But, to complete the sketch. 'It is easy to be conceived, that if
male children be not in a capacity to form any true notions of
religion, those ideas must be greatly above the conception of the
females: it is for this very reason, I would begin to speak to
them the earlier on this subject; for if we were to wait till
they were in a capacity to discuss methodically such profound
questions, we should run a risk of never speaking to them on this
subject as long as they lived. Reason in women is a practical
reason, capacitating them artfully to discover the means of
attaining a known end, but which would never enable them to
discover that end itself. The social relations of the sexes are
indeed truly admirable: from their union there results a moral
person, of which woman may be termed the eyes, and man the hand,
with this dependence on each other, that it is from the man that
the woman is to learn what she is to see, and it is of the woman
that man is to learn what he ought to do. If woman could recur to
the first principles of things as well as man, and man was
capacitated to enter into their minutiæ as well as
woman, always independent of each other, they would live in
perpetual discord, and their union could not subsist. But in the
present harmony which naturally subsists between them, their
different faculties tend to one common end; it is difficult to
say which of them conduces the most to it: each follows the
impulse of the other; each is obedient, and both are masters.
