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that religion is neither mystical, nor incomprehensible, nor absolute. It is simply a scheme of rational knowledge, enlarged into a practical rule of earthly life. We Comtists," as some still perversely call us; for we do not base our faith on Comte's words, example, or precept. We base them on the sum of Positive knowledge. This sum of Positive knowledge was neither discovered nor collected much less revealed by Auguste Comte. It was in part arranged and co-ordinated, connected and illustrated by him-and that (I say it most reverently, but most definitely) with constant errors, much premature generalization, and not a little defective knowledge. It no more disturbs ine to have to admit mistakes, fallacies, ignorance in the philosophy of Comte than to admit them in Aristotle and Descartes. And as I am neither Aristotelian nor Cartesian, so I am not Comtist. The only authority I can recognize is the sum of man's Positive knowledge; and the only interpreter of that knowledge is the final judgment of the most competent minds. The very suggestion of any man having closed the progress of knowledge at once amazes and disgusts me.

But, on the other hand, though Auguste Comte is to us one of the great teachers of mankind, having no indisputable authority such as we shrink from giving to other great teachers, he is no mere philosopher, head of a school of science, and intellectual reformer. He is the founder of a Religion-but there again not the inventor of a religion-much less the revealer or Prophet of a new religion, The religion of Humanity is not new: it was not a discovery of Auguste Comte: he was not the first even to introduce it to our age. The religion of Humanity is as old as Humanity all other kinds of religions are merely parts of it, germs of it, strivings after it, forecasts and types of it. The religion of Humanity began with civilization and with human nature. It has been a constant living force-disguised now as the worship of nature, or of many gods, now as the worship of one God, or of the Infinite and the Unknowable. It was always and every where the living bond which held together the family, which formed nations, and stirred men to all that was good and great. We meet here to-day, not to acknowledge our faith in a new Religion we meet to submit our consciences

to the oldest religion known to this planet; to go back to human nature in its primæval simplicity. We rest in a 1eligious faith of which the Judaisms, the Buddhisms, the Romanisms of East and West are but late perversions.

Of this Religion-the essential and primitive bond of Human Nature--Auguste Comte never was, and never professed to be the inventor. But he professed to be-and he was-to use his own word, the "institutor," or founder. That is to say, he put on a solid foundation, made intelligible, plain, coherent, forms of belief and of feeling which for ages had been living and working indeed, but were indistinctly seen, vague, misunderstood, without any scientific ground, perpetually covered by a mass of accumulated and superincumbent débris. Comte did not discover the Religion of Love and of Faith in Human Nature-which was there already. He did discover that it was the real religion, and that it was ample in itself without supernatural and superterrestrial ideas about religion. And by his wonderful sketch of sociology as a science (ébauche he loved to call it) Comte gave this religion of Human Nature a basis of demonstrative reality, and thus closed the long warfare between Science and Religion, Philosophy and Devotion. This was not to invent a new Religion-I can hardly say how much the idea of such a new Tower of Babel" disgusts me-but it was to found the Old Religion, which arrogance and vanity had long buried under so much dogma and so many dreams.

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This difference between "inventing" a new thing, and "founding," or giving permanent foundation to an old thing which had been obscured, misunderstood, and misused, is so important that I will try to illustrate it by a figure. When Watt discovered the steam-engine, or Wheatstone the electric telegraph, they "invented" new instruments of enormous power, of which certainly the inorganic materials existed, but of which the idea, construction, and use had never before been known on this earth. When Columbus or Cook discovered unknown continents and islands across the ocean, they found lands, peoples, minerals, vegetables, and animals-a flora and a fauna, which had, indeed, been there for ages-but which were so completely new at the time of discovery that, though only on the

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other side of this planet, they no more affected Europe, Asia, and Africa than if they had been placed on Mars. Comte never was, and never claimed to be, the inventor" or discoverer" of a new Religion in this sense. What he did say was this: "Mankind has for ages persistently sought for a permanent religion in all kinds of form. Now, a scientific study of history and sound anthropology show that the essence of all these efforts lies in a combination of Hope in Man's Future with veneration for Man's higher nature, knowledge of Man's past history, his actual resources and limits. This is the essence of religion; and hopes of an eternal Heaven and assertions about the Universe and its origin are not religion at all, but hindrances of religion. Your old love and faith in Human Nature itself, is your religion. And all that you need is to clear it from the clouds, grave on your minds its scientific certainty, and allow yourselves to see it in its true beauty!"

