These rules have all a reference to generation, and yet women past child-bearing are no more supposed to be exempted from them than those in the flower of their youth and beauty. General rules are often extended beyond the principle whence they first arise, and this holds in all matters of taste and sentiment. It is a vulgar story at Paris that during the rage of the Mississippi a hump-backed fellow went every day into the Rue de Quincempoix, where the stock-jobbers met in great crowds, and was well paid for allowing them to make use of his hump as a desk in order to sign their contracts upon it. Would the fortune which he raised by this invention make him a handsome fellow, though it be confessed that personal beauty arises very much from ideas of utility? The imagination is influenced by association of ideas, which, though they arise at first from the judgment, are not easily altered by every particular exception that occurs to us. To which we may add, in the present case of chastity, that the example of the old would be pernicious to the young, and that women, continually thinking that a certain time would bring them the liberty of indulgence, would naturally advance that period and think more lightly of this whole duty so requisite to society.
Those who live in the same family have such frequent opportunities of licence of this kind that nothing could preserve purity of manners were marriage allowed among the nearest relations, or were any intercourse of love between them ratified by law and custom. Incest, therefore, being pernicious in a superior degree, has also a superior turpitude and moral deformity annexed to it. {p250}
What is the reason why, by the Athenian laws, one might marry a half-sister by the father but not by the mother? Plainly this:—The manners of the Athenians were so reserved that a man was never permitted to approach the women’s apartment, even in the same family, unless where he visited his own mother. His step-mother and her children were as much shut up from him as the women of any other family, and there was as little danger of any criminal correspondence between them. Uncles