And then, when we bring them to the field of life, we are surprised to find many of them unintelligent, unadapted, unadaptable; resourceless, inept and incompetent. Cooped during those impressionable years in a wholly artificial environment, when confronted by the world of living actualities, which is not ruled by similar narrow restrictions, nor shaped upon the artificial forms and puerile misconceptions in which their young ductile natures have been run and have set—they show themselves wholly unfitted for life, with its varied, difficult and complex conditions and adjustments. They have become, in point of fact, mentally and temperamentally "provincial."
The good form which some of them acquire is derived less from school-ethics or training than from an aristocratic strain of boys with whom they have been associated. And being acquired, when it is not the form of their own social order, it appears only too frequently as a counterfeit; engendering insincerity and snobbishness, and marring individuality.
It has seemed to me that, in both sexes, the first seven years of life—during which native faculty and attribute are evolving at great pace—are a phase in which the Recessive, or anabolic, mode, conservative of the resources and vitalising of the tissues, is in the ascendant. The true child of both sexes is normally, during these years, a typification of the Woman-traits; receptive, plastic, gentle, affectionate, trustful, intuitive, emotional; quickly fatigued, quickly recuperative; more or less lovely and angelic. In this phase, native intuitive faculty makes children sometimes phenomenal; lightning calculators, musical prodigies, precocious poets, artists. So too, their marvellously rapid apprehension of the complex meanings and implications of life betokens Supra-conscious mentality.
At seven years old and thence onward to fourteen, a male, and katabolic, phase sets in. Phenomenal faculty vanishes. Concrete development of body, brain and energy proceeds apace. The child becomes active, intelligent, enterprising, inquiring. The boy becomes appreciably male; the girl more or less of a hoyden, more male, indeed, than she is normally at any other period of her existence. Unless, that is, this hoyden phase is rendered permanent in her by masculine training.
At fourteen, with the evolution of sex, the sex of boy and girl, with its respective opposite modes of constitution and of function, makes for marked development, each along its characteristic lines.
III
The French have a saying: La femme est une malade. Woman is not, of course, an invalid. Nature does not fashion invalids. Woman's organisation is normally delicate and sensitive and highly strung, because of its special and complex sex-differentiation. She resembles the child, in that howsoever healthful (in proportion, indeed, as she is normal and healthfully organised) her cells of brain and body re-act resiliently and vitally to all the agencies, physical and psychical, about her.
This sensitive re-activity is not only a sign, it is, as well, a source of health. Because the greater delicacy and sensitiveness of organisation which characterise women and children, resulting in their quick re-activity to deleterious conditions, secure a permanently more highly-vitalised condition of body than is the case with man, whose cells are less sensitive, more tolerant of fatigue, of cold, and of other injurious agents. Immunity against injurious factors is the parent of degeneracy. Life being re-activity, in terms of living processes, to the factors of environment, such immunity entails loss of vital re-activity to vivifying as much as against deteriorative factors.
We complain that Nature, in place of making our bodies of cast iron, so to speak, makes them, on the contrary, vulnerable at every point. The reason is, surely, that the less we are constituted like cast iron—the more vital and complex, intelligent and responsive, our tissues are, accordingly—the more conducive to change and advance (because the more sensitively re-active to subtler and psychical stimuli) they are likewise. We cannot be, at the same time, hardy and obtuse, yet exquisitely sensitive. Living tissue-cells are characterised, beyond all other developments, by a range of contrasting abilities. An arm serves as softest cushion for a child's head, or, by stiffening of its muscles, becomes rigid as steel. An eye that sees for miles will focus to a pin-point. But being, as we are, still in the making, our tissues necessarily have limitations—and the defects, accordingly, of both their sets of qualities. High sensitiveness of function is necessarily attended by corresponding complexity and delicacy of structure. Such structural delicacy obliges us to adapt environment to its complexities. It is thus an incentive to progress.
It obliges us, as well, to moderate our activities, and, by thus restricting the output of our cruder powers, our resources are husbanded and directed into higher channels.