human
she even seeks the patronage of Queen Anne, as the most prominent and influential member of her sex. François Poullain de la Barre, however, who half a century later became heir to her spiritual legacy, was an out-and-out revolutionist, whose theories of female equality proceeded from generally revolutionary tendencies. Like Mlle de Gournay, he was a theorist, but he differed from her in being above all a philosopher of the school of Descartes, and the first to apply the doctrine of Cartesianism to social problems. This consideration renders him important not merely as the direct advocate of the cause of woman, in which capacity his efforts met with no success whatever, but as the forerunner of J. J. Rousseau in his theory of human rights, which in its turn became the basis of the feminist movement in England in the last years of the next century, inaugurated by Mary Wollstonecraft. As M. Piéron puts it,
gpt
[8] The utter obscurity in which this author remained buried for two centuries is probably due to his life of retirement,--as M. Henri Grappin has pointed out in opposition to M. Piéron's opinion, who, basing himself upon evidence of style and language, adjudged him to be a frequent visitor to salons--to his complete indifference to worldly fame, and to this freedom from worldly ambitions. His work, like that of Mlle de Gournay, was received with a mixture of scorn and ridicule, and soon forgotten. A century later, some of the works of the Encyclopedians, which developed the same social ideas--with a striking difference in the matter of female education,--were burnt by the common hangman by order of the authorities, who could not, however, prevent the new ideas from taking root and bearing fruit. In striking contrast, Poullain, whose revolutionism found few sympathisers and was consequently adjudged harmless, was left at peace, and brought out his revolutionary treatises
human
, and
gpt
, for which he paid with disregard and oblivion. Both Mary Wollstonecraft and Poullain should have been born in the nineteenth century, but whereas the former was the embodiment of that indomitable spirit of rebellion which had taken almost a century to mature, Poullain stands revealed to the modern reader, a living anachronism. There is something in his
human
which anticipates the intellectual