ABSTRACT
Religious Positivism is, in principle, as the author have said, a “positivization” of Catholicism. That is to say, it takes from Catholicism—considered as a creation and expression of the mind of Humanity—a number of its great conceptions, symbols and institutions, and assigns to them a positive, or scientific, sense and use. The author was not, in principle, positivizing Protestantism—which Comte decisively reprobated, and excluded almost entirely from religious commemoration; he was positivizing Catholicism; and the centre of the Catholic worship—the centre, too, as a consequence, of its doctrine and discipline—is the Mass. It is obvious that this Utopia of the “Virgin Mother,” is even more a Utopia of the Virgin Father, for, under it, assuming its realization, the husband would become only a detached and sympathetic spectator of his wife’s processes of procreation—a kind of Positivist St. Joseph.
