CUPID-AND-PSYCHOLOGY


The learned Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, England, is frequently
facetious; and his jokes are quoted with the deference due to the chief
officer of the chief college of that great university. Now it is known that
the Cambridge colleges, and Trinity College in particular, are doing a
great deal for the instruction of women. The young women of Girton College
and Newnham College--both of these being institutions for their benefit, in
or near Cambridge--not only enjoy the instruction of the university, but
they share it under a guaranty that it shall be of the best quality;
because they attend, in many cases, the very same lectures with the young
men. Where this is not done, they sometimes use the vacant lecture-rooms of
the college; and it was in connection with an application for this
privilege that the Master of Trinity College made a celebrated joke. When
told that the lecture-room was needed for a class of young women in
psychology, he said, "Psychology? What kind of psychology?
Cupid-and-Psychology, I suppose."

Cupid-and-Psychology is, after all, not so bad a department of instruction.
It may be taken as a good enough symbol of that mingling of head and heart
which is the best result of all training. One of the worst evils of the
separate education of the sexes has been the easy assumption that men were
to become all head, and women all heart. It was to correct the evils of
this that Ben Jonson proposed for his ideal woman

"a learned and a manly soul."