The change which this involves is, no doubt, very great-deep, wide, and startling. But it is not a change from the old to something new and unknown, it is not a leap in the dark. It is a clearing off of the new to come down to the old foundation, to abandon ambitious dreams for solid good. It is unquestionably a new Era; but it is a simple and a continuous development. It is as when Julius and his successors in the Empire said to the Romans" Peace is your real glory not war. Your dreams of perpetual warfare and universal dominion are cruel superstitions and degrading phantoms. Your mission, Romans, is to civilize in peace the nations you have incorporated. The true greatness of the Roman Republic is to count all Southern Europe among her citizens. Or, as when St. Paul said to the Jews-Cease your ambitious dreams of a conquering Messiah. The true Messiah bears a message of Faith, Hope, Charity which the Prophets and Priests used to utter to the stricken remnant of Israel, and which, I tell you, is to be offered to every son of Man, who is, every one of them, a son of God." Or, as when wise and peaceful statesmen slowly taught the people of Europe that industry, not war, was the true business of civilized man that Peace hath her victories far more renowned than war. Or, as if an English

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statesman were to arise and tell the democratic agitators of to-day that England is now a democratic Republic if we choose to act like citizens, that good government is a more urgent want than an ideally perfect machine for taking votes, and that Home Rule, in the true sense, is a far nobler ideal than any Imperial Federation of the English race. Or, just as we here tell the Socialists around us, that the essence of Socialism is a moral, social, and religious education of the people-without which, to confiscate the wealth of the actual capitalists, and to put hungry and angry workmen to direct the capital of society, would be a disaster to all; for true Socialism consists in the spread of a religion of social duty, and not in social wars, proscriptions, and confiscations. All of these are examples of a New Era being founded by a return to, or the development of, old and living forces, which have been thrust aside or misunderstood, under the spur of ambition, arrogance, and vanity.

This is the meaning of the underlying maxim of Positive Philosophy-Progress is the development of Order. That is to say, our true hopes for the Future lie, not in destroying the institutions and products of the Past, but in cultivating them to their normal issue and purpose. There is nothing new in Positivism, except in making new use of our old resources. On the other hand, there is nothing in Positivism absolutely old, in the sense of returning to anything in the Past as it used to be. We can neither stand still, nor can we go back. We must go forward. We can recall nothing, no more than the old man can recall his youth, or the youth his childhood. We must change everything. But we can create, invent, originate, in an absolute sense, nothing. Whatever pretends to be absolutely new, without parentage or preparation, is a manifest imposture. Everything must be developed — ie., evolved by normal growth out of the conditions and germs of the Past. There are infinite meanings and inexhaustible applications in the maxim: Progress is the development of order.

Thus, with all its daring ideal of a New Era in every sphere of human life, Positivism is, in the true and noble sense of that term, profoundly conservative. It traces the growth of the great institutions of Humanity back for tens of thousands

of years to the very dawn of civilized society, and it finds them all and every where living forces, working for human good the Family, Marriage, the Domestic education, Political Government, Nations, the appropriation of capital, the differentiation of social functions, the influence of a spiritual authority, the transmission of ideas, of materials, of memories, the diverse offices of the sexes, the tendency to continual differentiation, along with a collateral tendency to union and organization by common beliefs and venerations. Our Positive Religion finds these institutions, habits, and tendencies, with a history of a hundred centuries, ever more and more definitely marked, and it aims at developing these diversities to their normal issue-not at assimilation and uniformity. It seeks to purify and spiritualize the great social institutions-not to materialize them or annihilate them.

In nothing is this character more conspicuous than in Comte's teaching as to the social Future of Woman. It is intensely conservative as to the distinctive quality with which civilization has ever invested women, while it is ardently progressive in its aim to purify and spiritualize the social function of women. It holds firmly the middle ground between the base apathy which is satisfied with the actual condition of woman as it is, and the rest. less materialism which would assimilate, as far as possible, the distinctive functions of women to those of men, which would equalize the sexes' in the spirit of justice. as they phrase it, and would pulverize the social groups of families, sexes, and professions into individuals organized, if at all, by unlimited resort to the ballotbox. Herein Positivism is truly conservative in holding society to be made up of families, not of individuals, and in developing, not in annihilating, the differences of sex, age, and relation between individuals.

