From the lofty height of her genius, she scorns her womanly duty, and she is trying to make a man of herself.
He speaks, e.g., as if species and genera were fixed and unchangeable; and fixing his eye on the ideal forms in their purity and self-sameness, he scorns the phenomenal world, whence this identity and persistence are absent.
Invective and apology he scorns alike, nor troubles himself to show, with Claudian, even a suppressed grief at the indignities put upon the old religion by the new.