person can respond muscularly to a signal. It is perhaps in more com- plicated processes involving a larger element of intelli- gence, that we may expect to find more marked sexual differences. Mr. Romanes has tested rapidity in reading; the same paragraph was presented to various well-educated persons, and they were asked to read it as rapidly as they could, ten seconds being 1 A. Herzen, Le Cerveau et Vaetiviti cMbrcde, pp. 96-98. 9 Archivio di Psichiatria^ 1892, pp. 394, 395.
Google THE INTELLECTUAL IMPULSE. 1 73 allowed for twenty lines. As soon as the time was up the paragraph was removed, and the reader immediately wrote down all that he or she could remember of it. It was found that women were usually more successful than men in this test Not only were they able to read more quickly than the men, but they were able to give a better account of the paragraph as a whole. One lady, for instance, could •read exactly four times as fast as her husband, and even then give a better account than he of that small portion of the paragraph he had alone been able to read. But it was found that this rapidity was no proof of intellectual power, and some of the slowest readers were highly distinguished men. 1 In youth we read rapidly, but it is within the experience of many of us that on reaching adult age we come to read more and more slowly. It is as though in early age every statement were admitted imme- diately and without inspection to fill the vacant chamber of the mind, while in adult age every state- ment undergoes an instinctive process of cross-exami- nation; every newfact seems to stir up the accumulated stores of facts among which it intrudes, and so impedes rapidity of mental action. It is the same with the impulse to action; in the simply organised mind this is direct and immediate: " I do just what I think of," said to Dr. Mendel an imbecile who had committed an offence against morality; "afterwards I consider it" In the more highly organised brain the consideration comes before the action and retards it We may say that the impulse and the action form the two ends of a circuit which at the centre of its course is intellectual. The longer and more infolded the intellectual portion of the circuit the longer it 1 G. J. Romanes, " Mental Differences between Men and Women," Nineteenth Century, May 1887. There is a discussion on •• Perception in Man and Woman," but without any contribution of new facts, in Dr. H. Campbell's Differences in the Nervous Organisation of Man and Woman t Part II., chap. xii.
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will be before the impulse is transmitted into action.
The masculine method of thought is massive and deliberate, while the feminine method is quick to perceive and nimble to act The latter method is apt to fall into error, but is agile in retrieving an error, and under many circumstances this agility is the prime requirement Whenever a man and a woman are found under compromising circumstances it is nearly always the woman who with ready wit audaciously retrieves the situation. Every one is acquainted with instances from life or from history of women whose quick and cunning ruses have saved lover or husband or child. It is unnecessary to insist on this quality, which in its finest forms is called tactfulness.
The method of attaining results by ruses (common among all the weaker lower animals) is so habitual among women that, as Lombroso and Ferrero remark, in women deception is "almost physiological." As Diderot somewhere says, the one thing that women have been thoroughly well taught is to wear decently the fig-leaf they have inherited from their grandmother Eve. The same fact is more coarsely and ungraciously stated in the proverbs of many nations, and in some countries it has led to the legal testimony of women being placed on a lower footing than that of men. But to regard the caution and indirectness of women as due to innate wicked- ness, it need scarcely be said, would be utterly irrational It is inevitable, and results from the constitution of women, acting in the conditions under which they are generally placed. There is at present no country in the world, certainly no civilised country, in which a woman may safely state openly her wishes and desires, and proceed openly to seek their satisfac- tion.
Lombroso and Ferrero have admirably analysed this habit of mind, the persistency of which in women no one will doubt, and Google THE INTELLECTUAL IMPULSE. 175 which is found to some extent even in the most highly intellectual- ised women. They trace it to seven causes, which all act chiefly or exclusively on women: (1) Weakness; for cunning and deception are the necessary resort of the weak and oppressed; only the strong can afford to be frank. (2) Menstruation; this function is treated with a certain amount of disgust, therefore women try to conceal it; so that every month they are exercised in dis- simulation for three or four days, during which they either endeavour to conceal their condition altogether, or else simulate some trivial malady. (3) Modesty; thus in a woman any de- monstration of love which has not been invited by a man is regarded as immodest, whence a training in deception which in the excitable nervous systems of women is peculiarly severe; again, in women the exercise of the natural functions of urination and defalcation is regarded as immodest, so that any natural call of this kind must either be repressed, or some ingenious ruse must be invented in order to gain an opportunity for its satisfaction; the facts concerning sexual relationships, again, are also regarded as immodest, and are so far as possible concealed from women and girls; when women find them out, as they inevitably do sooner or later, they have become habituated to the idea that to be modest means telling lies about such things, and so they continue the tradition. (4) Sexual Selection; a woman instinctively hides her defects, her disorders, if necessary her age — anything which may injure her in the eyes of men, including even her best qualities, if she thinks that these may call out ridicule or dislike. A woman usually finds it easy to mould herself on the ideal of the man she is with at the moment, provided she admires him. He would usually be repelled if she were independently to assert her own individuality. The artifices of the toilet have the same source, although, as has often been pointed out, they no longer refer to men alone, but are also intended to impress other women, or to obtain' a triumph over them. (5) The desire to be interesting, leading to simulated weaknesses, etc, and a supposed need for protection; this seems to be merely an extension of the previous heading. (6) Suggestibility; the greater suggestibility of women (else- where pointed out, Chap. XI.) necessarily involves an overlapping of the real and the simulated — which is really unconscious and involuntary. (7) The duties of Maternity; a large part of the education of the infantile mind at the hands of mothers con- sists of a series of more or less skilful lies; told with the object of hiding from children the facts of life which are not considered proper or right for them to know; frequently also various false ideas are taught in order to frighten or otherwise influence children; so that in training their children women are also training themselves in dissimulation. (La Donna Delinquente> 1893, pp. 133-139.) I think it might be added that another Google 176 MAN AND WOMAN.
cause of dissimulation lies in their compassion, a feminine quality on which Lombroso and Ferrero elsewhere rightly insist; an exaggerated desire to avoid hurting or shocking others is one of the most frequent causes of minor dissimula- tions, and works more powerfully in women than in men. I would also add that this tendency to caution and ruse is by no means confined to the human female; it appears to be a fact of considerable zoological extension, and is rooted in the necessity the female is under of guarding her offspring from danger. Female monkeys are more cautious and cunning than the males, and it is said that trappers on the average can only catch one nursing mother and three or four females of any kind for two score specimens of the less wary se* Buckle has dignified the ready wit of women by terming it a tendency to start from ideas rather than from the patient collection of facts; men's minds, he asserted, are naturally inductive, women's deductive. 1 It would perhaps be more correct to say that women start more readily, perhaps without any conscious intellectual process, from the immediate facts before them. It is unquestionably a valuable possession, and, as Buckle remarks, women's fine and nimble minds are no doubt often irretrievably injured by "that preposterous system called their education." He refers to the notable superiority of women in quickness of intelligence among the lower classes, and to the fact that a stranger in a foreign land will always find that his difficulties are more readily understood by women. I think there can be little doubt as to the more ready intelligence of women among the uncultivated classes, whatever the cause may be. In the solitude of the Australian bush, for instance, one finds repeatedly that while the settler is embarrassed and silent, or scarcely able to utter more than monosyllables, his wife is comparatively fluent and in possession of a fairly rich and precise vocabu- lary. It may be that this is merely the result of greater practice in the course of domestic avocations, although 1 "The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge," Buckle's Miscellaneous Works % vol. i.
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