club affords an instant clue to the state of mind of many of its members.  They have this in common with the plagiarising pupil, clergyman, or statesman—­they are called upon to do something in which they have only a secondary interest.  The minister who reads a sermon on the text “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” and considers that the fact that he has paid five dollars for it will absolve him from the charge of inconsistency, does not—­cannot—­feel any desire to impress his congregation with a desire for right living—­he wants only to hold his job.  The university student who, after ascertaining that there is no copyable literature in the Library on “Why I Came to College,” pays a classmate a dollar to give this information to the Faculty, cares nothing about the question; but he does care to avoid discipline.  So the clubwoman who reads a purchased essay on “Ireland in the Fourteenth Century,” has not the slightest interest in the subject; but she does want to remain a member of her club, in good and regular standing.  It is the same substitution of adventitious for natural motives and stimuli that works intellectual havoc from the mother’s knee up to the Halls of Congress.

When I assert boldly that at the present time the majority of vague and illogical readers are women, and that women’s clubs are responsible for much of that kind of reading, I shall doubtless incur the displeasure of the school of feminists who seem bent on minimising the differences between the two sexes.  Obvious physical differences they have not been able to explain away, and to deny that corresponding mental differences exist is to shut one’s eyes to all the teachings of modern physiology.  The mental life is a function, not of the brain alone, but of the whole nervous system of which the brain is but the principal ganglion.  Cut off a man’s legs, and you have removed something from his mental, as well as from his physical equipment.  That men and women should have minds of the same type is a physiological impossibility.  A familiar way of stating the difference is to say that in the man’s mind reason predominates, in the woman’s, intuition.  There is doubtless something to be said for this statement of the distinction, but it is objectionable because it is generally interpreted to mean—­quite unnecessarily—­that a woman’s mind is inferior to a man’s—­a distinction about as foolish as it would be to say the negative electricity is inferior to positive, or cold to heat.  The types are in most ways supplementary, and a combination of the two has always been a potent intellectual force—­one of the strongest arguments for marriage as an institution.  When we try to do the work of the world with either type alone we have generally made a mess of it.  And the outcome seems to make it probable that the female type is especially prone to become the prey of fallacies like that which has brought about the present flood of useless, or worse than useless, reading.