gs is quite different from ours, chiefly in the
fact that they like to take the shortest way to their goal, and, in
general, manage to fix their eyes upon what lies before them; while
we, as a rule, see far beyond it, just because it is in front of our
noses. In cases like this, we need to be brought back to the right
standpoint, so as to recover the near and simple view.

Then, again, women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than
we are, so that they do not see more in things than is really there;
whilst, if our passions are aroused, we are apt to see things in an
exaggerated way, or imagine what does not exist.

The weakness of their reasoning faculty also explains why it is that
women show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men do, and so treat
them with more kindness and interest; and why it is that, on the
contrary, they are inferior to men in point of justice, and less
honorable and conscientious. For it is just because their reasoning
power is weak that present circumstances have such a hold over them,
and those concrete things, which lie directly before their eyes,
exercise a power which is seldom counteracted to any extent by
abstract principles of thought, by fixed rules of conduct, firm
resolutions, or, in general, by consideration for the past and the
future, or regard for what is absent and remote. Accordingly, they
possess the first and main elements that go to make a virtuous
character, but they are deficient in those secondary qualities which
are often a necessary instrument in the formation of it.[1]

[Footnote 1: In this respect they may be compared to an animal
organism which contains a liver but no gall-bladder. Here let me refer
to what I have said in my treatise on _The Foundation of Morals_, sec.
17.]

Hence, it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female
character is that it has _no sense of justice_. This is mainly due to
the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the powers of
reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position
which Nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex. They are
dependent, not upon strength, but upon craft; and hence their
instinctive capacity for cunning, and their ineradicable tendency to
say what is not true. For as lions are provided with claws and teeth,
and elephants and boars with tusks, bulls with horns, and cuttle fish
with its clouds of inky fluid, so Nature has equipped woman, for her
defence and pr