most ample room for intellectual attainments, it must undoubtedly
add to the sum of pleasurable sensations in life. Virtuous love,
exalted by friendship, seems to be that sort of mixture of
sensual and intellectual enjoyment particularly suited to the
nature of man, and most powerfully calculated to awaken the
sympathies of the soul, and produce the most exquisite
gratifications.

Mr Godwin says, in order to shew the evident inferiority of
the pleasures of sense, 'Strip the commerce of the sexes of all
its attendant circumstances, and it would be generally despised'
(Bk. I, ch. 5; in the third edition, Vol. I, pp. 71-72). He might
as well say to a man who admired trees: strip them of their
spreading branches and lovely foliage, and what beauty can you
see in a bare pole? But it was the tree with the branches and
foliage, and not without them, that excited admiration. One
feature of an object may be as distinct, and excite as different
emotions, from the aggregate as any two things the most remote,
as a beautiful woman, and a map of Madagascar. It is 'the
symmetry of person, the vivacity, the voluptuous softness of
temper, the affectionate kindness of feelings, the imagination
and the wit' of a woman that excite the passion of love, and not
the mere distinction of her being female. Urged by the passion of
love, men have been driven into acts highly prejudicial to the
general interests of society, but probably they would have found
no difficulty in resisting the temptation, had it appeared in the
form of a woman with no other attractions whatever but her sex.
To strip sensual pleasures of all their adjuncts, in order to
prove their inferiority, is to deprive a magnet of some of its
most essential causes of attraction, and then to say that it is