Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/235

Rh seeks greatness in senseless arbitrariness, in dissolute transgressions of rational rules, and is therefore incompatible with truth, the foremost requirement of genius; not that sham wisdom, whose essence is weakness instead of strength, but that true genius which, regardless of the motives of a mean world, of the calculators and hucksters, of the authorities and scribes, breaks the fetters with which harrowmindedness and the anxiety of philistine pygmies have bound human nature, and creates for us a paradise of freedom, in which the great and noble thoughts of human happiness and human beauty take on life and form.

We could even love a dead genius, but not a living philistine.

In this wise, Mr. Ruge, are we women aristocrats, and the only misfortune is that not all of us are. Perhaps the men would then try harder to become aristocrats also, and would drop the conceit that we must love them, on every plebeian condition, just because they are the stronger and we their dependents, and because they usually pay for the hearth, upon which we have the honor of cooking for them.

We women are not adapted to become philosophers. Imagination and feeling — in short, all the more living activities of the soul — fortunately do not admit of that strong calm which is capable of evolving systems of thought in the privacy of the study, that astonish the world just so long as it does not