The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Santayana compares human intellectual roles to bees, assigning workers to universal arts and queens to intuition. This reflects a gendered view of mind and creativity prevalent in his time.
- In plain terms
- He says men work on universal arts while women focus on intuition.
- What can you take from it?
- Intellectual roles are often divided by gender and function.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- How do gender roles shape intellectual work?
- What parts of this view feel outdated?
Another view
The quote relies on outdated and essentialist views of gender.
More from George Santayana
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
Permalink to quote #16 To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
Permalink to quote #18 Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possib…
Permalink to quote #15
Related quotes
I seek a form that my style cannot discover, a bud of thought that wants to be a rose.
Ruben DarioRuben Dario quote #1 Music is for me like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate th…
Jean SibeliusJean Sibelius quote #2 To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.
Grace HopperGrace Hopper quote #2