Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. The propositions of logic are not conditioned by the existence of memory, but only the power to use them. The proposition A = A must have a psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be At1 = At2. Of course this is not the case in pure logic, but man has no special faculty of pure logic, and must act as a psychological being.
I have already shown that the continuous memory is the vanquisher of time, and, indeed, is necessary even for the idea of time to be formed. And so the continuous memory is the psychological expression of the logical proposition of identity. The absolute woman, in whom memory is absent, cannot take the proposition of identity, or its contradictory, or the exclusion of the alternative, as axiomatic.
Besides these three conditions of logical thought, the fourth condition, the containing of the conclusion in the major premiss, is possible only through memory. That proposition is the groundwork of the syllogism. The premisses psychologically precede the conclusion, and must be retained by the thinking person whilst the minor premiss applies the law of identity or of non-identity. The grounds for the conclusion must lie in the past. And for this reason continuity which dominates the mental processes of man is bound up with causality. Every psychological application of the relation of a conclusion to its premisses implies the continuity of memory to guarantee the identity of the propositions. As woman has no continuous memory she can have no principium rationis sufficientis.
And so it appears that woman is without logic.
George Simmel has held this familiar statement to be erroneous, inasmuch as women have been known to draw conclusions with the strongest consistency. That a woman in a concrete case can unrelentingly pursue a given course at the stimulation of some object is no more a proof that she understands the syllogism, than is her habit of perpetually recurring to disproved arguments a proof that the law of identity is an axiom for her. The point at issue is whether or no they recognise the logical axioms as the criteria of
