important acts of actual life, public and private; to arbitrate in cases
of practical conflict; to preach sermons recalling those principles of
generality and universal harmony which our special activities dispose us
to ignore; to order the due classification of society; to perform the
various ceremonies appointed by the founder of the religion. The
authority of the priesthood is to rest wholly on voluntary adhesion, and
there is to be perfect freedom of speech and discussion. This provision
hardly consists with Comte's congratulations to the tsar Nicholas on the
"wise vigilance" with which he kept watch over the importation of
Western books.

Women.

From his earliest manhood Comte had been powerfully impressed by the
necessity of elevating the condition of women. (See remarkable passage
in his letters to M. Valat, pp. 84-87.) His friendship with Madame de
Vaux had deepened the impression, and in the reconstructed society women
are to play a highly important part. They are to be carefully excluded
from public action, but they are to do many more important things than
things political. To fit them for their functions, they are to be raised
above material cares, and they are to be thoroughly educated. The
family, which is so important an element of the Comtist scheme of
things, exists to carry the influence of woman over man to the highest
point of cultivation. Through affection she purifies the activity of
man. "Superior in power of affection, more able to keep both the
intellectual and the active powers in continual subordination to
feeling, women are formed as the natural intermediaries between Humanity
and man. The Great Being confides specially to them its moral
Providence, maintaining through them the direct and constant cultivation
of universal affection, in the midst of all the distractions of thought
or action, which are for ever withdrawing men from its influence....
Beside the uniform influence of every woman on every man, to attach him
to Humanity, such is the importance and the difficulty of this ministry
that each of us should be placed under the special guidance of one of
these angels, to answer for him, as it were, to the Great Being. This
moral guardianship may assume three types,--the mother, the wife and the
daughter; each having several modifications, as shown in the concluding
volume. Together they form the three simple modes of solidarity, or
unity with contemporaries,--obedience, union and p