love is a difficulty, for love,
though blind, is unfortunately not dumb, and habitually uses speech for
the concealment of truth. It does this with the best of intentions, and
the best of intentions generally yield the worst of results. It should
be said that sheer intellect is very seldom displayed by man. Intellect
is the ideal skeleton of a man's mental power. It may be defined as an
aspiration toward material advantage, absolute truth, or achievement,
combined with a capacity for taking steps toward successful achievement
or attaining truth. From this point of view such men as Napoleon,
Machiavelli, Epictetus, Leo XIII, Bismarck, Voltaire, Anatole France,
are typical intellectuals. They are not perfect: all, so far as we can
tell, are tainted with moral feeling or emotion,--a frailty which
probably explains why there has never been a British or American
intellectual of the first rank. Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, Cromwell, all
alike suffered grievously from good intentions. The British and American
mind has long been honeycombed with moral impulse, at any rate since
the Reformation; it is very much what the German mind was up to the
middle of the nineteenth century. Intellect, as I conceive it, is seeing
life sanely and seeing it whole, without much pity, without love; seeing
life as separate from man, whose pains and delights are only phenomena;
seeing love as a reaction to certain stimuli.

In this sense it can probably be said that no woman has ever been an
intellectual. A few may have pretensions, as, for instance, "Vernon
Lee," Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Wharton, perhaps Mrs. Hetty Green. I do not
know, for these women can be judged only by their works. The greatest
women in history--Catherine of Russia, Joan of Arc, Sappho, Queen
Elizabeth--appear to have been swayed largely by their passions,
physical or religious. I do not suppose that this will always be the
case. For reasons which I shall indicate further on in this chapter, I
believe that woman's intellect will tend toward approximation with that
of man. But meanwhile it would be futile not to recognize that there
exist to-day between man and woman some sharp intellectual divergences.

One of the sharpest lies in woman's logical faculty. This may be due to
her education (which is seldom mathematical or scientific); it may
proceed from a habit of mind; it may be the result of a secular
withdrawal from responsibilities other than domestic. Whatever the
cause, it m