ular cases in which they are and are not
applicable, constitutes practical talent: and for this, women as they
now are have a peculiar aptitude. I admit that there can be no good
practice without principles, and that the predominant place which
quickness of observation holds among a woman's faculties, makes her
particularly apt to build over-hasty generalizations upon her own
observation; though at the same time no less ready in rectifying
those generalizations, as her observation takes a wider range. But
the corrective to this defect, is access to the experience of the
human race; general knowledge--exactly the thing which education can
best supply. A woman's mistakes are specifically those of a clever
self-educated man, who often sees what men trained in routine do not
see, but falls into errors for want of knowing things which have long
been known. Of course he has acquired much of the pre-existing
knowledge, or he could not have got on at all; but what he knows of
it he has picked up in fragments and at random, as women do.

But this gravitation of women's minds to the present, to the real, to
actual fact, while in its exclusiveness it is a source of errors, is
also a most useful counteractive of the contrary error. The principal
and most characteristic aberration of speculative minds as such,
consists precisely in the deficiency of this lively perception and
ever-present sense of objective fact. For want of this, they often
not only overlook the contradiction which outward facts oppose to
their theories, but lose sight of the legitimate purpose of
speculation altogether, and let their speculative faculties go astray
into regions not peopled with real beings, animate or inanimate, even
idealized, but with personified shadows created by the illusions of
metaphysics or by the mere entanglement of words, and think these
shadows the proper objects of the highest, the most transcendant,
philosophy. Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man of
theory and speculation who employs himself not in collecting
materials of knowledge by observation, but in working them up by
processes of thought into comprehensive truths of science and laws of
conduct, than to carry on his speculations in the companionship, and
under the criticism, of a really superior woman. There is nothing
comparable to it for keeping his thoughts within the limits of real
things, and the actual facts of nature. A woman seldom runs wild
after an abstra