LXI. Some prelate, who is quoted by Don Francisco Manuel in his Guide to Married People, said, that the understanding of the most knowing woman did not exceed the bounds of ordering how a chest of clean linen should be packed. Let those who adhere to such opinions, be as respectable as they will in other points of view, they do themselves no sort of credit by such declarations; for the most favourable interpretation they admit of, is, that they were intended as hyperbolic jokes. It is a fact of public notoriety, that there have been women, who well understood the ordering and governing religious communities, and also women, who are equal to the government and direction of whole states. LXII. These discourses against the women, are the works of superficial men; who, seeing they in general understand nothing but household business, which is commonly the only thing they are instructed in, or employed about, are apt to infer from thence, without being aware that they draw the inference from that circumstance, that they are unfit for, or incapable of any other matter. The most shallow logician knows, that it is not a valid conclusion, to suppose that because a person forbears to do an act, that he is unable to do it, and therefore, from the women in general knowing no more, it cannot be inferred, that they have not talents to comprehend more. LXIII. Nobody understands radically and well, more than the subject he has studied; but you cannot deduce from hence, without incurring the note of barbarism, that his ability extends no farther. Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, states the following question: suppose all men were to dedicate themselves to agriculture, in so close and strict a manner, as to occasion their understanding nothing else; would this be a foundation whereon to argue and insist, that they were incapable of understanding any other thing? With the Druses, a people of Palastine, the women are the only repositories of the little learning that subsists among them, for almost all of these can read and write; in consequence of which, the little literature they can boast of, is treasured up in the heads of the women, and totally hidden from the men, who devote themselves solely to agriculture, war, and handy-craft business. If the same custom prevailed all the world over, the women would undoubtedly consider the men as unfit for, or incapable of literature, in which light, the men at present consider the women; and as such a judgment would certainly be erroneous, in the same manner is that mistaken, which we at present make, because it proceeds upon the same principle. SECT. X.