o 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
have an independent power of bodily movement, so as to transport
ourselves whither we will and to see without the aid of bodily organs,
--in a word the laws of thought's dynamic and those of its physical
influence,--these things will fall to the lot of the next century, as
their portion in the treasury of human sciences. And perhaps we, of
the present time, are merely occupied in quarrying the enormous blocks
which later on some mighty genius will employ in the building of a
glorious edifice.

Thus the error of Rousseau is simply the error of his age. He explains
modesty by the relations of different human beings to each other
instead of explaining it by the moral relations of each one with
himself. Modesty is no more susceptible of analysis than conscience;
and this perhaps is another way of saying that modesty is the
conscience of the body; for while conscience directs our sentiments
and the least movement of our thoughts towards the good, modesty
presides over external movements. The actions which clash with our
interests and thus disobey the laws of conscience wound us more than
any other; and if they are repeated call forth our hatred. It is the
same with acts which vi