530 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



by certain rules, and wearing a peculiar garb.^ The suppression 

 of the teaching orders in 1904, under the provision of the hi sur 

 la suppression de V enseignement congreganiste, was a further 

 violation of the elementary right of the Church to organise for 

 her children that mode of teaching which she deems indispensable 

 for them. 



The ideal for the Church is certainly to be found in the formula 

 of Cavour, VEglise libre dans VEtat libre. One article suffices 

 for the establishment of this system : the Church ignores the 

 State, the State ignores the Church. Leave to the Church the 

 spiritual organisation of society, and the Hberty of pursuing 

 that aim as she thinks best ; and, similarly, the State must be 

 left entirely free to organise the material welfare of the nation. 

 This ideal is not a chimera ; this mutual separation of the two 

 spheres prevails in the United States, as it prevails also in 

 Belgium. The Church demands no privilege ; it demands only 

 liberty and the rights of the common law ; and the proof that 

 liberty does not slay the Church is seen by her progress in the 

 United States, in England, in Belgium, in Germany, in every 

 coimtry where she is placed on equal terms with other organisa- 

 tions, and where the State abstains from interference. 



" Even if our mental constitution," wrote Augusta Comte — and one 

 can rarely tire of citing Comte in these days wlien Positivism is often 



1 We have no space here to discuss the question of the social value of 

 the rehgious orders. We must, however, be careful to distinguish between 

 their social value during the Middle Ages and their social value to-day. 

 Celibacy, by ehminating persons whose egoistic instincts are developed 

 at the expense of their social instincts, must be considered as a factor of 

 importance in social selection, and obviously a considerable number of 

 socially unfit elements are attracted by the rehgious orders and eUminated. 

 We must consider the men who shrink from fulfiUing their primary social 

 duties as socially unfit, and it is to the interest of society that such persons 

 should be eliminated. It is, of course, evident that a man can pay his 

 debt to society in other ways than by founding a family — for instance, 

 by enriching its intellectual patrimony. Thus, the Society of Jesus has 

 amply discharged its social duties by its indefatigable intellectual activity. 



