distinguish quickly the passing feelings of those around and was the
result of long ages of barbarism during which woman as the weaker sex
was obliged to resort to the arts of divination and to cunning to make
up for her lack of physical force and to protect herself and her
offspring.[11] In like vein Käthe Schirmacher, a German feminist, says:
"The celebrated intuition of woman is nothing but an astonishing
refinement of the senses through fear.... Waiting in fear was made the
life task of the sex."[12]

Lester F. Ward had a somewhat different view.[13] He thought that
woman's psychic power came from the sympathy based on the maternal
instinct, which "though in itself an entirely different faculty, early
blended with or helped to create, the derivative reason-born faculty of
altruism." With Ward's view Olive Schreiner agrees, saying: "We have no
certain proof that it is so at present, but woman's long years of
servitude and physical subjection, and her experience as childbearer and
protector of infancy, may be found in the future to have endowed her ...
with an exceptional width of human sympathy and instinctive
comprehension."[14]

In all probability Lombroso came nearer to the truth in his explanation
of feminine penetration. "That woman is more subject to hysteria is a
known fact," he says, "but few know how liable she is to hypnotic
phenomena, which easily opens up the unfoldment of spiritual
faculties.... The history of observation proves that hysteria and
hypnotism take the form of magic, sorcery, and divination or prophecy,
among savage peoples. 'Women,' say the Pishawar peoples, 'are all
witches; for several reasons they may not exert their inborn powers.'
... In the Slave Coast hysterical women are believed to be possessed
with spirits. The Fuegians believed that there had been a time when