ground that their
natures were too exclusively animal to require it. To-day, the same
education is still withheld, but on the new plea that their animal
nature is too imperfectly developed to enable them to avail themselves
of it. Formerly, psychology was widely separated from physiology, and
the study of the mind began and ended with demonstrations of the immense
gulf by which it was separated from the body. To-day, psychology has
become a section of physiology, and mental philosophers busy themselves
with searching out in all its details, the close dependence of the mind
upon the body. Insanity has become an inflammation of the cortical
substance of the brain: idiocy results from a foetal meningitis: genius
is a form of scrofula closely allied to mania: in sleep, the brain loses
blood, in intellectual excitement, attracts blood; in the illumination
of the death-bed, or the delirium of drunkenness, the circulation
through the brain is quickened; in torpidity, melancholy, stupidity, the
circulation slackens and stagnates.

With this tendency, whose legitimacy we are certainly far from
disputing, it is inevitable that the old doctrine of the mental
inferiority of women should be defended, if at all, on a new basis; a
basis organic; structural, physiological, hence incontrovertible; on an
analysis, not of her reasoning faculties, her impulses, her emotions,
her logic, her ignorance, but of her digestion, her nerves, her muscles,
her circulation. It is inevitable, therefore, that the two great
functions of parturition and ovulation, of which the latter is peculiar
in form,[33] and the former altogether peculiar to the female sex,
should assume peculiar importance in all discussions about
women--inevitable, that to these should be attributed the inferiority of
mental calibre or of mental achievement that few care more openly to
maintain.[34]

A mysterious interest has indeed always attached to these functions.
From the Mosaic law to Raciborski, from the denunciations of the
school-men to the rhapsodies of Michelet, they have been invoked in
every theory on the nature of women; that is, in every theory on the
organization of society. In virtue of them, the woman has been
considered, now unclean, now angelic, now touchingly (but irredeemably)
helpless. In this connection, the association of ideas has been almost
always too powerful and too varied to admit of a dispassionate
examination of facts. Yet to-day, as already said,