In certain cases uneducated people must be studied from the same
point of view as children. Geiger[1] speaks of a child who knew only one boy, and all the other boys were Otho to him because this first boy was called Otho. So the recruit at the Rhine believed that in his country the Rhine was called Donau. The child and the uneducated person can not subordinate things under higher concepts. Every painted square might be a bon-bon, and every painted circle a plate. New things receive the names of old ones. And frequently the skill of the criminalists consists in deriving important material from apparently worthless statements, by way of discovering the proper significance of simple, inartistic, but in most cases excellently definitive images. It is of course self-evident that one must absolutely refrain from trickery.
[1] Der Ursprung der Sprache. Stuttgart 1869.
Section 62. (c) Incorrect Forms of Expression.
If it is true that by the earnest and repeated study of the meanings of words we are likely to find them in the end containing much deeper sense and content than at the beginning, we are compelled to wonder that people are able to understand each other at all. For if words do not have that meaning which is obvious in their essential denotation, every one who uses them supplies according to his inclination, and status the "deeper and richer sense." As a matter of fact many more words are used pictorially than we are inclined to think. Choose at random, and you find surprisingly numerous words with exaggerated denotations. If I say, "I posit the case, I press through, I jump over, the proposition, etc.," these phrases are all pictures, for I have posited nothing, I have pressed through no obstacle, and have jumped over no object. My words, therefore, have not stood for anything real, but for an image, and it is impossible to determine the remoteness of the latter from the former, or the variety of direction and extent this remoteness may receive from each individual. Wherever images are made use of, therefore, we must, if we are to know what is meant, first establish how and where the use occurred. How frequently we hear, e. g., of a "four-cornered" table instead of a square table; a "very average" man, instead of a man who is far below the average. In many cases this false expression is half- consciously made for the purpose of beautifying a request or making it appear more modest. The smoker says: "May I have some light," although you know that it is perfectly indifferent whether much or
little light is taken from the cigar. "May I have just a little piece of roast," is said in order to make the request that the other fellow should pa.s.s the heavy platter seem more modest. And again: "Please give me a little water," does not modify the fact that the other fellow must pa.s.s the whole water flask, and that it is indifferent to him whether afterwards you take much or little water. So, frequently, we speak of borrowing or lending, without in the remotest thinking of returning. The student says to his comrade, "Lend me a pen, some paper, or some ink," but he has not at all any intention of giving them back. Similar things are to be discovered in accused or witnesses who think they have not behaved properly, and who then want to exhibit their misconduct in the most favorable light. These beautifications frequently go so far and may be made so skilfully that the correct situation may not be observed for a long time. Habitual usage offers, in this case also, the best examples. For years uncountable it has been called a cruel job to earn your living honestly and to satisfy the absolute needs of many people by quickly and painlessly slaughtering cattle. But, when somebody, just for the sake of killing time, because of ennui, shoots and martyrs harmless animals, or merely so wounds them that if they are not retrieved they must die terrible deaths, we call it n.o.ble sport. I should like to see a demonstration of the difference between killing an ox and shooting a stag. The latter does not require even superior skill, for it is much more difficult to kill an ox swiftly and painlessly than to shoot a stag badly, and even the most accurate shot requires less training than the correct slaughter of an ox. Moreover, it requires much more courage to finish a wild ox than to destroy a tame and kindly pheasant. But usage, once and for all, has a.s.sumed this essential distinction between men, and frequently this distinction is effective in criminal law, without our really seeing how or why. The situation is similar in the difference between cheating in a horse trade and cheating about other commodities. It occurs in the distinction between two duellists fighting according to rule and two peasant lads brawling with the handles of their picks according to agreement. It recurs again in the violation of the law by somebody "n.o.bly inspired with champagne," as against its violation by some "mere" drunkard. But usage has a favoring, excusing intent for the first series, and an accusing, rejecting intent for the latter series. The different points of view from which various events are seen are the consequence of the varieties of the usage which first distinguished the view-points from one another.
