Reason in women is a practical reason, capacitating them
artfully to discover the means of attaining a known end, but which
would never enable them to discover that end itself. The social
relations of the sexes are indeed truly admirable: from their union
there results a moral person, of which woman may be 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 she is to see, and it
is of the woman that man is to learn what he ought to do. If woman
could recur to the first principles of things as well as man, and
man was capacitated to enter into their minutae as well as woman,
always independent of each other, they would live in perpetual
discord, and their union could not subsist. But in the present harmony
which naturally subsists between them, their different faculties
tend to one common end; it is difficult to say which of them
conduces the most to it: each follows the impulse of the other; each
is obedient, and both are masters.
'As the conduct of a woman is subservient to the public opinion, her
faith in matters of religion should, for that very reason, be
subject to authority. Every daughter ought to be of the same
religion as her mother, and every wife to be of the same religion as
her husband: for, though such religion should be false, that
docility which induces the mother and daughter to submit to the
order of nature, takes away, in the sight of God, the criminality of
their error.
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