By this we mean,
of course, the natural as distinguished from the nurtural
differences--to use the antithetic terms so usefully adapted by Sir
Francis Galton from Shakespeare. Our task, we shall soon discover, is
not an easy one: because it is rarely easy to disentangle the effects of
nature from those of nurture, all the phenomena, physical and psychical,
of all living creatures being not the sum but the product of these two
factors. The sharp allotment of this or that feature to nature or to
nurture alone is therefore always wholly wrong: and the nice estimation
of the relative importance of the natural as compared with the nurtural
factors must necessarily be difficult, especially for the case of
mankind, where critical observation, on a large scale, and with due
control, of the effects of environment upon natural potentialities is
still lacking.
But here, at least, we may unhesitatingly declare and insist upon, and
shall hereafter invariably argue from, _the_ one indisputable and
all-important distinction between man and woman. We must not commit the
error of regarding this distinction as qualitative so much as
quantitative: by which is meant that it really is neither more nor less
than a difference in the proportions of two kinds of vital expenditure.
Nor must we commit the still graver error of asserting, without
qualification, that such and such, and that only, is the ideal of
womanhood, and that all women who do not conform to this type are
morbid, or, at least, abnormal.
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