But here we are dealing with the healthy evidence of sex in mind. I have referred to but few of the many recognized intellectual states or processes, and yet they are sufficient to define differentially the average mental conditions of the sexes. With these as a basis of difference, the acuteness of intuitions, the vividness of imagination, and the want of intellectual belligerence, so often spoken of as traits of the feminine mind, and the existence of a modified or opposite form of these in the mental type of the other sex, can, with equal justice, be traced to sexual differences. Sex does not exist simply as a physical state; but we find it pervading organic life, and asserting itself potentially in every mental process. I believe the relation of the sexes in society bears to sexual cerebration the relation of cause and effect. Since the beginning of the historic age, under every variety of mental and physical conditions, the sexes have preserved their moral relations to each other almost unchanged. In what way can this be explained, except as the working of a natural law? There appears to me to be no law so adequate to explain this as that of sexual cerebration.
Several of the reviewers of a former paper seem to have regarded me as the avowed enemy of woman's social and moral advancement. I have entered upon the study of the relations of the sexes to the matters of daily life, with the single purpose of arriving at truth by the use of scientific methods. I believe the field gone over in this and former papers to belong properly to the student of Nature, and not to the so-called social reformer. I cannot bring myself to use the term "woman's sphere;" women have no sphere, except as it is defined by usefulness. I concede to woman the right to essay her fortune in any profession: I simply claim the right to courteously study her in her new relations. The ethnologist cannot be called the enemy of mankind, because he studies the different natural races of men; the botanist cannot be called the enemy of the rose, because he has analyzed its parts, and assigned it its place as a thing of beauty in the scheme of Nature.
| THE DEEPER HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.[1] |
II.
I HAVE suggested the thought of a God revealed in Nature, not by any means because such a view of God seems to me satisfactory, or worthy to replace the Christian view, or even as a commencement from which we must rise by logical necessity to the Christian view. I have suggested it because this is the God whom the present age actually does, and in spite of all opposition, certainly will worship, also because
- ↑ From a series of papers, in Macmillan's Magazine, on "Natural Religion."