There is, moreover, a certain dishonesty in speaking and in listening where the speaker knows that the hearer is hearing a different matter, and the hearer knows that the speaker is speaking a different matter. As Steinthal[1] has said, "While the speaker speaks about things that he does not believe, and the reality of which he takes no stock in, his auditor, at the same time, knows right well what the former has said; he understands correctly and does not blame the speaker for having expressed himself altogether unintelligibly." This occurs very frequently in daily routine, without causing much difficulty in human intercourse, but it ought, for this reason, to occur inversely in our conversation with witnesses and accused. I know that the manner of speaking just described is frequently used when a witness wants to clothe some definite suspicion without expressing it explicitly. In such cases, e. g., the examiner as well as the witness believes that X is the criminal. For some reason, perhaps because X is a close relation of the witness or of "the man higher up," neither of them, judge nor witness, wishes to utter the truth openly, and so they feel round the subject for an interminable time. If now, both think the same thing, there results at most only a loss of time, but no other misfortune. When, however, each thinks of a different object, e. g., each thinks of another criminal, but each believes mistakenly that he agrees with the other, their separating without having made explicit what they think, may lead to harmful misunderstandings. If the examiner then believes that the witness agrees with him and proceeds upon this only apparently certain basis, the case may become very bad. The results are the same when a confession is discussed with a suspect, i. e., when the judge thinks that the suspect would like to confess, but only suggests confession, while the latter has never even thought of it. The one thing alone our work permits of is open and clear speaking; any confused form of expression is evil.
[1] Cf. Zeitschrift fur Vlkeranthropologie. Vol. XIX. 1889. "Wie denkt das yolk ber die Sprache?"Nevertheless, confusions often occur involuntarily, and as they can not be avoided they must be understood. Thus, it is characteristic to understand something unknown in terms of some known example, i. e., the Romans who first saw an elephant, called it "bos lucani." Similarly "wood-dog" = wolf; "sea-cat" = monkey, etc. These are forms of common usage, but every individual is accustomed to make such identifications whenever he meets with any strange object. He speaks, therefore, to some degree in images,
and if his auditor is not aware of the fact he can not understand him. His speaking so may be discovered by seeking out clearly whether and what things were new and foreign to the speaker. When this is learned it may be a.s.sumed that he will express himself in images when considering the unfamiliar object. Then it will not be difficult to discover the nature and source of the images.
Similar difficulties arise with the usage of foreign terms. It is of course familiar that their incorrect use is not confined to the uneducated. I have in mind particularly the weakening of the meaning in our own language. The foreign word, according to Volkmar, gets its significance by robbing the h.o.m.onymous native word of its definiteness and freshness, and is therefore sought out by all persons who are unwilling to call things by their right names. The "triste position" is far from being so sad as the "sad" position. I should like to know how a great many people could speak, if they were not permitted to say malheur, mchant, perfide, etc.-words by means of which they reduce the values of the terms at least a degree in intensity of meaning. The reason for the use of these words is not always the unwillingness of the speaker to make use of the right term, but really because it is necessary to indicate various degrees of intensity for the same thing without making use of attributes or other extensions of the term. Thus the foreign word is in some degree introduced as a technical expression. The direction in which the native word weakens, however, taken as that is intended by the individual who uses its subst.i.tute, is in no sense universally fixated. The matter is entirely one of individual usage and must be examined afresh in each particular case.The striving for abbreviated forms of expression,-extraordinary enough in our gossipy times,-manifests itself in still another direction. On my table, e. g., there is an old family journal, "From Cliff to Sea." What should the t.i.tle mean? Obviously the spatial distribution of the subject of its contents and its subscribers-i. e., "round about the whole earth," or "Concerning all lands and all peoples." But such t.i.tles would be too long; hence, they are synthesized into, "From Cliff to Sea," without the consideration that cliffs often stand right at the edge of the sea, so that the distance between them may be only the thickness of a hair:-cliff and sea are not local opposites.
