or she never destroys
with her own hands her empire over her husband without some sort of
repugnance. But this is a poisoned weapon as powerful as the fatal knife
of the executioner. This reflection brings us to the last paragraph of
the present Meditation.

3. OF MODESTY, IN ITS CONNECTION WITH MARRIAGE.

Before taking up the subject of modesty, it may perhaps be necessary
to inquire whether there is such a thing. Is it anything in a woman but
well understood coquetry? Is it anything but a sentiment that claims the
right, on a woman's part, to dispose of her own body as she chooses, as
one may well believe, when we consider that half the women in the
world go almost naked? Is it anything but a social chimera, as Diderot
supposed, reminding us that this sentiment always gives way before
sickness and before misery?

Justice may be done to all these questions.

An ingenious author has recently put forth the view that men are much
more modest than women. He supports this contention by a great mass
of surgical experiences; but, in order that his conclusions merit
our attention, it would be necessary that for a certain time men were
subjected to treatment by women surgeons.

The opinion of Diderot is of still less weight.

To deny the existence of modesty, because it disappears during those
crises in which almost all human sentiments are annihilated, is as
unreasonable as to deny that life exists because death sooner or later
comes.

Let us grant, then, that one sex has as much modesty as the other, and
let us inquire in what modesty consists.

Rousseau makes modesty the outcome of all those coquetries which females
display before males. This opinion appears to us equally mistaken.

The writers of the eighteenth century have doubtless rendered immense
services to society; but their philosophy, based as it is upon
sensualism, has never penetrated any deeper than the human epidermis.
They have only considered the exterior universe; and so they have
retarded, for some time, the moral development of man and the progress
of science which will always draw its first principles from the Gospel,
principles hereafter to be best understood by the fervent disciples of
the Son of Man.

The study of thought's mysteries, the discovery of those organs which
belong to the human soul, the geometry of its forces, the phenomena of
its active power, the appreciation of the faculty by which we seem
to have an independent