morose and
crippled life science is never fathomed; it may be varied and
superficially immense; but it escapes, for it will not reside there.
Celibacy gives a restless activity to researches, intrigues, and
business, a sort of huntsman's eagerness, a sharpness in the subtleties
of school-divinity and disputation; this is at least the effect it had
in its prime. If it makes the senses keen and liable to temptation,
certainly it does not soften the heart. Our terrorists in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were monks.[2] Monastic prisons were
always the most cruel.[3] A life systematically negative, a life
without its functions, developes in man instincts that are hostile to
life; he who suffers, is willing to make others suffer. The harmonious
and fertile parts of our nature, which on the one hand incline to
goodness, and on the other to genius and high invention, can hardly
ever withstand this partial suicide.

Two classes of persons necessarily contract much
insensibility--surgeons and priests. By constantly witnessing
sufferings and death, we become by degrees dead in our sympathetic
faculties. Let us, however, remark this difference, that the
insensibility of the surgeon is not without its utility: if he was
affected by his operation he might tremble. The business of the
priest, on the contrary, requires that he should be affected; sympathy
would be generally the most efficacious remedy to cure the soul. But
independently of what we have just said about the natural harshness of
this profitless life, we must observe that the priest, in contradiction
with a society, the whole of whose progress he condemns, becomes less
and less benevolent for the sinner and the rebel. The physician who
does not like his patient is less likely than another to cure him.

It is a sad reflection to think that these men, who have so little
sympathy, and who are, moreover, soured by contention, should happen to
have in their hands the most gentle portion of mankind; that which has
preserved the most affection, and ever remained the most faithful to
nature, and which, in the very corruption of morals, is still the least
corrupted by interest and hateful passions.

That is to say, that the least loving govern those who love the most.

In order to know well what use they make of this empire over women,
which they claim as their own privilege, we must not confine ourselves
to their flattering and wheedling ways with fashionabl