ween
occidental and oriental ideas is not merely the most extensive; it is
also by far the most interesting and picturesque.

Less picturesque but often more dramatic are the conflicts that arise
within each geographical region, within each nation, between old beliefs
and new--the conflicts of sequent, in distinction from coexistent,
ideas; the conflicts in time, in distinction from the conflicts in
space. A new knowledge is attained which compels us to question old
dogmas. A new faith arises which would displace the ancient traditions.
As the new waxes strong in some region favorable to it, it begins there,
within local limits, to supersede the old. Only then, when the conflict
between the old as old and the new as new is practically over, does the
triumphant new begin to go forth spatially as a conquering influence
from the home of its youth into regions outlying and remote.

Whatever the form, however, that the culture conflict assumes, whether
serial and dramatic or geographical and picturesque, its antecedent
psychological conditions are in certain great essentials the same. Men
array themselves in hostile camps on questions of theory and belief, not
merely because they are variously and conflictingly informed, but far
more because they are mentally unlike, their minds having been prepared
by structural differentiation to seize upon different views and to
cherish opposing convictions. That is to say, some minds have become
rational, critical, plastic, open, outlooking, above all, intuitive of
objective facts and relations. Others in their fundamental constitution
have remained dogmatic, intuitive only of personal attitudes or of
subjective moods, temperamentally conservative and instinctive. Minds of
the one kind welcome the new and wider knowledge; they go forth to
embrace it. Minds of the other kind resist it.

In the segregation thus arising, there is usually discoverable a certain
tendency toward grouping by sex.

Whether the mental and moral traits of women are inherent and therefore
permanent, or whether they are but passing effects of circumscribed
experience and therefore possibly destined to be modified, is immaterial
for my present purpose. It is not certain that either the biologist or
the psychologist is prepared to answer the question. It is certain that
the sociologist is not. It is enough for the analysis that I am making
now if we can say that, as a merely descriptive fact, women thus far in
the