(4) Particular Feminine Qualities.
Section 70. (a) Intelligence.
Feminine intelligence properly deserves a separate section.
Intelligence
is a function that has in both sexes some basis and purpose
and proceeds according to the same rules, but the meaning of intelligence
must be abandoned if we are to suppose it so rigid and so
difficult to hold, that the age-long differences between man and
woman could have had no influence on it. The fundamentally
distinct bodies, the very different occupations of both sexes, their
different destinies, must have had profound mutative influence on
their intelligence. Moreover, we must always start with a difference
of attitude in the two sexes, in which the purely positive belongs
to one only, and we must see whether it is not intensified by the
negative of the other. When one body presses on another the resulting
impression is due, not only to the hardness of the first, but
also to the softness of the second, and when we hear about the extraordinary
wit of a woman we must blame the considerable idiocy of
the men she associates with. How many women are to be trusted for
intelligence, is a question of great importance for the criminalist,
inasmuch as right judgment depends on the attitude and good
sense of the witnesses, and must determine the value of the material
presented us.
We wish to make no detailed sub-divisions in what follows. We
shall merely consider in their general aspects those functions which
we are accustomed to find in our own work.
