Page:Vindication Women's Rights (Wollstonecraft).djvu/198

192 it be neceary to take into the reckoning the doubts and diappointments that cloud our reearches. Vanity and vexation cloe every inquiry: for the caue which we particularly wihed to dicover flies like the horizen before us as we advance. The ignorant, on the contrary, reemble children, and uppoe, that if they could walk traight forward they hould at lat arrive where the earth and clouds meet. Yet, diappointed as we are in our reearches, the mind gains trength by the exercie, ufficient, perhaps, to comprehend the anwers which, in another tep of exitence, it may receive to the anxious quetions it aked, when the undertanding with feeble wing was fluttering round the viible effects to dive into the hidden caue.

The paions alo, the winds of life, would be ueles, if not injurious, did the ubtance which compoes our thinking being, after we have thought in vain, only become the upport of vegetable life, and invigorate a cabbage, or bluh in a roe. The appetites would anwer every earthly purpoe, and produce more moderate and permanent happines. But the powers of the oul that are of little ue here, and, probably, diturb our animal enjoyments, even while concious dignity makes us glory in poeing them, prove that life is merely an education, a tate of infancy, to which the only hopes worth cherihing hould not be acrificed. I mean, therefore, to infer, that we ought to have a precie idea of what we wih to attain by education, for the immortality of the oul is contradicted by the actions of many people who firmly profes the belief. If&ensp;