oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind,
it is of little purpose to tell us that women have more intelligence
and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason; that men
will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will be
more skilful in reading it.[319] And it is a mere mockery to end the
matter by a fervid assurance, that in spite of prejudices that have
their origin in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what is
worthy and noble is no more foreign to women than it is to men, and
that there is nothing which under the guidance of nature may not be
obtained from them as well as from ourselves.[320] Finally there is a
complete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence as
this: "I only know for either sex two really distinct classes; one the
people who think, the other the people who do not think, and this
difference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first of
these classes ought not to marry into the other; for the greatest
charm of companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife he
is reduced to think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that
provides agreeable commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing for a father
of a family who loves his home, to be obliged to shut himself up
within himself, and to have no one about him who understands him.
Besides, how is a woman who has no habits of reflection to bring up
her children?"[321] Nothing could be more excellently urged. But how
is a woman to have habits of reflection, when she has been constantly
brought up in habits of the closest mental bondage, trained always to
consider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and her
instruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?

This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his most
serious errors, to Rousseau's want of a conception of improvement in
human affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot,
Condorcet, and others were, he would have been forced as they were, to
meditate upon changes in the education and the recognition accorded to
women, as one of the first conditions of improvement. For lack of
this, he contributed nothing to the most important branch of the
subject that he had undertaken to treat. He was always taunting the
champions of reigning systems of training for boys, with the vicious
or feeble men whom he thought he saw on every hand around him. The
same kind of answer obv