[16] At a later period, under the influence of
circumstances equally personal, his opinions and feelings respecting
women were very much modified, without becoming more rational: in his
final scheme of society, instead of being treated as grown children,
they were exalted into goddesses: honours, privileges, and immunities,
were lavished on them, only not simple justice. On the other question,
the irrevocability of marriage, M. Comte must receive credit for
impartiality, since the opposite doctrine would have better suited his
personal convenience: but we can give him no other credit, for his
argument is not only futile but refutes itself. He says that with
liberty of divorce, life would be spent in a constant succession of
experiments and failures; and in the same breath congratulates himself
on the fact, that modern manners and sentiments have in the main
prevented the baneful effects which the toleration of divorce in
Protestant countries might have been expected to produce. He did not
perceive that if modern habits and feelings have successfully resisted
what he deems the tendency of a less rigorous marriage law, it must be
because modern habits and feelings are inconsistent with the perpetual
series of new trials which he dreaded.
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