PIERRE LEROUX _agitated_. Take care! It is not so much in sex that woman should be affranchised; it is only in her quality of _wife and human being_. She has sex only for him she loves; to all other men she is what they are themselves: sensation, sentiment, sense. She must be free in marriage and in the commonwealth as man himself should be. FUSIONIST _interrupting him_. You are right, Pierre Leroux; yet neither is the previous speaker wholly wrong; woman is free and the equal of man in everything, because spirit and matter are equal in God; because the man and the woman form together the human androgynus, the derivation of the divine androgynus. It is not so, my dear sister? MYSELF. Excuse me, brothers, from joining in your theological discussion; my wings are not strong enough to follow you into the bosom of God, in order to assure myself whether he is spirit or matter, androgynus or not, binary, trinary, quarternary, or nothing of all these. It is enough for me that you all grant that woman should be free, and the equal of man. I permit myself only a single observation; that your notion of the couple or of the androgynus, at the bottom one and the same thing, tends fatally to the subjugation of my sex; if, by a metaphor, a fiction, we make of two beings, endowed each with a separate will, free-will and intellect, a single unity; _in social practice_, this unity is manifested by a single will, a single free-will, a single intellect, and the individuality that prevails in our society is that which is endowed with strength of arm; the other is annihilated, and the right given to the couple is in reality only the right of the stronger. The use that M. Proudhon has made of androgyny ought to cure you of this fancy; as the use which your predecessors made of the ternary ought to have preserved you from trinitary metaphysics. Be it said without offence to you, gentlemen, I have a decided antipathy to any trinities and androgynies whatsoever; I am a sworn enemy to all metaphysics, whether profane or sacred,--a constitutional vice, aggravated in me by Kant and his school. PHALANSTERIAN. For God's sake, gentlemen, let us quit this mysticism. Man and woman are different, but the one is as necessary as the other to the great work that should be accomplished by humanity; therefore they are equal. As each individual has a right to develop himself integrally, to manifest himself completely in order to perform the parcellary task which his attractions assign to him, the liberty of one sex can no more be called in question than can that of the other. Man modulates in major, woman in minor, with an exceptional eighth; but, as in all the general functions, the combination of the two modes is necessary, it is evident that each of them ought to be double, and that woman ought everywhere to be equal with man.