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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- PREFATORY NOTE TO THIRD EDITTON
- Contents
- PREFACE
- POSITIVIST LIBRARY
- HINT TO THE READER
- INTRODUCTION
- First Part EXPLANATION OF THE WORSHIP
- Second Part EXPLANATION OF THE DOCTRINE
- CONVERSATION VI The Doctrine as a Whole
- CONVERSATION VII The External Order, first Inorganic, then Vital
- CONVERSATION VIII The Human Order, first Social, then Moral
- Third Part EXPLANATION OF THE REGIME, OR SYSTEM OF LIFE
- CONCLUSION: GENERAL HISTORY OF RELIGION
- TABLES
CONVERSATION VII - The External Order, first Inorganic, then Vital
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
- Frontmatter
- PREFATORY NOTE TO THIRD EDITTON
- Contents
- PREFACE
- POSITIVIST LIBRARY
- HINT TO THE READER
- INTRODUCTION
- First Part EXPLANATION OF THE WORSHIP
- Second Part EXPLANATION OF THE DOCTRINE
- CONVERSATION VI The Doctrine as a Whole
- CONVERSATION VII The External Order, first Inorganic, then Vital
- CONVERSATION VIII The Human Order, first Social, then Moral
- Third Part EXPLANATION OF THE REGIME, OR SYSTEM OF LIFE
- CONCLUSION: GENERAL HISTORY OF RELIGION
- TABLES
Summary
The Woman.—By studying the table which summarizes our fundamental conversation, I understand, my father, the necessity for the two others on the Positive doctrine which you promised me at its close. My heart must first make me feel the need of each encyclopedic phase for the moral systematisation which is the grand object of this immense scientific construction. It is necessary now that my intellect should see how the separate stages of this abstract edifice succeed one another, from the base to the summit, without, however, penetrating into their interior. This systematic ascent becomes the indispensable complement of the descent which serves as its foundation and which I made under your guidance. If the mind of man can really mount, by an almost insensible progression, from the lowest mathematical notions to the sublimest moral conceptions, it will be for me the most admirable of all sights. Though my sex never can follow such a filiation in its details, it should at the present day grasp its feasibility in the general, in order to be sure that systematic morals can thus be rested on really safe foundations. Then the opinion of women will brand, as you wish, the anarchical sophists who, though theological belief is absolutely decayed, oppose the advent of the Positive faith, in order to prolong indefinitely a religious interregnum which favours their unworthiness and their incapacity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Catechism of Positive ReligionOr Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion in Thirteen Systematic Conversations between a Woman and a Priest of Humanity, pp. 140 - 159Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009First published in: 1891