A General View of Positivism by Auguste Comte (learn to read books TXT) 📕

than morally superior. Her nature was of rare endowment, moved by noble impulse, and yet allowing its due influence to reason. When she was beginning to study Positivism she wrote to me: “No one knows better than myself how weak our nature is unless it has some lofty aim beyond the reach of passion.” A short time afterwards, writing with all the graceful freedom of friendship, she let fall a phrase of deep meaning, almost unawares: “Our race is one which must have duties, in order to form its feelings.”

With such a nature my Saint Clotilde was, as may be supposed, fully conscious of the moral value of Positivism, though she had only one year to give to its study. A few months before her death, she wrote to me: “If I were a man, I should be your enthusiastic disciple; as a woman, I can but offer you my cordial admiration.” In the same letter she explains the part which she proposed to take in diffusing the principles of the new philosophy: “It is always well for a woman to follow modestly behind the army of renovators, even at the risk of losing a little of her own originality.” She describes our intellectual anarchy in this charming simile: “We are all standing as yet with one foot in the air over the threshold of truth.”

With such a colleague, combining as she did qualities hitherto shared amongst the noblest types of womanhood, it would have been easy to induce her sex to cooperate in the regeneration of society. For she gave a perfect example of that normal reaction of Feeling upon Reason which has been here set forward as the highest aim of Woman’s efforts. When she had finished the important work on which she was engaged, I had marked out for her a definite yet spacious field of cooperation in the Positivist cause: a field which her intellect and character were fully competent to occupy. I mention it here, to illustrate the mode in which women may help to spread Positivism through the West; giving thus the first example of the social influence which they will afterwards exert permanently. What I say has special reference to Italy and to Spain. In other countries it only applies to individuals who, though living in an atmosphere of free thought, have not themselves ventured to think freely. Success in this latter case is so frequent, as to make me confident that the agencies of which I am about to speak may be applied collectively with the same favourable result.

The intellectual freedom of the West began in England and Germany; and it had all the dangers of original efforts for which at that time no systematic basis could be found. With the legal establishment of Protestantism, the metaphysical movement stopped. Protestantism, by consolidating it, seriously impeded subsequent progress, and is still, in the countries where it prevails, the chief obstacle to all efficient renovation. Happily France, the normal centre of Western Europe, was spared this so-called Reformation. She made up for the delay, by passing at one stride, under the impulse given by Voltaire, to a state of entire freedom of thought; and thus resumed her natural place as leader of the common movement of social regeneration. But the French while escaping the inconsistencies and oscillations of Protestantism, have been exposed to all the dangers resulting from unqualified acceptance of revolutionary metaphysics. Principles of systematic negation have now held their ground with us too long. Useful as they once were in preparing the way for social reconstruction, they are now a hindrance to it. It may be hoped that when the movement of free thought extends, as it assuredly will, to the two Southern nations, where Catholicism has been more successful in resisting Protestantism and Deism, it will be attended with less injurious consequences. If France was spared the Calvinistic stage, there seems no reason why Italy and even Spain should not be spared Voltairianism. As a compensation for this apparent stagnation, they might pass at once from Catholicism to Positivism, without halting for any length of time at the negative stage. These countries could not have originated the new philosophy, owing to their insufficient preparation; but as soon as it has taken root in France, they will probably accept it with extreme rapidity. Direct attacks upon Catholicism will not be necessary. The new religion will simply put itself into competition with the old by performing in a better way the same functions that Catholicism fulfils now, or has fulfilled in past times.

All evidence, especially the evidence of the poets, goes to prove that before Luther’s time, there was less belief in the South of Europe, certainly less in Italy, than in the North. And Catholicism, with all its resistance to the progress of thought, has never been able really to revive the belief in Christianity. We speak of Italy and Spain as less advanced; but the truth is that they only cling to Catholicism because it satisfies their moral and social wants better than any system with which they are acquainted. Morally they have more affinity to Positivism than other nations; because their feelings of fraternity have not been weakened by the industrial development which has done so much harm in Protestant countries. Intellectually, too, they are less hostile to the primary principle of Positive Polity; the separation of spiritual and temporal power. And therefore they will welcome Positivism as soon as they see that in all essential features it equals and surpasses the medieval church. Now as this question is almost entirely a moral one, their convictions in this respect will depend far more upon Feeling than upon argument. Consequently, the work of converting them to Positivism is one for which women are peculiarly adapted. Positivism has been communicated to England by men. Holland, too, which has been the vanguard of Germany ever since the Middle Ages has been initiated in the same way still more efficiently. But its introduction in