We are told that in the East there was once a woman named Moarbeda who was a philosopher and considered to be the wisest woman of her time.  When Moarbeda was once asked:  “In what part of a woman’s body does her mind reside?” she replied:  “Between her thighs.”  To many women,—­perhaps, indeed, we might even say to most women,—­to a certain extent may be applied—­and in no offensive sense—­the dictum of the wise woman of the East; in a certain sense their brains are in their wombs.  Their mental activity may sometimes seem to be limited; they may appear to be passing through life always in a rather inert or dreamy state; but, when their sexual emotions are touched, then at once they spring into life; they become alert, resourceful, courageous, indefatigable.  “But when I am not in love I am nothing!” exclaimed a woman when reproached by a French magistrate for living with a thief.  There are many women who could truly make the same statement, not many men.  That emotion, which, one is tempted to say, often unmans the man, makes the woman for the first time truly herself.

“Women are more occupied with love than men,” wrote De Senancour (De l’Amour, vol. ii, p. 59); “it shows itself in all their movements, animates their looks, gives to their gestures a grace that is always new, to their smiles and voices an inexpressible charm; they live for love, while many men in obeying love feel that they are forgetting themselves.”

Restif de la Bretonne (Monsieur Nicolas, vol. vi, p. 223) quotes a young girl who well describes the difference which love makes to a woman:  “Before I vegetated; now all my actions have a motive, an end; they have become important.  When I wake my first thought is ‘Someone is occupied with me and desires me.’  I am no longer alone, as I was before; another feels my existence and cherishes it,” etc.

“One is surprised to see in the south,” remarks Bonstetten, in his suggestive book, L’Homme du Midi et l’Homme du Nord (1824),—­and the remark by no means applies only to the south,—­“how love imparts intelligence even to those who are most deficient in ideas.  An Italian woman in love is inexhaustible in the variety of her feelings, all subordinated to the supreme emotion which dominates her.  Her ideas follow one another with prodigious rapidity, and produce a lambent play which is fed by her heart alone.  If she ceases to love, her mind becomes merely the scoria of the lava which yesterday had been so bright.”

Cabanis had already made some observations to much the same effect.  Referring to the years of nubility following puberty, he remarks:  “I have very often seen the greatest fecundity of ideas, the most brilliant imagination, a singular aptitude for the arts, suddenly develop in girls of this age, only to give place soon afterward to the most absolute mental mediocrity.” (Cabanis,