Or: my son enters and tells me a story about an "old semester." By "old semester" he means an old student who has spent many terms, at least more than are required or necessary, at the university.
As this explanation is too long, the whole complex is contracted into "old semester," which is comfortable, but unintelligible to all people not a.s.sociated with the university. These abbreviations are much more numerous than, as a rule, they are supposed to be, and must always be explained if errors are to be avoided. Nor are silent and monosyllabic persons responsible for them; gossipy individuals seek, by the use of them, to exhibit a certain power of speech. Nor is it indifferent to expression when people in an apparently nowise comfortable fashion give approximate circ.u.mlocutive figures, e. g., half-a-dozen, four syllables, instead of the monosyllable six; or "the bell in the dome at St. Stephen"s has as many nicks as the year has days," etc. It must be a.s.sumed that these circ.u.mlocutive expressions are chosen, either because of the desire to make an a.s.sertion general, or because of the desire for some mnemonic aid. It is necessary to be cautious with such statements, either because, as made, they only "round out" the figures or because the reliability of the aid to memory must first be tested. Finally, it is well-known that foreign words are often changed into senseless words of a similar sound. When such unintelligible words are heard, very loud repeated restatement of the word will help in finding the original.
t.i.tLE B. DIFFERENTIATING CONDITIONS OF GIVING TESTIMONY.
Topic I. GENERAL DIFFERENCES.
(a) Woman.
Section 63. (I) General Considerations.[1]
[1] For the abnormal see-N
One of the most difficult tasks of the criminalist who is engaged in psychological investigation is the judgment of woman. Woman is not only somatically and psychically rather different from man; man never is able wholly and completely to put himself in her place. In judging a male the criminalist is dealing with his like, made of the same elements as he, even though age, conditions of life, education, and morality are as different as possible. When the criminalist is to judge a gray-beard whose years far outnumber his own, he still sees before him something that he may himself become, built as he, but only in a more advanced stage. When he is studying a boy, he knows what he himself felt and thought as boy. For we
never completely forget att.i.tudes and judgments, no matter how much time has elapsed-we no longer grasp them en ma.s.se, but we do not easily fail to recall how they were constructed. Even when the criminalist is dealing with a girl before p.u.b.erty he is not without some point of approach for his judgment, since boys and girls are at that period not so essentially different as to prevent the drawing of a.n.a.logous inferences by the comparison of his own childhood with that of the girl.
But to the nature of woman, we men totally lack avenues of approach. We can find no parallel between women and ourselves, and the greatest mistakes in criminal law were made where the conclusions would have been correct if the woman had been a man.[1] We have always estimated the deeds and statements of women by the same standards as those of men, and we have always been wrong. That woman is different from man is testified to by the anatomist, the physician, the historian, the theologian, the philosopher; every layman sees it for himself. Woman is different in appearance, in manner of observation, of judgment, of sensation, of desire, of efficacy,-but we lawyers punish the crimes of woman as we do those of man, and we count her testimony as we do that of man. The present age is trying to set aside the differences in s.e.x and to level them, but it forgets that the law of causation is valid here also. Woman and man have different bodies, hence they must have different minds. But even when we understand this, we proceed wrongly in the valuation of woman. We can not attain proper knowledge of her because we men were never women, and women can never tell us the truth because they were never men.
[1] H. Marion: Psychologie de la Femme. Paris 1900.
Just as a man is unable to discover whether he and his neighbor call the same color red, so, eternally, will the source of the indubitably existent differences in the psychic life of male and female be undiscovered. But if we can not learn to understand the essence of the problem of the eternal feminine, we may at least study its manifestations and hope to find as much clearness as the difficulty of the subject will permit. An essential, I might say, unscientific experience seems to come to our aid here. In this matter, we trust the real researches, the determinations of scholars, much less than the conviction of the people, which is expressed in maxims, legal differences, usage, and proverbs. We instinctively feel that the popular conception presents the experience of many hundreds of years, experiences of both men and women. So that we may a.s.sume that the mistakes of the
observations of individuals have corrected each other as far as has been possible, and yield a kind of average result. Now, even if averages are almost always wrong, either because they appear too high or too low, the mistake is not more than half a mistake. If in a series of numbers the lowest was 4, the highest 12, and the average 8, and if I take the latter for the individual problem, I can at most have been mistaken about four, never about eight, as would have been the case if I had taken 4 or 12 for each other. The att.i.tude of the people gives us an average and we may at least a.s.sume that it would not have maintained itself, either as common law or as proverb, if centuries had not shown that the mistake involved was not a very great one.
