[1] "A work," continues the translator, "which can profit the reader, and which brings marvellous contentment to those who frequent the courts of the _grands seigneurs_, and who wish to learn how to talk of an infinite number of things opposed to the common opinion." S. 1. 1603.
[3] Someone remarked in the course of a conversation: "The peasant is a real person; he is a scientist, a physicist." All modern political effort tends to turn the physicist into a metaphysician. This effort is well under way for the working-man, who begins to despise toil and value phrases. His surprise is great when he finds that the word has no effect upon reality.
Women's rôle in the work of civilization is so great that it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the edifice is reared on the shoulders of these frail caryatides. Women know things that have never been written or taught, and without which almost the whole equipment of our daily life would be rendered useless. In 1814, some Cossacks, who had discovered a supply of stockings, drew them on directly over their boots--a general example of our commonest acts, had not women, for centuries of centuries, been the patient teachers of childhood. This rôle is so natural that it seems humble. We are struck only by what is extraordinary. The powerful machinery of a woolen-mill overwhelms us. Who has ever felt moved at the sight of the simple play of a pair of knitting-needles? Yet, compared with these little sticks, the greatest power-loom becomes insignificant. It represents a particular civilization. The wooden or steel needles represent absolute civilization. In every field the essential should be distinguished from the accessory. In civilization women's part represents the essential.
It is easier to feel this than to prove it, for it is a question precisely of those acts which pass unperceived along life's path--of all sorts of things which are never mentioned, because they are not observed or because their importance is not understood. Thus physiology was long unknown, while curiosity was occupied with monsters. The continuous phenomenon ceases to exist for our senses. It was a city-dweller, or a prisoner, or a blind man suddenly restored to sight, who first noted natural beauty. There is an external physiology which disappears in habit. Analyzed, it reveals the most important voluntary act of our lives--voluntary, in the sense that they are contingent compared with the primordial movements of the life of a species; voluntary, if the will be regarded as the consciousness of an unconscious effort.