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necessity for all. In many societies of a high civilization, from the point of view of intellectual activity or military organization, the condition of women is often found to be one of seclusion, neglect, or humiliation, moral, physical, and intellectual. Even to-day, under the most favorable conditions-conditions, perhaps, more often found in some sections of the laboring classes of cities rather than among the spoiled daughters of wealth and power

it is shocking to see how backward is the education of women as a sex, how much their lives are overburdened by labor, anxiety, and unwomanly fatigues, by frivolous excitement and undue domestic responsibility, by the fever of public ambitions and cynical defiance of all womanly ideals.

No we can never rest satisfied with the current prejudice that assigns to woman, even to those with ample leisure and resources, an education different in kind and degree and avowedly inferior to that of men, which supposes that even a superior education for girls should be limited to a moderate knowledge of a few modern languages, and a few elegant accomplishments. This truly Mohammedan or Hindoo view of woman's education is no longer openly avowed by cultured people of our own generation. But it is too obviously still the practice in fact throughout the whole Western world, even for nine tenths of the rich. And as to the education which is officially provided for the poor, it is in this country, at least, almost too slight to deserve the name at all. For this most dreadful neglect Positivism calls aloud for radical relief. It calls aloud for an education for women in the same line as that of men, to be given by the same teachers, and covering the same ground, though not at all necessarily to be worked out in common or in the same form and with the saine practical detail. It must be an education, essentially in scientific basis, the same as that of men, conducted by the same, and those the best attainable, instructors-an education certainly not inferior, rather superior to that of men, inasmuch as it can easily be freed from the drudgery incidental to the practice of special trades, and also because it is adapted to the more sympathetic, more alert, more tractable, more imaginative intelligence of woinen.

So, also, we look to the good feeling of

the future to relieve women from the agonizing wear and tear of families far too large to be reared by one mother-a burden which crushes down the best years of life for so many mothers, sisters, and daughters-a burden which, while it exists, makes all expectation of superior education or greater moral elevation in the masses of women mere idle talk-a burden which would never be borne at all, were it not that the cry of the market for more child labor produces an artificial bounty on excessively large families. And to the future we look to set women free from the crushing factory labor which is the real slave-trade of the Nineteenth Century, one of the most retrograde changes in social order ever made since Feudalism and Church together extinguished the slavery of the ancient world. In many ways this slavery of modern Industrialism is quite as demoralizing to men and women, and in some ways as injurious to society, as ever was the mitigated slavery of the Roman Empire, though its evils are not quite so startling and so cruel.

These are the wants which, in our eyes, press with greatest urgency on the condition of women, and not their admission to all the severe labors and engrossing professions of men, the assimilation of the life of women to the life of men, and especially to a share in all public duties and privileges. The root of the matter is that the social function of women is essentially and increasingly different from that of men. What is this function? It is personai, direct, domestic; working rather through sympathy than through action, equally in tellectual as that of men, but acting more through the imagination, and less through logic. We start from this-neither exaggerating the difference, nor denying it, but resting in the organic difference between woman and man. It is proved by all sound biology, by the biology both of man and of the entire animal series. It is proved also by the history of civilization, and the entire course of human evolution. It is brought home to us every hour of the day, by the instinctive practice of every family. And it is illustrated and ideal ized by the noblest poetry of the world, whether it be the great epics of the past or the sum of modern romance.

It is a difference of nature, I say, an organic difference, alike in body, in mind, in feeling, and in character-a difference

which it is the part of evolution to develop and not to destroy, as it is always the part of evolution to develop organic differences and not to produce their artificial assimilation. A difference, I have said; but not a scale of superiority or inferiority. No theory can more deeply repudiate the brutal egoism of past ages, and of too many present men of the world, which classes women as the inferiors of men, and the cheap sophistry of the vicious and the overbearing that the part of women in the life of humanity is a lower, a less intellectual, or less active part. Such a view is the refuge of coarse natures and stunted brains. Who can say whether it is nobler to be husband or to be wife, to be mother or to be son? Is it more blessed to love or be loved, to form a character or to write a poem ? Enough of these idle conundrums, which are as cynical as they are senseless. Everything depends on how the part is played, how near each one of us comes to the higher ideal-how our life is worked out, not whether we be born man or woman, in the first half of the century or in the second. The thing which concerns us is to hold fast by the organic difference implanted by Nature between Man and Woman, in body, in mind, in feeling, and in energy, without any possibility of talking of higher and lower, of better or of

worse.

