"Women," writes M. Étienne Lamy, the distinguished French Academician, "group themselves at the center of human knowledge, whereas men disperse themselves towards its outer boundaries. While men are always pushing analysis to its utmost limits, women are seeking a synthesis. While men are becoming more technical, women are becoming more intellectual. They are better placed to observe the correlations of the different sciences, and to subordinate them to the common and unique source of truth from which they all descend. We seem, indeed, to be approaching a time when women will become the conservers of general ideas."[262]
In the preceding chapter reference was made to the fact that women are naturally inclined to adopt the deductive method in their search for truth when men would employ only the inductive method. This disposition of theirs to arrive at conclusions by a kind of intuition, coupled with their more pronounced idealism, is sure to react favorably on men, and prevent them from becoming so involved in mere facts and phenomena as to cause them to forget that it is as important to reason well as to observe well—that the fundamental principles of a true philosophy are quite as necessary for the eminent man of science as they are to the trustworthy historian or commanding statesman.
From what has been said, it is clear that man's ideal of the woman of the future will be quite different from what it was but a little more than a century ago, when Dr. Johnson could say that "any acquaintance with books," among women, "was distinguished only to be censured." It will be quite different from the ideal woman, as portrayed by poets and novelists, for centuries past. For among the thousands of women painted by our leading writers of fiction, poets and dramatists there are few, if any, outside of those sketched by Tennyson in The Princess, who are distinguished for their learning or for their love of intellectual pursuits. Even Portia, Shakespeare's most learned woman, was, according to her own confession, but
"An unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed."
And the heroines of the novelist, far from being women who had a thirst for knowledge, or were eager
"To sound the abyss
Of science and the secrets of the mind,"
were those only whose chief attractions were physical graces and charms, affectionate natures, brilliant wit together with "sweet laughs for bird-notes and blue eyes for a heaven."
Now, however, that women after ages of struggle are beginning to experience a sense of intellectual freedom before unknown, and to exult in the fact that
"Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed";
now that they are, for the first time, beginning, in every civilized nation, to realize their age-long aspirations for unimpeded opportunity in all the activities of the intellect; now that they are no longer