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.