her people and suffered no harm. Man is capable of every
unreasonable deduction, but he is more inclined to justify himself by
close reasoning. In matters of argument, man is like the Italian brigand
who robs the friar, then confesses and asks him for absolution; woman is
the burglar unrepentant. This may be due to woman as a rule having few
guiding principles or intellectual criteria. She often holds so many
moral principles that intellectual argument with her irritates the
crisper male mind. But she finds it difficult to retain a grasp upon a
central idea, to clear away the side issues which obscure it. She can
seldom carry an idea to its logical conclusion, passing from term to
term; somewhere there is a solution of continuity. For this reason
arguments with women, which have begun with the latest musical play,
easily pass on, from its alleged artistic merit, to its costumes, their
scantiness, their undesirable scantiness, the need for inspection,
inspectors of theaters, and, little by little, other inspectors, until
one gets to mining inspectors and possibly to mining in general. The
reader will observe that these ideas are fairly well linked. All that
happens is that the woman, tiring of the central argument, has pursued
each side issue as it offered itself. This comes from a lack of
concentration which indisposes a woman to penetrate deeply into a
subject; she is not used to concentration, she does not like it. It
might lead her to disagreeable discoveries.

It is for this reason--because she needs to defend purely emotional
positions against man, who uses intellectual weapons--that woman is so
much more easily than man attracted by new religions and new
philosophies--by Christian Science, by Higher Thought, by Theosophy, by
Eucken, by Bergson. Those religions are no longer spiritual; they have
an intellectual basis; they are not ideal religions like Christianity
and Mohammedanism and the like, which frankly ask you to make an act of
faith; what they do is to attempt to seduce the alleged soul through the
intellect. That is exactly what the aspiring woman demands: emotional
satisfaction and intellectual concession. Particularly in America, one
discovers her intellectual fog in the continual use of such words as
mental, elemental, cosmic, universality, social harmony, essential
cosmos, and other similar ornaments of the modern logomachy.

_Case 16_

Case 16 told me that my mind did not "functionalize" properly.