It is because of the potence of the Subconscious medium in her, instinct with the magnetic forces of Evolving Matter, that, in her intelligence, she shows as more materialistic than man is, although warmer and more quickened in her feelings.
Living personalities and issues mean to her more than intellectual abstractions do. She is more materialistic because she cares more for the things that matter! The puddings which in her children's young bodies will be transmuted into living flesh and function, are to her of more significance than the Isosceles Triangle is.
(All that is true of the Woman brain-half must be true of the Woman brain-half in man. In him, however, his own hemisphere dominates the bent and faculty of its female counterpart.)
It is in the emotional impressionability of the Subconsciousness that habit, good and bad, is formed. Hence woman's native susceptibility to her environment—a susceptibility which renders indispensable due protection of her mind and nature during years when habits of thought and of conduct are shaping in her. Normal man, whose emotionalism is (like woman's intelligence) a borrowed faculty, differs essentially from her in this. His intelligence is inherent and more stably rooted. He is far less mimetic, far less a creature of circumstance. His firmer will and stronger intellect enable him to rise superior to environmental conditions, to shake himself free alike of habit and of circumstance; his pioneering spirit disposing him to new departures.
VII
Dual Personality, Catalepsy, Epilepsy, Shock, Insanity, Chorea are explicable as effects of abnormal dissociations or inherent discrepant relations between the two brain-hemispheres, which represent, respectively, Conscious (or objective) Intelligence, and Subconsciousness (which is subjective).
Such discrepancy occasioning confusion between the two planes of mentality, perception becomes so blurred that, as in insanity, subjective impressions are perceived as objective fact. And some idea or spectre of his own mind becoming thus objective, and being seen out of all perspective with the facts and conditions of everyday life, the patient may be so haunted and dominated thereby that not only his mentality, but his actions too may take distorted shape.
While the Conscious Brain-half is a lens that focuses the Concrete, the Subconscious Brain-half is a highly-sensitised mirror (or retina) that reflects and retains, in terms of potential Memory, all impressions and experiences. It becomes charged thus with a medley of strange and incongruous imprints, which, so long as the lens keeps these submerged and subconscious—because unfocused on the plane of consciousness—do not obtrude upon mentality. Flaws or failures in the lens of reason allowing certain imprints to emerge, these become fixed ideas and obsessions.
It is by way of the Subconsciousness, that the hypnotist impresses "suggestion."