THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
Ill
Mill on “Liberty, or the Subjection of Woman,” I would advise her at once to beg, buy or borrow this book. Mill demands the liberty of women, not alone for the benefit that it will confer on the whole human race, but because it is her inalienable right. Herbert Spencer, like our Mr. Platt, has shown the barbarities of the subjugation of women, and then he shirks her enfranchisement. He has shown that the fine intuition possessed by women would be of incalculable value and benefit to man in all his researches, if she were only educated enough to use her God-given faculties. Henry Thomas Buckle declares that so far from the mind of women being inferior to that of men, those men who have gained the greatest victories in science have approached their studies after the manner of women. He avers that the flimsy thing called woman’s education has been solely to blame that so few women are distinguished in thought. He points out how men reason from induction. They collect first facts and build their theories from these facts. This is the modern method of scientific investigation, but he sayS the great achievements in science have not been mastered in this way. Newton discovered the law of gravitation because he had great imagination. He could follow the force that made the apple fall, to great heights—to the moon—and saw how our Earth kept her satellites in order. From this he followed the same law to the planets, and saw how the sun held them in their courses. There was no inductive reasoning in this. It was pure deduction. It was what is sneered at in woman as intuition, that grasped the mighty problem. It was the same sublime power of imagination that taught Keppler his three wonderful laws, that revealed a true knowledge of the planetary worlds to us. It is akin to the mind of the poet. Shakespeare had it when he drew forth his creations of real beings, who live through all the generations. Hamlet, Shylock, Othello, Rosalind, Desdemona and Portia are as real to us as they were to the people of three hundred years ago. George Eliot, whom the foremost critics of our age declare to be the greatest creator of character since Shakespeare, who is, in fact, the only writer of our own time that has ever been classed with the master, had it. This woman, whose works will live in literature with increasing value as the ages come and go, showed what might be accomplished by women of genius if they were fully educated. Her mind did not receive the ordinary training of her sex. It was developed and strengthened by the same processes that go to build up scholarship in men.
Mr. Buckle also points out to us that it was the womanly intuition or poetic faculty that brought about the greatest discoveries in botany. Everyone who takes up this interesting study now knows that the stamens, pistils, corolla and petals are. simply modified leaves. These parts, unlike in shape, color and function, we know are the successive stages of the leaf. No botanist discovered this secret. It was found by the greatest poet that Germany has known. When Goethe announced his discovery, the botanists received it with scorn. They who had collected their facts and filled their herbariums were the ones to find nature’s secret of the morphological generalization of plants. What had a poet with his verses and imagination to do with it? Nevertheless, time, that works out her slow revenges, saw the botanists of the whole world receive Goethe’s idea and join in praise of it. Nor was that the only one of the poet’s discoveries. Wandering like Hamlet through a cemetery he came upon a skull lying on the freshly turned earth beside an open grave. Like Hamlet, he took it up and mused upon it. Suddenly there flashed into his mind the then unknown truth that the skull was composed of vertebrae, that the bony covering of the head was an expansion of the bony covering of the spine.» This great discovery was stubbornly fought in England, and it was fifty years after it was known in Germany and France before English anatomists would acknowledge that the mind of the poet had soared above all their facts and dissections.* What the world has lost in denying the mind of women free development, only future civilization can tell.
Our last lecturer on this subject, Professor Clark, of Stanford University," in his excellent paper, gave us much hope for this future. His eloquent appeal to women to stand by their cause until the last shackle of bondage was removed, must have found
*From Henry T. Buckle.