theme, and a bitter estimate of women as companions for men, which might
have pleased Calvin or Knox in his sternest mood. The same eloquence
which showed men the superior delights of the state of nature, now shows
the superior fitness of the oriental seclusion of women; it makes a
sympathetic reader tremble at the want of modesty, purity, and decency,
in the part which women are allowed to take by the infatuated men of a
modern community.

All this, again, is directed against "that philosophy of a day, which is
born and dies in the corner of a city, and would fain stifle the cry of
nature and the unanimous voice of the human race" (p. 131). The same
intrepid spirits who had brought reason to bear upon the current notions
of providence, inspiration, ecclesiastical tradition, and other
unlighted spots in the human mind, had perceived that the subjection of
women to a secondary place belonged to the same category, and could not
any more successfully be defended by reason. Instead of raging against
women for their boldness, their frivolousness, and the rest, as our
passionate sentimentalist did, the opposite school insisted that all
these evils were due to the folly of treating women with gallantry
instead of respect, and to the blindness of refusing an equally vigorous
and masculine education to those who must be the closest companions of
educated man. This was the view forced upon the most rational observers
of a society where women were so powerful, and so absolutely unfit by
want of intellectual training for the right use of social power.
D'Alembert expressed this view in a few pages of forcible pleading in
his reply to Rousseau,[355] and some thirty-two years later, when all
questions had become political (1790), Condorcet ably extended the same
line of argument so as to make it cover the claims of women to all the
rights of citizenship.[356] From the nature of the case, however, it is
impossible to confute by reason a man who denies that the matter in