In any event, the popular method was comparatively simple. No delicate distinctions were developed. A general norm of valuation was applied to woman and the result showed that woman is simply a less worthy creature. This conception we find very early in the history of the most civilized peoples, as well as among contemporary backward nations and tribes. If, now, we generally a.s.sume that the culture of a people and the position of its women have the same measure, it follows only that increasing education revealed that the simple a.s.sumption of the inferiority of woman was not correct, that the essential difference in psyche between man and woman could not be determined, and that even today, the old conception half unconsciously exercises an influence on our valuation of woman, when in any respect we are required to judge her. Hence, we are in no wise interested in the degree of subordination of woman among savage and half-savage peoples, but, on the other hand, it is not indifferent for us to know what the situation was among peoples and times who have influenced our own culture. Let us review the situation hastily.
A number of cla.s.sical instances which are brought together by Fink[1] and Smith,[2] show how little the cla.s.sic Greek thought of woman, and W. Becker[3] estimates as most important the fact that the Greek always gave precedence to children and said, ." The Greek naturalists, Hippocrates and Aristotle, modestly held woman to be half human, and even the poet Homer is not free from this point of view (cf. the advice of Agamemnon to Odysseus). Moreover, he speaks mostly concerning the scan- dalmongering and lying of women, while later, Euripides directly reduces the status of women to the minimum (cf. Iphigenia).
[1] Romantic Love and Personal Beauty. H. Fink. London 1887.
[2] Dictionary of Christian Antiquities.
[3] Bilder altgriechischer Sitte.
The attention of ancient Rome is always directed upon the puzzling, sphinx-like, unharmonious qualities in woman. Horace gives it the clearest expression, e. g., "Desinite in piscem mulier formosa superne."
The Orientals have not done any better for us. The Chinese a.s.sert that women have no souls. The Mohammedan believes that women are denied entrance to paradise, and the Koran (xliii, 17) defines the woman as a creature which grows up on a soil of finery and baubles, and is always ready to nag. How well such an opinion has sustained itself, is shown by the Ottomanic Codex 355, according to which the testimony of two women is worth as much as the testimony of one man. But even so, the Koran has a higher opinion of women than the early church fathers. The problem, "An mulier habeas animam," was often debated at the councils. One of them, that of Macon, dealt earnestly with the MS. of Acidalius, "Mulieres homines non esse." At another, women were forbidden to touch the Eucharist with bare hands. This att.i.tude is implied by the content of countless numbers of evil proverbs which deal with the inferior character of woman, and certainly by the circ.u.mstance that so great a number of women were held to be witches, of whom about 100,000 were burned in Germany alone. The statutes dealt with women only in so far as their trustworthiness as witnesses could be depreciated. The Bambergensis (Art. 76), for example, permits the admission of young persons and women only in special cases, and the quarrels of the older lawyers concerning the value of feminine testimony is shown by Mittermaier.[1]
[1] Die Lehre vom Beweise. Darmstadt.
