That the facts of history are not only not conclusive, but cannot properly be regarded as establishing even a presumption concerning the limitations of the intellectual powers of woman, it is the object of the present paper to show. Strange as the assertion may at first blush appear, it is nevertheless true that the presumption that women are incapable of the highest intellectual achievement may far more reasonably be based upon mere ordinary impressions than upon anything which historical experience has thus far been able to furnish. If a man feels it in his bones that no woman could possibly write a poem as great as Paradise Lost or evolve a body of arithmetical doctrine like that of the Disquisitiones Arithmeticæ, his state of mind is the result of a vast array of experiences, for the most part absorbed unconsciously, but not the less valuable on that account. A conviction arrived at in this way it is difficult to dislodge or weaken. But when the position is taken, as it has been taken by many previous writers, as well as by Mrs. Buckler, that women have historically demonstrated their incapacity for such triumphs by not yet having achieved them, it is not difficult to show that the argument is thoroughly unsound.

The first and most vital defect in all these discussions is their total neglect of the question of numbers. "No woman has attained the highest rank in science, literature, or art "-granted. But in all the ages of the world there have been but a handful of men who have attained this rank; and only an utterly insignificant fraction of the female sex can be regarded as having been in any sense in the running for these high honors. Among the writers who hold Mrs. Buckler's view, one never finds the slightest attempt to take into account the relation of these numbers. With all but an insignificant fraction of the sex ruled out, would not women have contributed more than their quota if they had furnished even one name to the list of immortals?

The force of this inquiry will become much more apparent if we turn aside for a moment from the woman question. Take our own great country, and ask whether any American has attained the highest rank in science, literature, or art. We have had no Newton, no Darwin, no Gauss; there has not only been

no American Shakespeare or Dante, but no American Goethe or Burns; and neither Beethoven nor Michael Angelo has even a distant relative on the roll of American glory. Does it enter any one's mind to infer, hence, that Americans are intrinsically incapable of the greatest triumphs in science, in literature, or in art? And yet the number of American men who have in the past hundred years been placed in circumstances conducive to the accomplishment of great work is incomparably larger than that of all the women who have ever been so placed.

Other examples will point the moral quite as strikingly. Take the history of German literature. Between the romances and songs of chivalry which were produced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the revival of German literature in the eighteenth century, there lies a dreary interval of five hundred years during which Germany produced not a single literary figure of importance, to say nothing of the "highest rank." And all this time her universities were keeping up the love of learning; she had ancient capitals and historic courts; she went through the stimulating experience of the Protestant Reformation, and it was within her bounds and during this period that the art of printing was invented. Or, again, take Scotland. An Englishman writing in the year 1750 could far more justly have said of Scotchmen than any one can to-day say of women, that historical experience had proved that we could not expect from them writings capable of attracting the attention or influencing the thought of the world. Yet the next half-century found Scotland furnishing to philosophy the preeminent name of Hume, to political economy the illustrious Adam Smith, to poetry Burns, and to prose Walter Scott.

One is tempted here to introduce examples in which the course of history has been the reverse of this cases where a period of glory has been followed by ages of utter insignificance. Of these, incomparably the most striking is that of Greece, or, let us say, of Athens. But the phenomenon presented by the magnificent flowering of Greek genius in a single century, followed by two millennia of obscurity, illustrates much more than this lesson of numbers, and may well serve to introduce the second great

