confessed, that personal beauty arises very much from ideas of
utility? The imagination is influenced by associations of ideas;
which, though they arise at first from the judgement, are not
easily altered by every particular exception that occurs to us.
To which we may add, in the present case of chastity, that the
example of the old would be pernicious to the young; and that
women, continually foreseeing that a certain time would bring
them the liberty of indulgence, would naturally advance that
period, and think more lightly of this whole duty, so requisite
to society.

Those who live in the same family have such frequent
opportunities of licence of this kind, that nothing could prevent
purity of manners, were marriage allowed, among the nearest
relations, or any intercourse of love between them ratified by
law and custom. Incest, therefore, being PERNICIOUS in a superior
degree, has also a superior turpitude and moral deformity annexed
to it.

What is the reason, why, by the Athenian laws, one might marry a
half-sister by the father, but not by the mother? Plainly this:
The manners of the Athenians were so reserved, that a man was
never permitted to approach the women's apartment, even in the
same family, unless where he visited his own mother. His step-
mother and her children were as much shut up from him as the
woman of any other family, and there was as little danger of any
criminal correspondence between them. Uncles and nieces, for a
like reason, might marry at Athens; but neither these, nor half-
brothers and sisters, could contract that alliance at Rome, where
the intercourse was more open between the sexes. Public utility