I may for this purpose take the general statements
or definitions which serve as premisses for my reasonings
in the text.
I bring forward those generalisations and definitions
because they commend themselves to my diacritical
judgment. In other words, I set them forth as
results which have been reached after reiterated efforts
to call up to mind the totality of my experience, and
to de-tect the factor which is common to all the individual
experiences.
When for instance I propose a definition, I have endeavoured
to call to mind all the different uses of the word
with which I am familiar—eliminating, of
course, all the obviously incorrect uses.
And when I venture to attempt a generalisation about
woman, I endeavour to recall to mind without distinction
all the different women I have encountered, and to
extricate from my impressions what was common to all,—omitting
from consideration (except only when I am dealing
specifically with these) all plainly abnormal women.
Having by this procedure arrived at a generalisation—which
may of course be correct or incorrect—I
submit it to my reader, and ask from him that he should,
after going through the same mental operations as
myself, review my judgment, and pronounce his verdict.
If it should then so happen that the reader comes,
in the case of any generalisation, to the same verdict
as that which I have reached, that particular generalisation
will, I submit, now go forward not as a datum of my
individual experience, but as the intellectual resultant
of two separate and distinct experiences. It will
thereby be immensely fortified.
If, on the other hand, the reader comes to the conclusion
that a particular generalisation is out of conformity
with his experience, that generalisation will go forward
shorn of some, or perchance all, its authority.
But in any case each individual generalisation must
be referred further.
And at the end it will, according as it finds, or
fails to find, acceptance among the thoughtful, be
endorsed as a truth, and be gathered into the garner
of human knowledge; or be recognised as an error,
and find its place with the tares, which the householder,
in time of the harvest, will tell the reapers to bind
in bundles to burn them.
A. E. W.
1913.
Programme of this Treatise—Motives from which Women Claim the
Suffrage—Types of Men who Support the Suffrage—John Stuart Mill.
The task which I undertake here is to show that the
Woman’s Suffrage Movement has no real intellectual
or moral sanction, and that there are very weighty
reasons why the suffrage should not be conceded to
woman.
I would propose to begin by analysing the mental attitude
of those who range themselves on the side of woman
suffrage, and then to pass on to deal with the principal
arguments upon which the woman suffragist relies.
