Most closely allied to practical politics was the Woman’s Movement. The eighteenth-century French rationalists who championed the rights of man included women in their thesis; however, for various historical and psychological reasons their own countrywomen never as a whole embraced the feminist cause. In England and America, on the other hand, where the property rights of women or their inability to vote on such humanitarian issues as abolition of slavery were sore points, feminists embarked upon a battle for legal equality which ran on into the present century. The Romantic Movement in literature represented a swing away from eighteenth century rationalism toward the glorifying of emotional experience. Whereas the sexual licence in pre-Revolutionary France had reflected a _galant_ indifference to moral standards, the new and more general claim to emotional freedom was a matter of philosophic principle. However unsatisfactory from a pragmatic viewpoint the lives of such men as Rousseau and Shelley may have been, these “mad idealists” were acting upon conviction. The keynote of romanticism was, as always, the exaltation of Love and of every individual’s right to follow its dictates, a theme which figured prominently in nineteenth century literature and which still persists in popular fiction and films. While this philosophic tolerance did not extend to homosexual love, it enabled the subject to be treated seriously in other than underground erotic literature. Yet another aspect of the rebellion against hitherto revered authority was the extension of scientific method to the study of human consciousness. Ever since the renaissance, science had been advancing steadily in physical fields. Its practical applications had produced the Industrial Revolution, and its unfettered intellectual attitude had helped, via the French Encyclopedists, to sow the seeds of political revolution. During the late eighteenth century students of geology, biology, and human anatomy were accumulating the evolutionary data so dramatically systematized in 1859 by Darwin. At the same time scientific travelers, observing primitive societies, assembled the raw materials of what later became anthropology. Finally at the beginning of the nineteenth century a few pioneers, defying heavy odds of religious and popular prejudice, began to explore the relation of mind to body. In Germany laboratory experiment was concentrated on the neurological bases of sensory experience. In France medical aspects of the problem took precedence, focussing on mental aberration, and by the 1860s Charcot, best known for his therapeutic use of hypnotism, had founded the first great neurological clinic.