Affection is a beautiful thing, but affection is BORN in the brain and CONFINED to the brain.
A young woman looks at a splendid creature in a soldier's uniform. Her heart beats fast, and she imagines, as all antiquity has imagined, that the heart is the seat of the emotions. Nonsense!
The emotion is in the BRAIN, which has just received, through the optic nerve, a conception of the lovely vision in brass buttons. The heart is ordered to pump more blood to the head of the young girl, to supply mental activity and the becoming blush.
If you hear bad news you feel the effect on your heart; sometimes you fall unconscious. That is because the brain sensation is so strong as to interfere with the heart's action. You feel the shock that the brain sends to the heart. ——
The idea that cultivation of the mind interferes with a woman's moral, sentimental, or motherly qualities is foolish twaddle.
The idea that mere sentiment, ignorant, vague affection are sufficient without education to make a first-class human mother is false and feeble.
Have you ever seen a cow follow the wagon that carries her calf to the butcher shop? It is a very sad sight, the plaintive lowing of the poor mother as she follows behind begging for her child to be restored. Every farmer knows that there is no necessity for hitching the cow to the wagon when her calf is inside. She will follow that calf until she drops.
There is your loving, devoted mother without education. The cow's heart, to use the old expression, is all right. Her mental equipment is perfectly suited to a cow. Nature and society require that she should give the utmost love to her calf this year, and give all of that same love to another calf next year.
Bring back in three months that calf that she follows now with such pitiful appeals. If the weaned calf tries to re-establish the old relationship, its mother, "all heart and no head," will kick it in the ribs and then butt it across the lot. ——
It's all right for the COW to be all heart and no head; she does not need the higher education.