A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral SubjectsWollstonecraft, Mary
Philosophy
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Feminism; Women -- Education -- Great Britain; Women -- History -- 19th century; Women's rights -- Great Britain
Do you know any thing of the construction of the human frame? If
not, it is proper that you should be told, what every child ought
to know, that when its admirable economy has been disturbed by
intemperance or indolence, I speak not of violent disorders, but of
chronical diseases, it must be brought into a healthy state again
by slow degrees, and if the functions of life have not been
materially injured, regimen, another word for temperance, air,
exercise, and a few medicines prescribed by persons who have
studied the human body, are the only human means, yet discovered,
of recovering that inestimable blessing health, that will bear
investigation.
Do you then believe, that these magnetisers, who, by hocus pocus
tricks, pretend, to work a miracle, are delegated by God, or
assisted by the solver of all these kind of difficulties--the
devil.
Do they, when they put to flight, as it is said, disorders that
have baffled the powers of medicine, work in conformity to the
light of reason? Or do they effect these wonderful cures by
supernatural aid?
By a communication, an adept may answer, with the world of spirits.
A noble privilege, it must be allowed. Some of the ancients
mention familiar demons, who guarded them from danger, by kindly
intimating (we cannot guess in what manner,) when any danger was
nigh; or pointed out what they ought to undertake. Yet the men who
laid claim to this privilege, out of the order of nature, insisted,
that it was the reward or consequence of superior temperance and
piety. But the present workers of wonders are not raised above
their fellows by superior temperance or sanctity. They do not cure
for the love of God, but money. These are the priests of quackery,
though it be true they have not the convenient expedient of selling
masses for souls in purgatory, nor churches, where they can display
crutches, and models of limbs made sound by a touch or a word.
I am not conversant with the technical terms, nor initiated into
the arcana, therefore I may speak improperly; but it is clear, that
men who will not conform to the law of reason, and earn a
subsistence in an honest way, by degrees, are very fortunate in
becoming acquainted with such obliging spirits. We cannot, indeed,
give them credit for either great sagacity or goodness, else they
would have chosen more noble instruments, when they wished to show
themselves the benevolent friends of man.
It is, however, little short of blasphemy to pretend to such power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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