A General View of Positivism: Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and LifeComte, Auguste
Philosophy
A General View of Positivism: Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
Comte, Auguste
Positivism
she had intended to refute the attacks upon marriage, contained in
the works of George Sand, to whom she was intellectually no less 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’.
[It is for women to
introduce Positivism into
the Southern nations]
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 co-operate 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 co-operation
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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