Fully to work out the whole meaning of this difference in all its details, would involve a complete education in Anthropology and Ethics, and nothing but the bare heads of the subject can here be noticed. It begins with the difference in physical organization-the condition, and, no doubt in one sense, the antecedent (I do not say the cause) of every other difference. The physical organization of women differs from that of men in many ways it is more rapidly matured, and yet, possibly, more viable (as the French say), more likely to live, and to live longer; it is more delicate, in all senses of the word, more sympathetic, more elastic, more liable to shock and to change; it is obviously less in weight, in mass, in physical force, but above all in muscular persistence. It is not true to say that the feminine organization is, on the whole, weaker, because there are certain forms of fatigue, such as those of nursing the sick or the infant, minute care of domestic details. ability to

resist the wear and tear of anxiety on th body, in which women certainly at present much surpass men. But there is one feature in the feminine organization which, for industrial and political purposes, is more important than all. It is subject to functional interruption absolutely incompatible with the highest forms of continuous pressure. With mothers, this interruption amounts to seasons of prostration during many of the best years of life with all women (but a small exception not worth considering) it involves some interruption to the maximum working capacity. A normal, perfectly healthy man works from childhood to old age, marries and brings up a family of children, without knowing one hour of any one day when he was not "" quite fit." No woman could say the same; and of course no mother could deny that, for months she had been a simple invalid. Now, for all the really severe strains of industrial, professional, and public careers, the first condition of success is the power to endure long continuous pressure at the highest point, without the risk of sudden collapse, even for an hour.

Supposing all other forces equal, it is just the five per cent of periodical unfit. ness which makes the whole difference between the working capacity of the sexes. Imagine an army in the field or a fleet at sea, composed of women. In the course of nature, on the day of battle or in a storm, a percentage of every regiment and of every crew would be in child-bed, and a much larger percentage would be, if not in hospital, below the mark or liable to contract severe disease if subject to the strain of battle or storm. Of course it will be said that civil life is not war, and that mothers are not intended to take part. But ali women may become mothers; and though industry, the professions, and politics are not war, they do, and they ought to, call forth qualities of endurance, readiness, and indomitable vigor quite as truly

as war.

Either the theory of opening all occupations to women means opening them to an unsexed minority of women, or it means a diminution and speedy end to the human race, or it means that the severer occupations are to be carried on in a fashion far more desultory and amateurish than ever has yet been known. It is owing to a very natural shrinking from hard facts, and a

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somewhat misplaced conventionality, that this fundamental point has been kept out of sight, while androgynous ignorance has gone about claiming for women a life of toil, pain, and danger, for which every husband, every biologist, every physician, every mother-every true woman-knows that women are, by the law of nature, unfit.

This is, as I said, merely a preliminary part of the question. It is decisive and fundamental, no doubt, and it lies at the root of the matter. It is a plain organic fact, that ought to be treated frankly, and which I have touched on as an incident only but with entire directness. But I feel it to be, after all, a material, and not an intellectual or spiritual ground, and to belong to the lower aspects of the question. We must notice it, for it cannot be disregarded; but it is by no means the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is the greater power of affection in Woman, or, it is better to say, the greater degree in which the nature of Woman is stimulated and controlled by affection. It is a stigma on our generation that so obvious a commonplace should need one word to support it. Happily there is one trait in humanity which the most cynical sophistry has hardly ventured to deny― the devotion of the mother to her offspring. This is the universal and paramount aspect of the matter. For the life of every man or woman now alive, or that ever lived, has depended on the mother's love, or that of some woman who played a mother's part. It is a fact so transcendent that we are wont to call it an animal instinct. It is, however, the central and most perfect form of human feeling. It is possessed by all women it is the dominant instinct of all women; it possesses women, whether mothers or not, from the cradle to the grave. The most degraded woman is in this superior to the most heroic man (abnormal cases apart). It is the earliest, most organic, most universal of all the innate forces of mankind. it still remains the supreme glory of Humanity. In this central feature of human nature, Women are always and every where incontestably pre-eminent. And round this central feature of human nature, al! human civilization is, and ought to be organized, and to perfecting it all human institutions do, and ought to converge.

And

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