y well have been
produced merely by circumstances, without any difference of natural
capacity. But, looking at women as they are known in experience, it
may be said of them, with more truth than belongs to most other
generalizations on the subject, that the general bent of their
talents is towards the practical. This statement is conformable to
all the public history of women, in the present and the past. It is
no less borne out by common and daily experience. Let us consider the
special nature of the mental capacities most characteristic of a
woman of talent. They are all of a kind which fits them for practice,
and makes them tend towards it. What is meant by a woman's capacity
of intuitive perception? It means, a rapid and correct insight into
present fact. It has nothing to do with general principles. Nobody
ever perceived a scientific law of nature by intuition, nor arrived
at a general rule of duty or prudence by it. These are results of
slow and careful collection and comparison of experience; and neither
the men nor the women of intuition usually shine in this department,
unless, indeed, the experience necessary is such as they can acquire
by themselves. For what is called their intuitive sagacity makes them
peculiarly apt in gathering such general truths as can be collected
from their individual means of observation. When, consequently, they
chance to be as well provided as men are with the results of other
people's experience, by reading and education, (I use the word chance
advisedly, for, in respect to the knowledge that tends to fit them
for the greater concerns of life, the only educated women are the
self-educated) they are better furnished than men in general with the
essential requisites of skilful and successful practice. Men who have
been much taught, are apt to be deficient in the sense of present
fact; they do not see, in the facts which they are called upon to
deal with, what is really there, but what they have been taught to
expect. This is seldom the case with women of any ability. Their
capacity of "intuition" preserves them from it. With equality of
experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more
than a man of what is immediately before her. Now this sensibility to
the present, is the main quality on which the capacity for practice,
as distinguished from theory, depends. To discover general
principles, belongs to the speculative faculty: to discern and
discriminate the partic