Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439, page 1 by Various Authors
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ments. The judgment will probably be right--the argument infallibly wrong.'
This is a common case, especially with practical men, who rarely have either leisure or inclination to recall the workings of their own minds, or observe the intellectual process by which they have been conducted to any conclusion. By what they are prone to consider as a kind of instinct--if by chance they are philosophers, and delight in what old Wilson, the essayist, calls 'inkhorn terms,' they designate it 'intuition'--they arrive at a truth, but have no recollection whatever of the road they travelled to reach it, and are able neither to retrace their own steps nor indicate to another the way they came. The poet, in describing and contrasting the intellectual characteristics of the two sexes, attributes to the softer something of this instinct as a distinguishing mental peculiarity, and seems to consider it as somewhat analogous in its constitution to those animal senses by means of which the mind becomes cognisant of external objects, of their existence, their qualities, and their relations. In his view, the reasoning process is vitally and essentially distinct, as it is exercised by men and by women--
'Her rapid mind decides while his debates; She feels a truth which he but calculates.'
And certainly this is a very pretty, very poetical, and very convenient way of accounting for a phenomenon that, if examined with common care, suggests a solution more accurate and complete, if not exactly so complimentary. In sober truth, a positive incapacity clearly to point out the precise manner in which a conviction has been formed, is one of the commonest of logical deficiencies, and no more to be ascribed exclusively to the softer sex, than it is an attribute of intellectual excellency in either.
When, in Euripides's beautiful play, the untranslatable Hippolylus, Phædra's nurse is made to conclude that certain men she refers to cannot be otherwise than lax in their morals, because t