Page:Vindication Women's Rights (Wollstonecraft).djvu/129

Rh for them by the profound thinker, ought not to be diguted, if they find the former choleric, and the latter moroe; becaue livelines of fancy, and a tenacious comprehenion of mind, are carcely compatible with that pliant urbanity which leads a man, at leat, to bend to the opinions and prejudices of others, intead of roughly confronting them.

But, treating of education or manners, minds of a uperior clas are not to be conidered, they may be left to chance; it is the multitude, with moderate abilities, who call for intruction, and catch the colour of the atmophere they breathe. This repectable concoure, I contend, men and women, hould not have their enations heightened in the hot-bed of luxurious indolence, at the expene of their undertanding; for, unles there be a ballat of undertanding, they will never become either virtuous or free: aritocracy, founded on property, or terling talents, will ever weep before it, the alternately timid, and ferocious laves of feeling.

Numberles are the arguments, to take another view of the ubject, brought forward with a hew of reaon: becaue uppoed to be deduced from nature, that men have ued morally and phyically, to degrade the ex. I mut notice a few.

The female undertanding has often been poken of with contempt, as arriving ooner at maturity than the male. I hall not anwer this argument by alluding to the early proofs of reaon, as well as genius, in Cowley, Milton, and Pope, but only appeal to experience to decide whether young men, who are early introduced into&ensp;