It may not be
amiss, therefore, to transcribe two or three passages from the treatise
I have just now mentioned. 'But, waiving these reflections, I shall fix
only on the personal accomplishments of the sex, and peculiarly that
which is the most principal endowment of the rational nature--I mean the
understanding--where it will be a little hard to pronounce that they are
naturally inferior to men, when it is considered how much of intrinsic
weight is put in the balance to turn it to the men's side. Men have
their parts cultivated and improved by education; refined and subtilized
by learning and arts; are like a piece of common which, by industry and
husbandry, becomes a different thing from the rest, though the natural
turf owned no such inequality. We may, therefore, conclude that whatever
vicious impotence women are under, it is acquired, not natural; nor
derived from any illiberality of God's, but from the ill-managery of his
bounty. Let them not charge God foolishly, or think that by making them
women, he necessitated them to be proud or wanton, vain or peevish;
since it is manifest he made them to better purpose; was not partial to
the other sex; but that having, as the prophet speaks, "abundance of
spirit," he equally dispensed it, and gave the feeblest woman as large
and capacious a soul as that of the greatest hero.
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