very large amount
of the world's intellectual endeavor. The financier does not
think merely for money, nor the scientist for truth, nor the
theologian to save souls. Their intellectual efforts are aimed in
great measure to outdo the other man, to subdue nature, to
conquer assent. The maternal instinct in its turn is the chief
source of woman's superiorities in the moral life. The virtues
in which she excels are not so much due to either any general
moral superiority or any set of special moral talents as to her
original impulses to relieve, comfort, and console.[1]

[Footnote 1: Thorndike: _loc. cit._, pp. 48-49.]

Ordinary observation reveals, as literature has in general
recorded, what Havelock Ellis has called the "greater affectability
of the female mind." There is evidenced in many
women a singular and immediate responsiveness to other
people's emotions, a quick intuition, a precise though non-logical
discrimination, which, though shared to some extent
by all individuals gifted with sympathy and affection, is a
peculiarly feminine quality. Indeed when a man possesses
it, it is common to speak of him as possessing "almost a
woman's intuition." Such emotional susceptibility is manifested
in the higher frequency of emotional instability and
emotional outbreaks among women than among men, and the
decreased power of inhibition which women have over
instinctive and emotional reactions. Further than this, women
more than men may be said to qualify their judgments of persons
and situations by their emotional reactions to them.

The common suspicion that in general women's abilities
are less than those of men has seemed to gain strength from
the greater number of geniuses and eminent persons there
have been among men than among women. Professor Cattell
writes in this connection:

I have spoken throughout of eminent men as we lack in English
words including both men and women, but as a matter of fact women
do not have an important place on the list. They have in all thirty-two
representatives in the thousand. Of these eleven are hereditary
sovereigns, and eight are eminent through misfortunes, beauty, or
other circumstances. Belles-lettres and fiction--the only department
in which woman has accomplished much--give ten names as
compared with seventy-two men. Sappho and Joan d'Arc are the
only other women on the list. It is noticeable that with the
exception of Sappho--a name associated with certain fine fragments--wom