 So while Marinella asserts (on the authority of Aristotle and scripture) that we can know the souls of men and women to be forms of the same species, rational souls, and equal in that respect, she also insists that this fundamental sameness allows nonetheless for distinctions in merit. Women’s souls are superior to those of men, because the moral character of women makes their faculty of desire, and ultimately also their faculty of reason, better than men’s. The superiority of women’s desires she traces to their temperate physiology, and she takes the proof of the superiority of their souls to be manifested in the beauty of their bodies.