Mind is of an order of mentality wholly different from that of Intelligence or Intellect. Mind is of the nature of Emotion. It is personal, is sympathy, is divination. It is the cerebration of the Soul.
The Soul, or essential Individuality, must abide amid infinitely delicate and delicately infinite brain-cells attuned to those spiritual vibrations whereof Mind is the reflex. And if Mind is Emotion, the Woman brain-half, which is the department of human emotion, must be the mainspring of the human mind.
Great intellect, pure and simple, may exist in man or woman without or with only a fractional leaven of Mind. This is seen in the abstractions of scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, astronomers, financiers, and others. Such brains are special organs of a high order of Intellection, clear, calculating and precise of observation and reflection; rational, deductive; admirable in their unswerving rectitude, pitiless in their impregnable emotionlessness; rejecting all but incontestable evidences, scrupulously aggregating and faithfully interpreting their dry bones of numbers and data and vestiges—skeletons of Life long since extinct, or scaffoldings of Life that lives and moves and laughs and weeps, and bears no more semblance to their bloodless tabulations of its modes and processes than warm, creative Mother-Earth resembles the geological strata they describe in her; or than a beautiful flower-garden blooms in botanical treatises; or than living men and women are pourtrayed in text-books of Anatomy and Physiology.
Many men of Science—and all the great ones—have been men of Mind as well as of Intellect. But the intellectual processes of Abstract Science are no more operations of Mind than the paths by which we climb to sun-illumined peaks are the Light upon those peaks. Mind is Spiritual Illumination—a glimmering of The Infinite, reflected in the highest and most subtle order of the brain-cells. Rays from it are deflected toward the concrete, to function as Intellection. But these rays enter the brain at a different angle from that of Mind-rays.
Like woman its medium, Mind is inspirational, wayward and elusive. It comes we know not whence. It goes we know not whither. Receptive, intuitive, creative, colourful, it may be unwitting of Astronomy, yet it roams amid the stars. Ignorant of Geology, in it Immortal, the dry-bones of The Past become immortal—arise eternally in everlasting re-creation. Its Biology is in the lives and loves, the hopes and fears, the throes and tears of human souls and stories. It inspires the poet, priest, historian, romancist, artist; the seer and statesman; the philosopher and wondering child. It exalts the humble and meek. It may be lacking in the cleverest and most learned of men. It is found in the most ignorant and simple women; in whom it is dumb, however, failing the intellectual talent of expression.
VI
The Woman brain-half being medium, in its higher region, of that Supra-conscious emotionalism which engenders Mind, and in its lower region, of that Subconscious emotionalism which engenders vital impulse in the body, woman's range of mentality is wider than is that of man; extending both higher and lower in its opposite reaches.
But because her Intelligent Consciousness is not inherent in her own brain-half, but is supplied by her borrowed masculine brain-half, her intelligence is more superficial, is weaker and less deep and strong of grip than is his. And when the gap between her upper and her lower registers is not duly bridged and stabilised by an efficient middle-register of male-intelligence, she tends toward two extremes of mentality, both of which are emotional. Thus she lives on the plane of her highest emotional impulses. Or she lives on the plane of her senses. Some women act and re-act perpetually between these two extremes.
In her highest Supra-reaches, she is athrill with Supra-faculties. In her lowest Sub-register, she is instinct and palpitant with the colour, the magnetic vibrations and the blind forces of Matter, which her vital processes are evolving into Life.
Extremes which are shown, at the one end, in the reasonless animal emotionalism of hysteria, with its abandon of control, its inco-ordinated muscular movements, its senseless weepings, cries and laughter; at the other end, in catalepsy, in which she exists detached from earth and its material needs and consciousness, subsisting, it may be for weeks together, without food or drink, withdrawn into the Inner, and potential, zones of Life and Mind. So that, no longer subject to limitations of Matter, she perceives without aid of the senses, apprehends without aid of intelligence, discerns without help of the eyes, hears without instrumentality of ears. And Time and Space no longer circumscribing her essential faculties, she visions happenings at the Antipodes, overhears whispers across a Continent, recalls The Past, foretells The Future.