He cannot lay his own ghost of belief that is judgment has played him false. If woman is what man has so often declared her to be, if her place in life and her lack of capabilities are self-evident, these facts need no repeated iteration, more than does the fact that night succeeds day, or that two and two makes four. Self-evident truths require no proving, only doubtful ones. The Sphinx, world-known emblem of all mystery, propounder of that wondrous riddle that led so many men to death, was a woman. That her husband, the Phoenician Cadmus, should have become the inventor of letters, seems no longer strange when we remember the wise inspirer by his side.
Modern science teaches the close interchangeableness of the senses.
If taste and smell are closely alike, and intimately connected with nutrition, so the more subtle form of touch, that invisible yet fully perceptible aura, that impression which the approach of individuals makes upon us, that is borne upon the pages of a letter, that comes with a gift, that clusters around a bouquet, that clings to a few withered leaves, has its interest upon the brain, in irritating it, dulling it, or inspiriting it to action. Neither friendship nor love can bud or blossom without there first exists receptivity of touch. It cannot be forced more than can oil and water be homogeneously mingled. The error of man through the ages has arisen from his belief that might could force incompatibility into homogeneity. Society having ignored woman as a factor, making of her but a fraction, religion and legislation having seized upon her in order to define her powers and her rights, we look back through history in search of the result.