If we discount Tacitus" testimony concerning the high status of women among the Germanic tribes on the basis that he aimed at shaming and reforming his countrymen, we have a long series of a.s.sertions, beginning with that of the Norseman Havam
woman may be superior to us in some qualities and inferior in others, but she is not like us in any. The statement that woman is as complete in her own right as man is in his, agrees with the att.i.tude above- mentioned if we correlate the superiority and inferiority of women with "purposefulness." We judge a higher or lower organism from our standpoint of power to know, feel, and do, but we judge without considering whether these organisms imply or not the purposes we a.s.sume for them. Thus a uniform, monotonous task which is easy but requires uninterrupted attention can be better performed by an average, patient, unthinking individual, than by a genial fiery intellect. The former is much more to the purpose of this work than the latter, but he does not stand higher. The case is so with woman. For many of the purposes a.s.signed to her, she is better constructed. But whether this construction, from our standpoint of knowing and feeling, is to be regarded as higher or lower is another question.
Hence, we are only in a sense correct, when calling some feminine trait which does not coincide with our own a poorer, inferior quality. We are likely to overlook the fact that this quality taken in itself, is the right one for the nature and the tasks of woman, whereas we ought with the modern naturalist a.s.sume that every animal has developed correctly for its own purposes. If this were not the case with woman she would be the first exception to the laws of natural evolution. Hence, our task is not to seek out peculiarities and rarities in woman, but to study her status and function as given her by nature. Then we shall see that what we would otherwise have called extraordinary appears as natural necessity. Of course many of the feminine qualities will not bring us back to the position which has required them. Then we may or may not be able to infer it according to the laws of general co-existence, but whether we establish anything directly or indirectly must be for the time, indifferent; we do know the fact before us. If we find only the pelvis of a human skeleton we should be able to infer from its broad form that it belonged to a woman and should be able to ground this inference on the business of reproduction which is woman"s. But we shall also be able, although we have only the pelvis before us, to make reliable statements concerning the position of the bones of the lower extremities of *this individual. And we shall be able to say just what the form of the thorax and the curve of the vertebral column were. This, also, we shall have in our power, more or less, to ground on the child-bearing function of woman. But we might go still further
and say that this individual, who, according to its pelvic cavity, was a woman, must have had a comparatively smaller skull, and although we can not correlate the present mark with the child- bearing function or any other special characteristic of woman, we may yet infer it safely, because we know that this smaller skull capacity stands in regular relation to the broad pelvis, etc. In a like manner it will be possible to bring together collectively various psychical differences of woman, to define a number of them as directly necessary, and to deduce another number from their regular co-existence. The certainty here will be the same as in the former case, and once it is attained we shall be able satisfactorily to interpret the conduct, etc., of woman.
Before turning to feminine psychology I should like briefly to touch upon the use of the literature in our question and indicate that the poets" results are not good for us so long as we are trying to satisfy our particular legal needs. We might, of course, refer to the poet for information concerning the feminine heart,-woman"s most important property,-but the historically famous knowers of the woman"s heart leave us in the lurch and even lead us into decided errors. We are not here concerned with the history of literature, nor with the solution of the "dear riddle of woman;" we are dry-soured lawyers who seek to avoid mistakes at the expense of the honor and liberty of others, and if we do not want to believe the poets it is only because of many costly mistakes. Once we were all young and had ideals. What the poets told us we supposed to be the wisdom of life-n.o.body else ever offers any-and we wanted compulsorily to solve the most urgent of human problems with our poetical views. Illusions, mistakes, and guiltless remorse, were the consequence of this topsy-turvy work.
