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220 comprehend them. Instead of this, every truth, at which philosophers arrive only by the roundabout and troublesome way of constructing a "system," is directly, and without difficulty, accessible to our intelligence. But our stupid and unnatural education generally makes us as diffident as it makes us intellectually dependent, so that we mistrust our own judgment before that of learned men. That is a weakness which men know very well how to utilize in behalf of our continued dispossession and suppression; it is quite natural, therefore, that they rebel when we discard this weakness, when we no longer allow ourselves to be imposed upon by their pretended mysteries, and that the philosophers must be the first to rebel is the most natural of all. We must, however, not allow ourselves to be led astray thereby; we must even dare to compete with the philosophers. I venture, therefore, to turn Mr. Ruge's reproach that we are aristocratic into the greatest praise; I venture to assert — without believing, however, that I have discovered a new truth — that, by our natural "aristocratic" tendency, we unconsciously establish the correct human rule, which men have brought into discredit by their perverse theories, and which demands that all men should become aristocratic. By what sort of philosophy does Mr. Ruge want to prove to me that, instead of elevating humanity to the height of the superiorities, which we women love, all must rather be degraded to the opposite, for the sake of being