And what chastity does woman possess! With what constancy she awaits her betrothed! What continence she observes during the absence or sickness of her husband! Ah! "woman alone knows how to be modest.... Through this modesty, which is her most precious prerogative, she triumphs over the transports of man, and ravishes his heart."--_Id._ And what wisdom in her choice of the companion of her life! "She desires man to be strong, valiant, ingenious; she turns from him if he is mincing and delicate."--_Id._ Now, my unloved, indocile, and very irreverent disciple, let us recapitulate. Woman, with respect to physical, intellectual and moral beauty, is to man as 3 to 2; "thus it may be said, indeed, that between man and woman there exists a certain equivalence, arising from their respective comparison, in the two-fold point of view of strength and beauty; if, by labor, genius, and justice, man is to woman as 27 to 8, in her turn, by graces of form and mind, by amenity of character and tenderness of heart, she is to man as 27 to 8.... But these respective qualities are incommutable, cannot be the subject of any contract.... "Now, as every question of preponderance in the government of human life is within the jurisdiction either of the economical order, or of the philosophical or judicial order, it is evident that superiority of beauty, even of that which is intellectual and moral, cannot create a compensation for woman, whose condition is thus made fatally subordinate."--_Id._ Do you understand me now? AUTHOR. I understand that this is pure sophistry, a thing easily demonstrated; that if your _thesis_ is absurd, your _antithesis_, however complimentary it may be, is quite as much so; that you have piled contradictions upon contradictions, and that it is a sad spectacle to me to see so strong and fine an intellect as yours abandon itself to such practices. You shall judge for yourself whether my reproaches and regrets are well founded. In the _Thesis_ you say: man alone is in himself intelligent and just, he alone is adequate to his destiny. Woman has no reason for existing; without man, she _would not emerge from the bestial condition_. In the _Antithesis_: without woman, who is the principle of animation of man, the motive power of all science, of all art, of all industry, of all virtue--without woman, who renders justice possible, thought comprehensible and applicable, man, far from being in himself just, intelligent, a worker, would be but a brute, _who would violate his female, strangle his little ones, and pursue his fellow men in order to devour them_. What follows from these divergent affirmations? That if woman alone is inadequate to her destiny, man alone is inadequate to his, and that the adequateness of both is caused by the synthesis of their respective qualities.