Page:Vindication Women's Rights (Wollstonecraft).djvu/160

154 tongue in this manner mut require great addres indeed; and it is too much practied both by men and women.—Out of the abundance of the heart how few peak! So few, that I, who love implicity, would gladly give up politenes for a quarter of the virtue that has been acrificed to an equivocal quality which at bet hould only be the polih of virtue.

But, to complete the ketch. 'It is eay to be conceived, that if male children are not in a capacity to form any true notions of religion, thoe ideas mut be greatly above the conception of the females: it is for this very reaon, I would begin to peak to them the earlier on this ubject; for if we were to wait till they were in a capacity to dicus methodically uch profound quetions, we hould run a rik of never peaking to them on this ubject as long as they lived. Reaon in women is a practical reaon, capacitating them artfully to dicover the means of attaining a known end, but which would never enable them to dicover that end itelf. The ocial relations of the exes are indeed truly admirable: from their union there reults a moral peron, of which woman may he 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 he is to ee, and it is of the woman that man is to learn what he ought to do. If woman could recur to the firt 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&ensp;