It is because women’s reasoning powers are weaker that they show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men, and consequently take a kindlier interest in them.  On the other hand, women are inferior to men in matters of justice, honesty, and conscientiousness.  Again, because their reasoning faculty is weak, things clearly visible and real, and belonging to the present, exercise a power over them which is rarely counteracted by abstract thoughts, fixed maxims, or firm resolutions, in general, by regard for the past and future or by consideration for what is absent and remote.  Accordingly they have the first and principal qualities of virtue, but they lack the secondary qualities which are often a necessary instrument in developing it.  Women may be compared in this respect to an organism that has a liver but no gall-bladder.[9] So that it will be found that the fundamental fault in the character of women is that they have no “sense of justice.”  This arises from their deficiency in the power of reasoning already referred to, and reflection, but is also partly due to the fact that Nature has not destined them, as the weaker sex, to be dependent on strength but on cunning; this is why they are instinctively crafty, and have an ineradicable tendency to lie.  For as lions are furnished with claws and teeth, elephants with tusks, boars with fangs, bulls with horns, and the cuttlefish with its dark, inky fluid, so Nature has provided woman for her protection and defence with the faculty of dissimulation, and all the power which Nature has given to man in the form of bodily strength and reason has been conferred on woman in this form.  Hence, dissimulation is innate in woman and almost as characteristic of the very stupid as of the clever.  Accordingly, it is as natural for women to dissemble at every opportunity as it is for those animals to turn to their weapons when they are attacked; and they feel in doing so that in a certain measure they are only making use of their rights.  Therefore a woman who is perfectly truthful and does not dissemble is perhaps an impossibility.  This is why they see through dissimulation in others so easily; therefore it is not advisable to attempt it with them.  From the fundamental defect that has been stated, and all that it involves, spring falseness, faithlessness, treachery, ungratefulness, and so on.  In a court of justice women are more often found guilty of perjury than men.  It is indeed to be generally questioned whether they should be allowed to take an oath at all.  From time to time there are repeated cases everywhere of ladies, who want for nothing, secretly pocketing and taking away things from shop counters.

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