Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/146

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I 38 INTRODUCTION

of this sort. Perhaps the ugliness of the baby which you describe may disappoint you, but all babies newly born are more ugly than kittens and puppies of the same age, and the rather because they reach their climax only by a more elaborate development. The brick-dust and mud color will be replaced in a few days by a clearer complexion. As for resemblance, a baby has no right greatly to resemble under several months either its father or its mother, unless they be natural fools ; but it will rapidly increase in comeliness and intelligence, and, as every child must resemble both its father and mother, you cannot fail to share with the mother after a time the resemblance.

Friday, lOth. Among other things you allude to the feminine intellect, and its relation to companionship as being altogether of a different kind from the masculine ; and in your school you must have as good opportunities as your father had for observing it. I perceive he has in many points done so, as I think, with much accuracy. I think the word intellect may mislead, when we employ it to denote, not a simple, but a compound faculty. I re- member that old metaphysicians have confounded, and old painters have allegorized, as three simple faculties. Intel- lect, Will, and Memory. But every faculty has its own intuition, each has its will, and memory is no faculty at all, but the result of the activity of, and limited or extended by, the variety of our associations. Now I doubt not that in the sense of causality women are deficient. They make in general bad reasoners, as Mrs. Craigie and many other sensible women have observed. With abstraction they have little business, for their want of concentrativeness does not admit of it. Indeed, even as regards the arts, I never remember to have read the finest verse or prose, " where more is meant than meets the eye," but that the

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