New-York tribune., 1918-05-04
A Masculine God

al ''io eIeIlldl CldSneS OF the sexes there
has developed classic formula for the
mutual recriminations at the climax.
"Brute!" cries the woman. GLOW un-
reasonable!" says the man. Whereupon
the man stalks and the woman weeps:
and are presently ready to begin all over
again.
Times change and climaxes with them.
Women are learning to reason and eniov
the process. But the notion of the di-
vision remains and much of the fact
Man dotes upon his reason; he loves to
argue. Woman takes up the thing gin
gerly and awkwardly, as she might
firearm to which she was unaccustomed.
And in the ultimate clashes of one naked
nature against another the old, old weap->
ons are always out.
The anti-feminists are in one of those
ultimate clashes at the present moment.
and it is no wonder that they see red
when women's minds are even mentioned.
There is nothing so infuriating to male
as the females blissful refusal to reason.
Listen, for one of the prettiest examples.
to Mr.. Douglas Jerrold expounding the
perils of femnism in "The English Re-
view: g
First and foremost, women distrust
logic. For generations it was rude to
argue with lady; it is still hardly polite
to express profound conviction that thew
are fundamentally wrong on any point.
They have suffered for centuries from
lack of that mental discipline to which
10 foo1
subjected more or less from the time of
Socrates. And the primitive instinct of
sef-Justification has had it's way. Women
nave learnt by bitter experience that their
reason Will play them sorry tricks in
critical encounters, and, having adopted
the catchword instinct, they openly pro-
claim that it constitutes their right of
entry to intellectual society When a
woman has arrived at a perfectly sound
conclusion by the ordinary process of
reasoning she will pretend that she acted
on instinct; and so the legend has grown
up Women have q gift for not
facing facts which amounts to eenius
This is fairly involved. Firstly, women
can't reason because their minds have
not been disciplined. Secondly, they do
reason, but ascribe their conclusions to
instinct out of sheer perversity. One
might try to thread a logical nath
through this maze if much we're at stake
but IN the next breath Mr.. Jerrold re-
lleves one of the necessity. He sums I'm
his defence of masculine superiority and
his ideal of intellectual endeavor thus.
A man may reason like fool; he gen.
orally does; but he admits the necessity
o.,,1@~
Nothing could be clearer than this. It
is not right reason or reason because f.
is right that Mr.. Jerro9d is hymning, but
reason for it's own sake. "Better rea-
soned than right" is his motto; and
frankly we do not believe better motto
could be chosen to express the faith of
the masculine mind at bay before the
clawing instincts of woman-of woman
at any rate.
We are sure that Mr.. Jerrold. has
calmer moments when the perils of fem
lnlsm DO not crimson his vision. For one
such we suggest the rather obvious
thought that reason is splendid servant
but had master. The other gifts of
humans, instinct and emotion. were
placed in them to be used. Nobody has
yet worked out an exact formula for
sound thinking. But it is surely one of
the soundest axioms to restrict reason to
matters which can be reasoned about. It
is masculine weakness to insist upon
reasoning such matters as an individuals
character. In fact, such debate is almost
as absurd as debutante's attempt to
work Euclid by instinct.
1t is woman's strength that she has
not totally abandoned instinct for the
new and still imperfect invention of
man-reason. Is it inconceivable that
in the new partnership of men and. wom-
en- each may learn something from the
other of both how to think and how not
to think?