defect of the historical argument against the capabilities of women. For not only has almost the entire mass of womankind, in all historic ages up to the last two or three decades, been practically placed completely out of the running, but the extremely small minority from whom high achievement might possibly be expected have been wholly cut off from those influences which have, in the case of men, so great a share in the stimulation of ambition and the development of genius. Men who have had the spark of genius or even of talent in them have been spurred to effort by all their surroundings, by the traditions of the race, by rivalry with their comrades, by the admiration which the opposite sex accords to brilliant achievements, by the dread of disappointing the high expectations of relatives and friends, by the thousand nameless forces which impel and animate to exertion. What of all this has there been for women? How many have been so placed as to even think of an intellectual career as a possibility? Of these few, how many have been otherwise than solitary in their youthful aspirations and efforts? None has had the goad of the humiliation of failure to urge her on, for from none was anything great expected or looked for. And the very absorption in a high intellectual interest, which in the case of a boy would be hailed with delight even by the humblest parents as an earnest of future greatness, was, in the case of girls, up to the last two or three decades, universally condemned and repressed and thwarted even in the most cultivated families. There is, of course, a very easy answer to all this. Genius, it will be said, rises superior to all obstacles, and will manifest itself in spite of all disadvantages. The widespread acceptance of this comfortable doctrine is an interesting example of the way in which opinions that, when examined, are seen to be mutually contradictory, may jog along together in the same mind without inconvenience. The same persons who hold this view of the infinite resources of genius will accept without hesitation the current explanation of the brilliant periods in the intellectual history of the world, or of a particular nation. But if the greatness of English literature in the time of Elizabeth is to be explained by reference to the glories of her reign in arms and ad

venture and statesmanship; if it is not to be considered as an accident that Italy's preeminence in art and literature was coincident with the period when her rival states were at their highest point of wealth and political importance and civic pride; if Augustus had something to do with the Augustan age, and we find it quite natural that Virgil and Horace wrote then, and not in the reign of Augustulus; if we find a line of succession like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, or like Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and recognize in it something most impressive, indeed, but nothing abnormal or miraculous; if we see nothing strange in the failure of the Greek race to produce a single worldname in two thousand years, after having, within the compass of a century and a half, furnished a considerable fraction of all the names on the brief list of the world's greatest men — if all these things are so, what becomes of the notion that inborn genius will triumph over all adversity of circumstance? In one breath we recognize that intellectual glory can be looked for only when the spirit of the time and the conditions of the national life are favorable to it; shall we say, the next moment, that genius is sure to assert itself under all circumstances? Evidently the two positions are incompatible.

So much for the inconsistency of the notion that "genius will out" with the all but universally accepted view that great things are, as a rule, done only in times somehow favorable to greatness. That it is the first, and not the second, of these doctrines which is at fault may easily be shown almost to demonstration; one has only to run over any list of the world's intellectual heroes and strike out those who belonged to some great period. Leave only the solitary giants who arose unheralded and alone, who wrote noble verse in an ignoble time, or made immortal works of art for a down-trodden or mean-spirited people, or extended the bounds of human knowledge at a time when learning was held in contempt. Is it necessary actually to go through the task? Is it not plain at once that, if it were performed, the splendid roll of immortals would shrink almost to nothing? And yet, if this be so, it is clear that, far from being sure to triumph over all the obstacles of circumstance, native genius depends

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almost invariably for its fruitful development upon influences to which it, along with meaner endowments, is subjected. By this is not to be understood any approval of the evolutionary cant which at one time was so prevalent and which asserted that works of genius were a mere "product" of the environment. The environment cannot make a genius, and cannot "evolve" his work. On the other hand, however, genius is not endowed with omnipotence, but, as common sense would indicate, and as historic experience amply demonstrates, it may be powerfully helped or fatally hindered by the atmosphere which it finds itself compelled to breathe.

But the ordinary differences of atmosphere between one age and another, which we thus readily recognize to have an influence so powerful upon literature and art, are insignificant in comparison with the difference between the atmosphere which has surrounded women and the atmosphere which has surrounded men in all times. To suppose that absolute exclusion from the opportunities of culture is the only important factor that has to be taken into account would be to overlook in this question what all acknowledge as of predominant importance when we are considering the history of civilization at large. Most vital of all the adverse influences, except such absolute exclusion, has been the prevalent sentiment as to what is fitting and commendable, as well as the prevalent estimate of what is possible, for women. The effect of such influence has been well expressed by Colonel Higginson: "Systematically discourage any individual, from birth to death, and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to acquiesce in their degradation, if not to claim it as a crown of glory. If the Abbé Choisy praised the Duchesse de Fontanges for being 'beautiful as an angel and silly as a goose,' it was natural that all the young ladies of the court should resolve to make up in folly what they wanted in charms."

Only those of us who are very young have any need of historical research to assure ourselves that up to an extremely recent date there was not one person in a hundred, of either sex, who did not look upon a really learned woman as a monstrosity. And yet it is instructive to take an occasional glance farther back