in the higher education of women; it
is not sufficient to provide an environment which looks upon the girl as
a sideboard ornament, in Ruskin's phrase, such as was provided in the
earlier Victorian days. In all these cases we are providing only part of
the environment, and providing it in excess. None of them, therefore,
satisfies our definition of education, which conceives of environment
as the sum-total of all the influences to which the whole organism is
subjected--influences dietetic, dogmatic, material, maternal, and all
other.[10]

Who will question that, according to this conception of education, such
a thing as the higher education of women must be condemned as
inadequate? No more than a man is woman a mere intellect incarnate. Her
emotional nature is all-important; it is indeed the highest thing in the
Universe so far as we know. The scheme of education which ignores its
existence, and much more than fails to provide the best environment for
it, is condemnable. But the scheme of education which derides and
despises the emotional nature of woman, looking upon it as a weakness
and seeking to suppress it, is damnable, and has led to the
damnation--or loss, if the reader prefers the English term--of this most
precious of all precious things in countless cases.

The only right education of women must be that which rightly provides
the whole environment. The simpler our conception of woman, the more we
underrate her complexity and the manifoldness of her needs, the more
certainly shall we repeat in one form or another the errors of our
predecessors.

Complete living is a great phrase; perhaps not for a lizard or a
mushroom, but assuredly for men and women. Perhaps it involves more for
women even than for men; indeed it must do so if we are to adhere to our
conception of women as more complex than men, having all the
possibilities of men in less or greater measure, and also certain
supreme possibilities of their own. Whatever complete living may mean
for men, it cannot mean for women anything less than all that is implied
in Wordsworth's great line--

"Wisdom doth live with children round her knees."

That line was written in reference to the unwisdom of a man, Napoleon,
the greatest murderer in recorded time, and I believe it to be true of
men, but it is pre-eminently true of women. There needs no excuse for
quoting from Herbert Spencer, since we have already accepted his
definition of the subject of educat