It takes all sorts to make a world, we
must remember. Further, the more we learn, especially thanks to the
modern experimental study of heredity, regarding the constitution of the
individual of either sex, the more we perceive how immensely complex and
how infinitely variable that constitution is. Nay more, the evidence
regarding both the higher animals and the higher plants inclines us to
the view, not unsupported by the belief of ages, that woman is even more
complex in constitution than man, and therefore no less liable to vary
within wide limits. On what one may term organic analysis, comparable to
the chemist's analysis of a compound, woman may be found to be more
complex, composed of even more numerous and more various elementary
atoms, so to say, than man.
And if these new observations upon the nature of femaleness were not
enough to warn the writer who should rashly propose, after the fashion
of the unwise, who on every hand lay down the law on this matter, to
state once and for all exactly what, and what only, every woman should
be, we find that another long-held belief as to the relative variety of
men and women has lately been found baseless. It was long held, and is
still generally believed--in consequence of that universal confusion
between the effects of nature and of nurture to which we have already
referred--that women are less variable than men, that they vary within
much narrower limits, and that the bias towards the typical, or mean, or
average, is markedly greater in the case of women than of men.
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