FOOTNOTES:
[232] Op. cit., pp. 210, 211.
[233] For a detailed discussion of the relationship of the painter, sculptor, poet, architect and musician to the great social builder and artist, see my Introduction to Van Gogh’s Letters (Constable & Co., London).
[234] See Lecky (Op. cit., vol. II, p. 360). Speaking of women he says: “They are little capable of impartiality or of doubt; their thinking is chiefly a mode of feeling.” See also Buckle (The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge), the whole argument of which is to the effect that woman’s thinking is emotional. Weininger also says (Op. cit., p. 100): “With the woman, thinking and feeling are identical,” but this testimony is not nearly as valuable as that of the two former writers, who can in no way be suspected of misogyny.
[235] On this whole question cp. Sir Almroth E. Wright (Op. cit., p. 35): “Woman’s mind attends in appraising a statement primarily to the mental images which it evokes, and only secondarily—and sometimes not at all—to what is predicated in the statement ... accepts the congenial as true, and rejects the uncongenial as false; takes the imaginary which is desired for reality, and treats the undesired reality which is out of sight as non-existent.”
[236] With the softening of men in an effeminate civilization, women are, of course, not alone in holding this attitude to truth. Many men, even among the most cultivated, are unable to-day to separate pleasantness from truth; for to do so implies a control of emotion by reason which is not the forte of modern mankind. Not only men writers during the war, but also politicians, proved beyond doubt their own and their male audiences’ inability to regard truth rationally; and at the present time you are quite as likely to be flatly contradicted by a man as by a woman, if you enunciate an unpleasant truth before an ordinary crowd.
[237] Vide Press reports of the William Harkness case, particularly the comments published, after Harkness’s execution, in The News of the World for February 26, 1922.
[238] Arabella Kenealy was tending towards this conclusion when she wrote (Op. cit., p. 155): “The woman of average brain, however, attains the intellectual standards of the man of average brain at cost of her health, of her emotions, or of her morale.” I would suggest “and” instead of “or” in the latter part of the sentence.
[239] Anyone who attempts to keep a record of his wife’s, mother’s or sister’s so-called “intuitive” statements, will soon realize how few of them reveal an accurate power of immediately perceiving truth.
[240] See several passages in his Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion.
[241] The fact that certain organisms in the animal kingdom use senses which, as far as we can tell, have neither sight, taste, smell, hearing, nor touch, for their basis, is shown by W. S. Coleman in his British Butterflies. The manner in which the males of the Kentish Glory Moth, for instance, are attracted to the female, when she is sometimes more than a mile away from them, is utterly unknown, and Coleman is compelled to refer it to a sort of clairvoyance. (See pp. 28-29.)
[242] It is largely animated by commercial and industrial rivalry, and this sort of opposition to Feminism is too contemptible to inspire much enthusiasm.