In gathering up the threads of history in the last century, and weaving its facts and philosophy together, one can trace the liberal social ideas, growing out of the political and religious revolutions in France, Germany, Italy, and America; and their tendency to substitute for the divine right of kings, priests, and orders of nobility, the higher and broader one of individual conscience and judgment in all matters pertaining to this life and that which is to come. It is not surprising that in so marked a transition period from the old to the new, as seen in the eighteenth century, that women, trained to think and write and speak, should have discovered that they, too, had some share in the new-born liberties suddenly announced to the world. That the radical political theories, propagated in different countries, made their legitimate impress on the minds of women of the highest culture, is clearly proved by their writings and conversation. While in their ignorance, women are usually more superstitious, more devoutly religious than men; those trained to thought, have generally manifested more interest in political questions, and have more frequently spoken and written on such themes, than on those merely religious. This may be attributed, in a measure, to the fact that the tendency of woman's mind, at this stage of her development, is toward practical, rather than toward speculative science. Questions of political economy lie within the realm of positive knowledge; those of theology belong to the world of mysteries and abstractions, which those minds, only, that imagine they have compassed the known, are ambitious to enter and explore. And yet, the quickening power of the Protestant Reformation roused woman, as well as man, to new and higher thought. The bold declarations of Luther, placing individual judgment above church authority, the faith of the Quaker that the inner light was a better guide than arbitrary law, the religious idealism of the Transcendentalists, and their teachings that souls had no sex, had each a marked influence in developing woman's self-assertion. Such ideas making all divine revelations as veritable and momentous to one soul, as another, tended directly to equalize the members of the human family, and place men and women on the same plane of moral responsibility. The revelations of science, too, analyzing and portraying the wonders and beauties of this material world, crowned with new dignity, man and woman,--Nature's last and proudest work. Combe and Spurzheim, proving by their Phrenological discoveries that the feelings, sentiments, and affections of the soul mould and shape the skull, gave new importance to woman's thought as mother of the race. Thus each new idea in religion, politics, science, and philosophy, tending to individualism, rather than authority, came into the world freighted with new hopes of liberty for woman.