Of course I do not mean to drag our poets to court and accuse them of seducing our youth with false G.o.ds-I am convinced that if the poets were asked they would tell us that their poetry was intended for all save for physicians and criminalists. But it is conceivable that they have introduced points of view that do not imply real life. Poetical forms do not grow up naturally, and then suddenly come. together in a self-originated idea. The poet creates the idea first, and in order that this may be so the individual form must evolve according to sense. The more natural and inevitable this process becomes the better the poem, but it does not follow that since we do not doubt it because it seems so natural, it mirrors the process of life. Not one of us criminalists has ever seen a form
as described in a poem-least of all a woman. Obviously, in our serious and dry work, we may be able to interpret many an observation and a.s.sertion of the poet as a golden truth, but only when we have tested its correctness for the daily life. But it must be understood that I am not saying here, that we ourselves might have been able to make the observation, or to abstract a truth from the flux of appearances, or at least to set it in beautiful, terse, and I might say convincing, form. I merely a.s.sert, that we must be permitted to examine whether what has been beautifully said may be generalized, and whether we then have found the same, or a similar thing, in the daily life. Paradoxical as it sounds, we must never forget that there is a kind of evidentiality in the form of beauty itself. One of Blopstock"s remarkable psalms begins: "Moons wander round the earth, earths round suns, the whole host of suns wander round a greater sun, Our Father, that art thou." In this inexpressibly lofty verse there is essentially, and only in an extremely intensified fashion, evidence of the existence of G.o.d, and if the convinced atheist should read this verse he would, at least for the moment, believe in his existence. At the same time, a real development of evidence is neither presented nor intended. There are magnificent images, una.s.sailable true propositions: the moon goes round about the earth, the earth about the sun, the whole system around a central sun-and now without anything else, the fourth proposition concerning the ident.i.ty of the central sun with our heavenly Father is added as true. And the reader is captivated for at least a minute! What I have tried here to show by means of a drastic example occurs many times in poems, and is especially evident where woman is the subject, so that we may unite in believing that the poet can not teach us that subject, that he may only lead us into errors.
To learn about the nature of woman and its difference from that of man we must drop everything poetical. Most conscientiously we must drop all cynicism and seek to find illumination only in serious disciplines. These disciplines may be universal history and the history of culture, but certainly not memoirs, which always represent subjective experience and one-sided views. Anatomy, physiology, anthropology, and serious special literature, presupposed, may give us an unprejudiced outlook, and then with much effort we may observe, compare, and renew our tests of what has been established, sine ire et studio, sine odio et gratia.
I subjoin a list of sources and of especial literature which also contains additional references.[1]
[1] E. Reich: Das Leben des Menschens als Individuum. Berlin 1881.
L. von Stern: Die Frau auf dem Gebiete etc. Stuttgart 1876.
A. Corre: La Mre et l"Enfant dans les Races Humaines. Paris 1882.A. v. Schweiger-Lerchenfeld: Das Frauenleben auf der Erde. Vienna 1881
J. Michelet. La Femme.
Rykre: Das weibliches Verbrechertum. Brussels 1898.C. Renooz: Psychologie Compare de l"Homme et de la Femme. Biblio. de. la Nouv. Encyclopaedie. Paris 1898.Mbius: Der Physiologische Schwachsinn des Weibes.Section 64. 2. Difference between Man and Women
There are many attempts to determine the difference between the feminine and masculine psyche. Volkmar in his "Textbook of Psychology" has attempted to review these experiments. But the individual instances show how impossible is clear and definite statement concerning the matter. Much is too broad, much too narrow; much is unintelligible, much at least remotely correct only if one knows the outlook of the discoverer in question, and is inclined to agree with him. Consider the following series of contrasts.
Male Female Individuality Receptivity (Burdach, Berthold) Activity Pa.s.sivity (Daub, Ulrici, Hagemann) Leadership Imitativeness (Schleiermacher) Vigor Sensitivity to stimulation (Beneke) Conscious activity Unconscious activity (Hartmann) Conscious deduction Unconscious induction (Wundt) Will Consciousness (Fischer) Independence Completeness (Krause, Lindemann) Particularity Generally generic (Volkmann) Negation Affirmation (Hegel and his school) None of these contrasts are satisfactory, many are unintelligible. Burdach"s is correct only within limits and Hartmann"s is approximately true if you accept his point of view. I do not believe that these explanations would help anybody or make it easier for him to understand woman. Indeed, to many a man they will appear to be saying merely that the psyche of the male is masculine, that of the female feminine. The thing is not to be done with epigrams however spirited. Epigrams merely tend to increase the already great confusion.
