'Why call woman, miserable, oppressed, and impotent, woman--_crushed, and then insulted_--why call her to _independence_--which not nature, but the barbarous and accursed laws of society, have denied her? _This is mockery!_ Even you, wise and benevolent as you are, can mock the child of slavery and sorrow! "Excluded, as it were, by the pride, luxury, and caprice, of the world, from expanding my sensations, and wedding my soul to society, I was constrained to bestow the strong affections, that glowed consciously within me, upon a few."[18] Love, in minds of any elevation, cannot be generated but upon a real, or fancied, foundation of excellence. But what would be a miracle in architecture, is true in morals--the fabric can exist when the foundation has mouldered away. _Habit_ daily produces this wonderful effect upon every feeling, and every principle. Is not this the theory which you have taught me? [Footnote 18: Godwin's Caleb Williams.] 'Am I not sufficiently ingenuous?--I will give you a new proof of my frankness (though not the proof you require).--From the miserable consequences of wretched moral distinctions, from chastity having been considered as a sexual virtue, all these calamities have flowed. Men are thus rendered sordid and dissolute in their pleasures; their affections vitiated, and their feelings petrified; the simplicity of modest tenderness loses its charm; they become incapable of satisfying the heart of a woman of sensibility and virtue.--Half the sex, then, are the wretched, degraded, victims of brutal instinct: the remainder, if they sink not into mere frivolity and insipidity, are sublimed into a sort of--[what shall I call them?]--refined, romantic, factitious, unfortunate, beings; who, for the sake of the present moment, dare not expose themselves to complicated, inevitable, evils; evils, that will infallibly overwhelm them with misery and regret! Woe be, more especially, to those who, possessing the dangerous gifts of fancy and feeling, find it as difficult to discover a substitute for the object as for the sentiment! You, who are a philosopher, will you still controvert the principles founded in truth and nature? "Gross as is my folly," (and I do not deny it) "you may perceive I was not wholly wandering in darkness. But while the wintry sun of hope illumined the fairy frost-work with a single, slanting ray--dazzled by the transient brightness, I dreaded the meridian fervors that should dissolve the glittering charm." Yes! it was madness--but it was the pleasurable madness which none but madmen know.