The Physiology of Marriage, Part 3 by Honoré de Balzac
page 75 of 125 (60%)
page 75 of 125 (60%)
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surgical experiences; but, in order that his conclusions merit our
attention, it would be necessary that for a certain time men were subjected to treatment by women surgeons. The opinion of Diderot is of still less weight. To deny the existence of modesty, because it disappears during those crises in which almost all human sentiments are annihilated, is as unreasonable as to deny that life exists because death sooner or later comes. Let us grant, then, that one sex has as much modesty as the other, and let us inquire in what modesty consists. Rousseau makes modesty the outcome of all those coquetries which females display before males. This opinion appears to us equally mistaken. The writers of the eighteenth century have doubtless rendered immense services to society; but their philosophy, based as it is upon sensualism, has never penetrated any deeper than the human epidermis. They have only considered the exterior universe; and so they have retarded, for some time, the moral development of man and the progress of science which will always draw its first principles from the Gospel, principles hereafter to be best understood by the fervent disciples of the Son of Man. The study of thought's mysteries, the discovery of those organs which belong to the human soul, the geometry of its forces, the phenomena of its active power, the appreciation of the faculty by which we seem to |
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