the thing in order to obtain a near and simple view. This is why women
are more sober in their judgment than we, and why they see nothing more
in things than is really there; while we, if our passions are roused,
slightly exaggerate or add to our imagination.

It is because women's reasoning powers are weaker that they show more
sympathy for the unfortunate than men, and consequently take a kindlier
interest in them. On the other hand, women are inferior to men in
matters of justice, honesty, and conscientiousness. Again, because their
reasoning faculty is weak, things clearly visible and real, and
belonging to the present, exercise a power over them which is rarely
counteracted by abstract thoughts, fixed maxims, or firm resolutions, in
general, by regard for the past and future or by consideration for what
is absent and remote. Accordingly they have the first and principal
qualities of virtue, but they lack the secondary qualities which are
often a necessary instrument in developing it. Women may be compared in
this respect to an organism that has a liver but no gall-bladder.[9] So
that it will be found that the fundamental fault in the character of
women is that they have no "_sense of justice_." This arises from their
deficiency in the power of reasoning already referred to, and
reflection, but is also partly due to the fact that Nature has not
destined them, as the weaker sex, to be dependent on strength but on
cunning; this is why they are instinctively crafty, and have an
ineradicable tendency to lie. For as lions are furnished with claws and
teeth, elephants with tusks, boars with fangs, bulls with horns, and the
cuttlefish with its dark, inky fluid, so Nature has provided woman for
her protection and defence with the faculty of dissimulation, and all
the power which Nature has given to man in the form of bodily strength
and reason has been conferred on woman in this form. Hence,
dissimulation is innate in woman and almost as characteristic of the