Women loving abstract reasoning, generalizing and synthetizing much, and without intuition of any sort; men intuitive, acute observers, good analysts, incapable of generalizing.... I know many such.
Women insensible to works of art, and without the sentiment of the beautiful; men full of enthusiasm for both.
Women immoral, immodest, respecting nothing or no one; men moral, chaste and reverential.
Women extravagant and disorderly; men economical and parsimonious to avarice.
Women thoroughly selfish, rigid, disposed to take advantage of the weakness, kindness, folly or misery of others; men full of generosity, mansuetude, and self-sacrifice.
What follows from these undeniable facts? that the law of sexual differences is not manifested through the several characteristics which have been laid down.
That these characteristics may be only the result of education, of the difference of prejudices, of that of occupations, etc.
That, as these generalities may be the fruit of the difference of training and surroundings, nothing can be legitimately deduced from them as to the functions of woman; would it not be absurd, in fact, to pretend that a woman who is organized for philosophy and the sciences can not, ought not to occupy herself with them because she is a woman, while a man, who is incapable of them but foolish and vain enough to be ignorant of his incapacity, can and ought to engage in them because he is a man?
Functions belong to those who prove their aptitude for them, and not to an abstraction called sex, for, definitively, every function is individual in its aggregate or in its elements.
VII.