Hardly more help toward understanding the subject is to be derived from certain expressions which deal with a determinate
and also with a determining trait of woman. For example, the saying, "On forbidden ground woman is cautious and man keen," may, under some circ.u.mstances, be of great importance in a criminal case, particularly when it is necessary to fix the s.e.x of the criminal. If the crime was cautiously committed a woman may be inferred, and if swiftly, a man. But that maxim is deficient in two respects. Man and woman deal in the way described, not only in forbidden fields, but generally. Again, such characteristics may be said to be ordinary but in no wise regulative: there are enough cases in which the woman was much keener than the man and the man much more cautious than the woman.
The greatest danger of false conceptions lies in the attribution of an unproved peculiarity to woman, by means of some beautifully expressed, and hence, apparently true, proverb. Consider the well known maxim: Man forgives a beautiful woman everything, woman nothing. Taken in itself the thing is true; we find it in the gossip of the ball-room, and in the most dreadful of criminal cases. Men are inclined to reduce the conduct of a beautiful sinner to the mildest and least offensive terms, while her own s.e.x judge her the more harshly in the degree of her beauty and the number of its partisans. Now it might be easy in an attempt to draw the following consequences from the correctness of this proposition: Men are generally inclined to forgive in kindness, women are the unforgiving creatures. This inference would be altogether unjustified, for the maxim only incidentally has woman for its subject; it might as well read: Woman forgives a handsome man everything, man nothing. What we have at work here is the not particularly remarkable fact that envy plays a great rle in life.Another difficulty in making use of popular truths in our own observations, lies in their being expressed in more or less definite images. If you say, for example, "Man begs with words, woman with glances," you have a proposition that might be of use in many criminal cases, inasmuch as things frequently depend on the demonstration that there was or was not an amour between two people (murder of a husband, relation of the widow with a suspect).
Now, of course, the judge could not see how they conversed together, how he spoke stormily and she turned her eyes away. But suppose that the judge has gotten hold of some letters-then if he makes use of the maxim, he will observe that the man becomes more explicit than the woman, who, up to a certain limit, remains ashamed. So if the man speaks very definitely in his letters, there
is no evidence contradictory to the inference of their relationship, even though nothing similar is to be found in her letters. The thing may be expressed in another maxim: What he wants is in the lines; what she wants between the lines.
The great difficulty of distinguishing between man and woman is mentioned in "Levana oder Erziehungslehre," by Jean Paul, who says, "A woman can not love her child and the four continents of the world at the same time. A man can." But who has ever seen a man love four continents? "He loves the concept, she the appearance, the particular." What lawyer understands this? And this? "So long as woman loves, she loves continuously, but man has lucid intervals." This fact has been otherwise expressed by Grabbe, who says: "For man the world is his heart, for woman her heart is the world." And what are we to learn from this? That the love of woman is greater and fills her life more? Certainly not. We only see that man has more to do than woman, and this prevents him from depending on his impressions, so that he can not allow himself to be completely captured by even his intense inclinations. Hence the old proverb: Every new affection makes man more foolish and woman wiser, meaning that man is held back from his work and effectiveness by every inclination, while woman, each time, gathers new experiences in life. Of course, man also gets a few of these, but he has other and more valuable opportunities of getting them, while woman, who has not his position in the midst of life, must gather her experiences where she may.
Hence, it remains best to stick to simple, sober discoveries which may be described without literary glamour, and which admit of no exception. Such is the statement by Friedreich[1]: "Woman is more excitable, more volatile and movable spiritually, than man; the mind dominates the latter, the emotions the former. Man thinks more, woman senses more." These ungarnished, clear words, which offer nothing new, still contain as much as may be said and explained. We may perhaps supplement them with an expression of Heusinger"s, "Women have much reproductive but little productive imaginative power. Hence, there are good landscape and portrait painters among women, but as long as women have painted there has not been any great woman-painter of history. They make poems, romances, and sonnets, but not one of them has written a good tragedy." This expression shows that the imaginative power of woman is really more reproductive than productive,
and it may be so observed in crimes and in the testimony of witnesses.