Page:Vindication Women's Rights (Wollstonecraft).djvu/51

Rh thanks to early debauchery, carcely men in their outward form—and if the blind lead the blind, one need not come from heaven to tell us the conequence.

Many are the caues that, in the preent corrupt tate of ociety, contribute to enlave women by cramping their undertandings and harpening their enes. One, perhaps, that ilently does more michief than all the ret, is their diregard of order.

To do every thing in an orderly manner, is a mot important precept, which women, who, generally peaking, receive only a diorderly kind of education, eldom attend to with that degree of exactnes, that men, who from their infancy are broken into method, oberve. This negligent kind of gues-work, for what other epithet can be ued to point out the random exertions of a ort of intinctive common ene, never brought to the tet of reaon? prevents their generalizing matters of fact—o they do to-day, what they did yeterday, merely becaue they did it yeterday.

This contempt of the undertanding in early life has more baneful conequences than is commonly uppoed; for the little knowledge which women of trong minds attain, is, from various circumtances, of a more deultory kind than the knowledge of men, and it is acquired more by heer obervations on real life, than from comparing what has been individually oberved with the reults of experience generalized by peculation. Led by their dependent ituation and dometic employments more into ociety, what they learn&ensp;