第32章 CHAPTER 3(7)

History and experience prove that the most passionate characters are themost fanatically rigid in their feelings of duty, when their passion hasbeen trained to act in that direction. The judge who gives a just decisionin a case where his feelings are intensely interested on the other side,derives from that same strength of feeling the determined sense of the obligationof justice, which enables him to achieve this victory over himself. The capabilityof that lofty enthusiasm which takes the human being out of his every-daycharacter, reacts upon the daily character itself. His aspirations and powerswhen he is in this exceptional state, become the type with which he compares,and by which he estimates, his sentiments and proceedings at other times: and his habitual purposes assume a character moulded by and assimilated tothe moments of lofty excitement, although those, from the physical natureof a human being, can only be transient. Experience of races, as well asof individuals, does not show those of excitable temperament to be less fit,on the average, either for speculation or practice, than the more unexcitable.

The French, and the Italians, are undoubtedly by nature more nervously excitablethan the Teutonic races, and, compared at least with the English, they havea much greater habitual and daily emotional life: but have they been lessgreat in science, in public business, in legal and judicial eminence, orin war? There is abundant evidence that the Greeks were of old, as theirdescendants and successors still are, one of the most excitable of the racesof mankind. It is superfluous to ask, what among the achievements of menthey did not excel in. The Romans, probably, as an equally southern people,had the same original temperament: but the stern character of their nationaldiscipline, like that of the Spartans, made them an example of the oppositetype of national character; the greater strength of their natural feelingsbeing chiefly apparent in the intensity which the same original temperamentmade it possible to give to the artificial. If these cases exemplify whata naturally excitable people may be made, the Irish Celts afford one of theaptest examples of what they are when left to themselves; (if those can besaid to be left to themselves who have been for centuries under the indirectinfluence of bad government, and the direct training of a Catholic hierarchyand of a sincere belief in the Catholic religion). The Irish character mustbe considered, therefore, as an unfavourable case: yet, whenever the circumstancesof the individual have been at all favourable, what people have shown greatercapacity for the most varied and multifarious individual eminence? Like theFrench compared with the English, the Irish with the Swiss, the Greeks orItalians compared with the German races, so women compared with men may befound, on the average, to do the same things with some variety in the particularkind of excellence. But, that they would do them fully as well on the whole,if their education and cultivation were adapted to correcting instead ofaggravating the infirmities incident to their temperament, I see not thesmallest reason to doubt.

Supposing it, however, to be true that women's minds are by nature moremobile than those of men, less capable of persisting long in the same continuouseffort, more fitted for dividing their faculties among many things than fortravelling in any one path to the highest point which can be reached by it: this may be true of women as they now are (though not without great and numerousexceptions), and may account for their having remained behind the highestorder of men in precisely the things in which this absorption of the wholemind in one set of ideas and occupations may seem to be most requisite. Still,this difference is one which can only affect the kind of excellence, notthe excellence itself, or its practical worth: and it remains to be shownwhether this exclusive working of a part of the mind, this absorption ofthe whole thinking faculty in a single subject, and concentration of it ona single work, is the normal and healthful condition of the human faculties,even for speculative uses. I believe that what is gained in special developmentby this concentration, is lost in the capacity of the mind for the otherpurposes of life; and even in abstract thought, it is my decided opinionthat the mind does more by frequently returning to a difficult problem, thanby sticking to it without interruption. For the purposes, at all events,of practice, from its highest to its humblest departments, the capacity ofpassing promptly from one subject of consideration to another, without lettingthe active spring of the intellect run down between the two, is a power farmore valuable; and this power women pre-eminently possess, by virtue of thevery mobility of which they are accused. They perhaps have it from nature,but they certainly have it by training and education; for nearly the wholeof the occupations of women consist in the management of small but multitudinousdetails, on each of which the mind cannot dwell even for a minute, but mustpass on to other things, and if anything requires longer thought, must stealtime at odd moments for thinking of it. The capacity indeed which women showfor doing their thinking in circumstances and at times which almost any manwould make an excuse to himself for not attempting it, has often been noticed: and a woman's mind, though it may be occupied only with small things, canhardly ever permit its elf to be vacant, as a man's so often is when notengaged in what he chooses to consider the business of his life. The businessof a woman's ordinary life is things in general, and can as little ceaseto go on as the world to go round.