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So in the discussion of voice we read:
The voice of the female is higher than that of the male in all animals, and in man this is especially noticeable. A deep note is better than a high pitched: depth belongs to the nobler nature, and depth of tone shows a sort of superiority.[15]
Nor is this view of the physical, and consequently the mental, inferiority of the female confined to the De Generatione: it permeates the History of Animals, and finds its clearest expression there in a passage which perhaps gives the ultimate reason of Aristotle's error:
In all genera in which the distinction of male and female is found, Nature makes a similar differentiation in the mental characteristics of the two sexes. This differentiation is the most obvious in the case of human-kind and in that of the larger animals and the viviparous quadrupeds. In the case of these latter the female is softer in character, is the sooner tamed, admits more readily of caressing, and is more apt in the way of learning. With all animals, except the bear and the leopard, the female is softer in disposition than the male, is more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more attentive to the nurture of the young. The traces of these differentiated characteristics are more or less visible in every species, but they are especially visible where character is the more developed, and most of all in man. The fact is, the nature of man is the most rounded off and complete, and consequently in man the qualities above referred to are found in[218] their perfection. Hence woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold. She is, furthermore, more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of more retentive memory. She is also more wakeful, more shrinking, more difficult to rouse to action, and requires a smaller quantity of nutriment.[16]
The Athenian women of the fourth century were the women that Aristotle knew best, and, given Aristotle's character and scientific method, it is not surprising that he should judge Woman in the abstract to be an inferior animal. If he had been a little more of a poet and idealist---in other words, if he had not been Aristotle---he might have taken another view; but considering the facts of Athenian life in his day, and Aristotle's disposition to cling to facts, we need not wonder at his estimate. The real mischief---and Aristotle's influence in this matter has been an enormous hindrance to human progress---was done not by the philosopher himself, for in his time the position of women could hardly have been altered for the worse, but by his blind followers in later ages when his slightest word was regarded almost as inspired truth. Aristotle himself is never dogmatic (he leaves that to weaker men), and does not profess to give anything but the somewhat[219] casual expression of his own personal knowledge and opinions.
It is hardly right to blame him: women in his time undoubtedly were the inferior sex, and Aristotle is always the prophet of things as they are. The protg of the absolute monarchy which had overthrown the city-states, he has no belief in abstract freedom or in social reform. For him, what is is right. 'Women and slaves are inferior,' he says to himself, 'by the conditions of existence as I see them: therefore they are inferior by the laws of nature,' and although he knows that this inferiority was the result of the conditions of their life, his business is only with facts.
But he generalises from insufficient data: Woman for him means the women of his time, and although he points out the influence of environment, he fails to distinguish between innate and accidental characteristics. And so again, in treating of the female sex in nature, he is too inclined to confine himself to the higher mammals. He emphasises the case of the herbivorous animals, those that go in herds, and are polygamous in their habits: deer, for example, where the male has a distinct advantage in size and strength; while he says little of the carnivora, who hunt in pairs and are monogamous, where the female tends to be equal in every respect to the male. Insects he almost disregards, and the microscope,[220] in the hands of a naturalist of genius like M. Fabre, has opened up for us a world from which Aristotle was debarred by the material limitations of his instruments.
We see now that Nature, at least, has no favoured sex, and that Euripides' words are as true in a zoological as they are in a sociological sense: 'All that can be said of the male can be said equally well of the female, and vice versa.' The male that in some species is the stronger and more active, in others is the weaker and plays a passive rle. The female mantis that devours her feeble mate is the reverse side of Nature's picture. So again, all the fascinating problems of parthenogenesis, whereby the female may produce for several births without the intervention of the male, have received a new light from the close study of the hive. Aristotle's chapter on bees suffers materially from lack of first-hand knowledge, and, as Professor Platt says, although it is greatly to his credit for hard thinking, it reveals the fact that he knew next to nothing about the subject. Of course, the whole method of bee-generation is totally at variance with Aristotle's theory of male superiority, and if he had possessed our knowledge his theory might have been modified. In the world of insects, at least, feminism reigns; the male is weak and subservient, the female is the ruler. Often the male is an accident;[221] the female would have sufficed. So true is this that a modern essayist, M. Remy de Gourmont, writing under the influence of Fabre's discoveries, can vary Aristotle's analogy and compare the female to the clock and the male to the necessary key that winds up the mechanism.
But although Aristotle can scarcely be said to understand all the mysteries of sex, he anticipates some of the most fruitful investigations of modern research, and in all questions of pure science, within the limits of his own experience, he is almost infallible. It is unfortunate that his experience of women was misleading, and that the problems of feminism do not always fall within the confines of science. That he was wrong in this matter is chiefly the fault of his times and their social conditions, and those who live in other days and amid other surroundings should remember his own significant words, spoken indeed about bees, but equally applicable to other social animals:
Such appears to me to be the truth, judging from theory and what I believe to be the facts. But up to the present the facts have not been sufficiently comprehended; if ever they are, then credit must be given to observation rather than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with observed facts.
And with that quotation we may well leave him: Amicus Aristoteles; magis amica veritas. If the[222] facts of modern existence show women to be the inferior sex, then, and then only, are we moderns justified in holding that opinion. But every man should judge for himself on the evidence that his own observation gives, and not be influenced by the theories of other men or by the literature of the past.
