Novels, music, poetry and gallantry, all tend to make women the
creatures of sensation, and their character is thus formed during
the time they are acquiring accomplishments, the only improvement
they are excited, by their station in society, to acquire. This
overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other powers of the
mind, and prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which
it ought to attain, to render a rational creature useful to others,
and content with its own station; for the exercise of the
understanding, as life advances, is the only method pointed out by
nature to calm the passions.
Satiety has a very different effect, and I have often been forcibly
struck by an emphatical description of damnation, when the spirit
is represented as continually hovering with abortive eagerness
round the defiled body, unable to enjoy any thing without the
organs of sense. Yet, to their senses, are women made slaves,
because it is by their sensibility that they obtain present power.
And will moralists pretend to assert, that this is the condition in
which one half of the human race should be encouraged to remain
with listless inactivity and stupid acquiescence? Kind
instructors! what were we created for? To remain, it may be said,
innocent; they mean in a state of childhood. We might as well
never have been born, unless it were necessary that we should be
created to enable man to acquire the noble privilege of reason, the
power of discerning good from evil, whilst we lie down in the dust
from whence we were taken, never to rise again.
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