In spite, however, of Christine's Cyte of Ladyes, "in which," according to our mediæval paragon, "women, hitherto scattered and defenceless, were forever to find refuge against all their slanderers," in spite of the fact that the foundations of this city were laid by Reason, that its walls and cloisters were built on Righteousness, and its battlements and high towers on Justice, in spite of the fact that the material entering into its construction was "stronger and more durable than any marble," and that it was, as our author declares, "a city right fair, without fear and of perpetual during to the world—a city that should never be brought to nought," Christine's work was soon lost sight of, and the right of women to the same intellectual advantages as men was as strongly denied as it had been before she had so valiantly championed their cause, and denied, too, on the assumed ground of their innate incapacity.
It mattered not that during the succeeding centuries other women took up the cause for which the author of La Cité des Dames had so nobly battled; it mattered not that countless women in every civilized country of the globe distinguished themselves by their achievements in every department of science and gave evidence of talent and genius of the highest order; it mattered not that chivalrous representatives of the sterner sex, like John Stuart Mill, came forward to plead the case of that half of humanity which had so long been held in cruel subjection. The attitude of the world toward the intellectually disfranchised sex remained unchanged almost until our own time.
But, although women now enjoy advantages in the pursuit of science which were undreamed of only a generation ago, the age-old prejudices respecting woman's mental powers and her capacity for the more abstract branches of science still prevail. It is useless to cite instances of women who have attained eminence in astronomy, mathematics, archæology, or in any other science whatever. Such instances, we are assured, are only exceptions and prove nothing. Men like Lombroso are willing to admit the existence of an occasional woman of talent, but they deny the existence of genius in one who is truly a womanly woman.[90] For, with Goncourt, they flippantly assert, Il n'y a pas de femmes de génie: lorsqu'elles sont des génies, elles sont des hommes—there are no women of genius; when they have genius they are men.
The reasons that now influence men for affirming the intellectual disparity of the sexes are, it must be observed, quite different from what they were in the time of Christine de Pisan—quite different from what they were half a century ago. Our forebears, in their endless disputations regarding woman's mental inferiority, based their arguments on a priori deductions, or on metaphysical considerations which proved nothing and which were often irrelevant, if not absurd.
Thus the Aristotelians, accepting as true the doctrine of the four elements as well as the superimposed doctrine of the four elemental qualities, sought to explain the properties of all compound bodies by these primal qualities. In this way they explained the various virtues of drugs and medicines. And by the same process of reasoning they explained the assumed difference between male and female brains. They assumed, to begin with, that there was a difference between the intellectual capacities of men and women. They then assumed that this difference in capacity was due to the difference in character and texture of the female as compared with those of the male brain. They next further assumed that the doctrines of the four elements and of the four elemental qualities were established beyond question, and then assumed again that the reason of woman's inferior capacity was due to the fact that her brain was moister and softer, and, therefore, more impressionable than that of man. No wonder that the old Spanish Benedictine, Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, in his chivalrous Defensa de la Mujer, lost all patience with such fantastic theorizers and wrote: "Did I write ... to display my wit, I could easily, by deducting a chain of consequences from received principles, shew that man's understanding, weighed in the balance with female capacity, would be found so light as to kick the beam."[91]
Abandoning the Aristotelian method of envisaging the question under discussion, our modern philosophers have recourse to the recent sciences of biology and psycho-physiology to prove what they, too, assume to be true—viz., woman's incurable mental weakness. Like their predecessors, they are dominated by passion, prejudice, the errors of countless centuries, and, like them, they approach the subject on which they are to pronounce judgment, with minds warped by long ages of imperious instincts, ignorant preconceptions and social bias. They will quote the opinions of Proudhon and Schopenhauer—as if they had the value of mathematical demonstrations—on the mental inferiority of women, and will declare with unblushing assurance that no woman has ever produced a single work of any kind of enduring worth. With the German pessimist, they will blatantly declare, taken as a whole, "women are and remain thoroughgoing Philistines and quite incurable."[92] With the French socialist they will assert, as if it were an axiomatic truth, that "thought in every living being is proportional to force"—that "physical force is not less necessary for thought than for muscular labor."
They have apparently no more doubt respecting the truth of these assumptions than had their predecessors, the Aristotelians, respecting their assumptions of the four elements and their first qualities. Their process of reasoning is somewhat as follows: "Woman is smaller and weaker than man. This is a matter of simple observation, confirmed by the teachings of physiology. Therefore, woman is physically and intellectually inferior to man. Therefore she is incapable of any of those great conceptions and achievements in science or philosophy which have so distinguished the male sex in every age of the world's history. That she is thus weaker and inferior physically and intellectually and forever incapacitated from successfully competing with man in the intellectual arena is a fatality for which, we are gravely told, there is no remedy, and to which women, consequently, must resign themselves as to one of the inexorable laws of nature."
It would be difficult to cite a more preposterous example of ratiocination. If it were true that there is a necessary relation between vigor of body and vigor of mind; that mental power is proportional to physical power; that thought is but a special form of energy and capable of transformation, like heat, light and electricity; that it, like the various physical forces, has its chemical and mechanical equivalents; that psychic work corresponds to a certain amount of chemical or thermic action; that intellectual capacity in man is proportional to muscular strength; it would follow that the great leaders of thought and action through the ages have been Goliaths in stature and Herculeses in strength. But so far is this conclusion from being warranted that it is almost the reverse of the truth. For many, if not the majority, of the great geniuses of the world in every age have been either men of small frame or men of delicate and precarious health.
Among the men of genius who were noted for their diminutive stature were Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Archimedes, Epicurus, Horace, Albertus Magnus, Montaigne, Lipsius, Spinoza, Erasmus, Lalande, Charles Lamb, Keats, Balzac and Thiers. Many others were remarkable for their spare form. Among these in the prime of life were Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, St. Paul, Kepler, Pascal, Boileau, Fénelon, D'Alembert, Napoleon, Lincoln and Leo XIII. Others, like Æsop, Brunelleschi, Leopardi, Magliabecchi, Parini, Scarron, Talleyrand, Pope, Goldsmith, Byron, Sir Walter Scott, to mention only a few of the most eminent, were either hunchbacked, lame, rachitic or clubfooted.
Others, still, were the victims of chronic ill health, or of nervous disorders of the most serious character. Virgil was of a delicate and frail constitution. He essayed the bar, but shrank from it and turned to the "contemplation of diviner things." Nor was Horace, though less completely a recluse and more of a bon vivant, a strong man. Both of them, as scholars will remember, sought the couch, while Mæcenas went off to the tennis court. Pope's life, says Johnson, was a long disease. Johnson himself, though large and muscular, had queer health and a tormenting constitution. Schiller wrote most of his best work while struggling against a painful malady, and Heine's "mattress grave" is proverbial. France furnishes an excellent example in Pascal.[93]