earning (as to the Eleusianin
mysteries) would be derogatory to the dignity of the learned craft. It
is therefore only very recently, and almost solely in the industrially
most advanced communities, that the higher grades of schools have
been freely opened to women. And even under the urgent circumstances
prevailing in the modern industrial communities, the highest and most
reputable universities show an extreme reluctance in making the move.
The sense of class worthiness, that is to say of status, of a honorific
differentiation of the sexes according to a distinction between superior
and inferior intellectual dignity, survives in a vigorous form in these
corporations of the aristocracy of learning. It is felt that the woman
should, in all propriety, acquire only such knowledge as may be classed
under one or the other of two heads: (1) such knowledge as conduces
immediately to a better performance of domestic service--the domestic
sphere; (2) such accomplishments and dexterity, quasi-scholarly and
quasi-artistic, as plainly come in under the head of a performance of
vicarious leisure. Knowledge is felt to be unfeminine if it is knowledge
which expresses the unfolding of the learner's own life, the acquisition
of which proceeds on the learner's own cognitive interest, without
prompting from the canons of propriety, and without reference back to a
master whose comfort or good repute is to be enhanced by the employment
or the exhibition of it. So, also, all knowledge which is useful as
evidence of leisure, other than vicarious leisure, is scarcely feminine.

For an appreciation of the relation which these higher seminaries of
learning bear to the economic life of the community, the phenomena which
have been reviewed are of importance rather as indications of a general
attitude than as being in themselves facts of first-rate economic
consequence. They go to show what is the instinctive attitude and
animus of the learned class towards the life process of an industrial
community. They serve as an exponent of the stage of development, for
the industrial purpose, attained by the higher learning and by the
learned class, and so they afford an indication as to what may fairly be
looked for from this class at points where the learning and the life of
the class bear more immediately upon the economic life and efficiency
of the community, and upon the adjustment of its scheme of life to
the requirements of the time. What these ritual