makes the very true remark:  They are made to trade with our own weaknesses and our follies, but not with our reason.  The sympathies that exist between them and men are skin-deep only, and do not touch the mind or the feelings or the character.  They form the sexus sequior—­the second sex, inferior in every respect to the first; their infirmities should be treated with consideration; but to show them great reverence is extremely ridiculous, and lowers us in their eyes.  When Nature made two divisions of the human race, she did not draw the line exactly through the middle.  These divisions are polar and opposed to each other, it is true; but the difference between them is not qualitative merely, it is also quantitative.

[Footnote 1:  Translator’s Note.—–­ Juan Huarte (1520?-1590) practised as a physician at Madrid.  The work cited by Schopenhauer is known, and has been translated into many languages.]

[Footnote 2:  Translator’s Note.—­See Counsels and Maxims, p. 12, Note.]

This is just the view which the ancients took of woman, and the view which people in the East take now; and their judgment as to her proper position is much more correct than ours, with our old French notions of gallantry and our preposterous system of reverence—­that highest product of Teutonico-Christian stupidity.  These notions have served only to make women more arrogant and overbearing; so that one is occasionally reminded of the holy apes in Benares, who in the consciousness of their sanctity and inviolable position, think they can do exactly as they please.

But in the West, the woman, and especially the lady, finds herself in a false position; for woman, rightly called by the ancients, sexus sequior, is by no means fit to be the object of our honor and veneration, or to hold her head higher than man and be on equal terms with him.  The consequences of this false position are sufficiently obvious.  Accordingly, it would be a very desirable thing if this Number-Two of the human race were in Europe also relegated to her natural place, and an end put to that lady nuisance, which not only moves all Asia to laughter, but would have been ridiculed by Greece and Rome as well.  It is impossible to calculate the good effects which such a change would bring about in our social, civil and political arrangements.  There would be no necessity for the Salic law:  it would be a superfluous truism.  In Europe the lady, strictly so-called, is a being who should not exist at all; she should be either a housewife or a girl who hopes to become one; and she should be brought up, not to be arrogant, but to be thrifty and submissive.  It is just because there are such people as ladies in Europe that the women of the lower classes, that is to say, the great majority of the sex, are much more unhappy than they are in the East.  And even Lord Byron says:  Thought of the state of women under the ancient