n and injustice practised upon her has been sure in the end to
rebound upon himself. If there is one thing more than another which, at
any given period and in any particular nation, has pointed to the true
state of society along the scale of advancement, it has been the degree
of woman's elevation; the undercurrents of history have all set steadily
and significantly in the direction of the truth, which the world has
been slow to accept and make use of, indeed, that society nears
perfection only in the proportion in which woman has been honored and
enfranchised; in which she has had opportunity and encouragement to work
and act in her own proper and lawful sphere.

Those who have gone the farthest in claiming special rights for woman
have generally based their demands upon a virtual abandonment of the
idea of _sex_, except in a physical sense. Here is a primary,
fundamental error. There is unquestionably a sex of mind, of soul, and
he who ignores or denies this is, it seems to me, studying his subject
without the key which alone will unlock it.

Another error which many of the advocates of _woman's rights_ have
fallen into, is that of assuming that those conditions are weaknesses,
disabilities, which God and nature have attested to be her crowning
glory and power. Or, rather, this second error results naturally and
most logically from the still more vital one of assuming that her sphere
is intended to be no way different from man's.

And still another, equally false and mischievous, would place her in
antagonism to man upon the question of comparative excellence and of
precedence in the scale of being.

A brief analysis of some of the points of difference between the mind
masculine and the mind feminine will show the futility of confounding
the two, or of drawing any useless or invidious comparisons. They are as
distinct in their normal action as any two things can well be. I begin,
then, by dividing our whole conscious human life into two comprehensive
departments, expressed by the generic terms, thought--feeling;
reflection--spontaneity; knowledge--emotion; perception--reception;
reason or intellect--affection or heart. The intelligent being unites
these conditions--he is supreme in but one. Man reasons--woman feels;
man analyzes--woman generalizes; man reaches his conclusions by
induction--woman seizes hers by intuition. There is just the difference,
_in kind_, between a man's mind and a woman's that there is betwe