what it has said or done, or suffered, must lie easily if it has the gift of speech. The impulse to untruthfulness will be hard to resist if there is a practical object to be gained, and if the influence that comes from a full conscious reality of the past be not present. The impulse to lie is stronger in woman, because, unlike that of man, her memory is not continuous, whilst her life is discrete, unconnected, discontinuous, swayed by the sensations and perceptions of the moment instead of dominating them. Unlike man, her experiences float past without being referred, so to speak, to a definite, permanent centre; she does not feel herself, past and present, to be one and the same throughout all her life. It happens almost to every man that sometimes he "does not understand himself"; indeed, with very many men, it happens (leaving out of the question the facts of psychical periodicity) that if they think over their pasts in their minds they find it very difficult to refer all the events to a single conscious personality; they do not grasp how it could have been that they, being what they feel themselves at the time to be, could ever have done or felt or thought this, that, or the other. And yet in spite of the difficulty, they know that they had gone through these experiences. The feeling of identity in all circumstances of life is quite wanting in the true woman, because her memory, even if exceptionally good, is devoid of continuity. The consciousness of identity of the male, even although he may fail to understand his own past, manifests itself in the very desire to understand that past. Women, if they look back on their earlier lives, never understand themselves, and do not even wish to understand themselves, and this reveals itself in the scanty interest they give to the attempts of man to understand them. The woman does not interest herself about herself, and hence there have been no female psychologists, no psychology of women written by a woman, and she is incapable of grasping the anxious desire of the man to understand the beginning, middle, and end of his individual life in their relation to each other, and to interpret the whole as a continual, logical, necessary sequence.
