On the whole, these Enlightenment authors were just carrying on an older tradition of mixing brilliance about some matters with daftness about others. In ancient Greece, for example, Plato approved of female education, yet also thought that women were the reincarnations of men who had been cowardly or immoral in a previous life. (It could have been worse: more serious failures were reborn as shellfish.) Aristotle wrote Europe’s greatest foundational works of ethics and politics, but only in the context of free Greek males: everyone else was of a lesser nature.
