Besides, he repeats continually that the ethics that he depicts would cause disorder in the civilized period; and that they can only be established progressively in subsequent periods. Many among the Phalansterians reject Fourier's ethics with respect to love as well as his Theodicy, and I myself have heard several discourses in which the orator condemned, not only falsity in conjugal relations, but also looseness of morals.
Fourier and the Saint Simonian orthodoxy have both been guilty of the same error with regard to the emancipation of woman; but, men, I repeat, must be very audacious to impute it to them as a crime, since they indulge themselves in worse; as to women, sustained and loved by these reformers, let them imitate the pious conduct of Shem and Japhet; one owes respect to his father, whatever may be the idea or the wine with which he is drunken.
Now that we have cited the master, let us enumerate the principal points of the Fourierist doctrine, touching the liberty of woman and the equality of the sexes:
1. Man and woman are composed of the same physical, moral and intellectual elements; there is, therefore, between the sexes, identity of nature.
2. The proportion of these elements differs in the two sexes, and constitutes the difference that exists between them.
3. This difference is so equalized that the value shall be equal. Where man is the stronger, he takes precedence of woman; where woman is stronger, she takes precedence of man.
4. Man belongs to the major mode: he has the ascendency over woman in intellect, in logic, in the larger manufactures, in friendship; it belongs to him therefore to create positive science, to connect facts, to regulate commercial relations, to bind together interests, and to organize groups and series. To all these things, woman brings her indispensable aid, but by reason of her aptitudes, her services are only secondary therein.
5. Woman belongs to the minor mode; she has the ascendency over man in the kind of intellect that applies and adapts, in the intuition that puts man on the track of the good to which masculine logic should attain; in the sphere of maternity in which she presides over education, for she comprehends the means to be employed to ameliorate the species in every respect better than man; in the sphere of love in which she has the right and the power to civilize and refine the relations of the sexes; and to stimulate man to conquest of the intellect, to the amelioration of the physical conditions of the globe, of industry, of art, of social relations, etc.
Woman intervenes to a certain point in the major mode, so does man enter into the minor mode, in which his coöperation is indispensable.
Thus, in general, in man the head predominates, in woman, the heart; but as both have a heart and a head, man, through his heart, becomes an aid in the minor mode, and woman, through her head, becomes an aid in the major mode.