Translated: the study of the relations of the brain with the body will lead us to discover the means of procreating children without the co-operation of man; this is the noblest aim of this study, as the faculty of being a virgin mother should be the ideal which the purest and most eminent women should seek to attain. "Thus," continues M. Comte, "I am led to represent the utopia of the Virgin Mother as the synthetic résume of positive religion, all the phases of which it combines."--_Ibid._ Translation: To procreate children without the concurrence of man, _sums up positive religion, and combines all its phases_. This may be very fine, but as to being _rational_ and _positive_--what do you think, readers? "The rationality of the problem," adds the author, "is founded upon the determination of the true office of the masculine apparatus, designed especially to supply to the blood an excitative fluid, capable of strengthening all the vital operations, whether animal or organic. In comparison with this general service, the special use of the fecundative stimulus becomes more and more secondary in proportion as the organism is elevated. It may thus be conceived that in the noblest species, this liquid ceases to be indispensable to the awakening of the germ, which may result artificially from several other, and even from material sources, especially from a better reaction of the nervous upon the vascular system."--_Ibid._ All this would be possible, I grant, _if_ the fluid of which you speak, High Priest, had, above all, the general function which you attribute to it; _If_ the reproduction of our species by the co-operation of the two sexes were not a _law_; _If_ we could preserve a species while destroying its law; _If_ facts did not contradict the possibility of the hypothesis. Now, to place an _if_ before a natural law and the phenomena which are its expression, is only a gross absurdity: we explain laws, we do not reform them without profoundly modifying the being that they govern; we do not destroy without destroying this being: for the individual being is _the law in form_. The author dwells as follows on the consequences of the absurd hypothesis. "Thence it may be conceived that civilization not only disposes man better to appreciate woman, but augments the participation of this sex in human reproduction, which ought, finally, _to emanate from it alone_. "Regarded individually, such a modification ought to improve the cerebral and corporal constitution of both sexes, by developing therein continued chastity, the importance of which has been felt more and more by universal instinct, even during irregularities.--p. 277.