abdication will be useless, unless it is entirely voluntary. Now this is precisely the result which Positivism attains, because it takes up the very ground on which the claims of intellect are defended, namely, scientific demonstration, a ground which the defenders of intellect cannot repudiate without suspicion at once attaching to their motives. But theological or metaphysical remedies can only exasperate the disease. By oppressing the intellect they provoke it to fresh insurrection against the heart. [Intellectual and moral affinities of women with Positivism] For all these reasons, women, who are better judges of moral questions than ourselves, will admit that Positivism, incontestably superior as it is to other systems intellectually, surpasses them yet more in dealing with the affections. Their only objection arises from confounding Positive Philosophy itself with its preliminary course of scientific study. Women’s minds no doubt are less capable than ours of generalizing very widely, or of carrying on long processes of deduction. They are, that is, less capable than men of abstract intellectual exertion. On the other hand, they are generally more alive to that combination of reality with utility which is one of the characteristics of Positive speculation. In this respect they have much in common intellectually with the working classes; and fortunately they have also the same advantage of being untrammelled by the present absurd system of education. Nor is their position far removed from what it should be normally; being less engaged than men in the business of life, their contemplative faculties are called into activity more easily. Their minds are neither preoccupied nor indifferent; the most favourable condition for the reception of philosophical truth. They have far more affinity intellectually with philosophers who truly deserve the name, than we find in the scientific men of the present day. Comprehensiveness of thought they consider as important as positivity, whereas our savants care for nothing but the latter quality, and even that they understand imperfectly. Molière’s remarkable expression, _des clartés de tout_, which I applied in the last chapter to popular education, was used by him in reference to women. Accordingly we find that women took a vivid interest in the very first attempt made to systematize Positive speculation, the Cartesian philosophy. No more striking proof could be given of their philosophical affinities; and the more so that in the Cartesian system moral and social speculations were necessarily excluded. Surely, then, we may expect them to receive Positivism far more favourably, a system of which the principal subject of speculation is the moral problem in which both sexes are alike interested.