This grows clearer when we remember that it is equally true in mental science.  There is not one logic for men, and another for women; a separate syllogism, a separate induction:  the moment we begin to state intellectual principles, that moment we go beyond sex.  We deal then with absolute truth.  If an observation is wrong, if a process of reasoning is bad, it makes no difference who brings it forward.  Any list of mental processes, any inventory of the contents of the mind, would be identical, so far as sex goes, whether compiled by a woman or a man.  These things, like the circulation of the blood or the digestion of food, belong clearly to the ground held in common.  The London “Spectator” well said some time since,—­

“After all, knowledge is knowledge; and there is no more a specifically feminine way of describing correctly the origin of the Lollard movement, or the character of Spenser’s poetry, than there is a specifically feminine way of solving a quadratic equation, or of proving the forty-seventh problem of Euclid’s first book.”

All we can say in modification of this is, that there is, after all, a foundation for the rather vague item of “manliness” and “womanliness” in these schoolgirl lists of duties.  There is a difference, after all is said and done; but it is something that eludes analysis, like the differing perfume of two flowers of the same genus and even of the same species.  The method of thought must be essentially the same in both sexes; and yet an average woman will put more flavor of something we call instinct into her mental action, and the average man something more of what we call logic into his.  Whipple tells us that not a man guessed the plot of Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” while many women did; and this certainly indicates some average difference of quality or method.  So the average opinions of a hundred women, on some question of ethics, might very probably differ from the average of a hundred men, while it yet remains true that “the virtues of the man and the woman are the same.”

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Blackburn, in his entertaining book, “Artists and Arabs,” draws a contrast between Frith’s painting of the “Derby Day” and Rosa Bonheur’s “Horse Fair,”—­“the former pleasing the eye by its cleverness and prettiness, the latter impressing the spectator by its power and its truthful rendering of animal life.  The difference between the two painters is probably more one of education than of natural gifts.  But whilst the style of the former is grafted on a fashion, the latter is founded on a rock,—­the result of a close study of nature, chastened by classic feeling and a remembrance, it may be, of the friezes of the Parthenon.”