Volume 36 — THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION OF COMTE.

IV.

In my last article I considered the subjective synthesis of Comte, or in other words, his attempt to systematize human knowledge in relation to the moral life of man. For it is his view, as we have seen, that science can never yield its highest fruit to man unless it be systematized—i.e., unless its different parts be connected together and put in their true place as parts of one whole. Scattered lights give no illumination; it is the esprit d'ensemble, the general idea in which our knowledge begins and ends, that ultimately determines the scientific value of each special branch of knowledge. But while synthesis is necessary, it is not necessary, according to Comte, that the synthesis should be objective. The error of mankind in the past has been that they supposed themselves able to ascertain the real or objective principle, which gives unity to the world, and able, therefore, to make their system of knowledge an ideal repetition of the system of things without them. Such a system, however, is entirely beyond our reach. The conditions of our lot, and the weakness of our intelligence, make it impossible for us to tell what is the real principle of unity in the world, or even whether such a principle exists. The attempts to discover it, made by Theology and Metaphysics, have been nothing more than elaborate anthropomorphisms, in which men gave to the unknown and unknowable reality, a form which was borrowed from their own. They saw in the clouds about them an exaggerated and distorted reflection of themselves, and regarded this Brocken spectre as the controlling power whose activity was the source and explanation of everything. Positivism, on the other hand, arises whenever men learn to recognize the nature of this illusion, and to confine their ambition within that which is really the limit of their intelligence. All that we can know is the resemblances and successions of phenomena, and not the things in themselves that are their causes; and if we seek to find a principle of unity for these phenomena, we must find it within and not without. We must organize knowledge with reference to our own wants, rather than with reference to the nature of things. We must regard everything as a means to an end, which is determined by some inner principle in ourselves—not as if we supposed that the world and all that is in it were made for us, or found its centre in us—but simply because this is the only point of view from which we can systematize knowledge, as it is indeed the only point of view from which we need care to systematize it.

It may be asked why system is necessary at all, why we should not be content with a fragmentary consciousness of the world, without attempting to gather the dispersed lights of science to one central principle. To critics like J. S. Mill, Comte's effort after system seems to be the result of an "original mental twist very common in French thinkers," of "an inordinate desire of unity." "That all perfection consists in unity, Comte apparently considers to be a maxim which no sane man thinks of questioning: it never seems to enter into his conceptions that any one could object ad initio, and ask, Why this universal systematizing, systematizing, systematizing? Why is it necessary that all human life should point but to one object, and be cultivated into a system of means to a single end?"[26] To this Mr. Bridges answers that unity in Comte's sense is "the first and most obvious condition which all moral and religious renovators, of whatever time or country, have by the very nature of their office set themselves to fulfil."[27] In other words, all moral and spiritual life depends upon the harmony of the individual with himself and with the world. A divided life is a life of weakness and misery, nor can life be divided intellectually, without being, or ultimately becoming, divided morally. Such unity, indeed, does not exclude—and in a being like man who is in course of development cannot altogether exclude—difference and even conflict. In the most steadily growing intellectual life there are pauses of difficulty and doubt; in the most continuous moral progress there are conflicts with self and others. But such doubts and difficulties will not greatly weaken or disturb us, so long as they are partial, so long as they do not affect the central principles of thought and action, so long as there is still some fixed faith which reaches beyond the disturbance, some certitude which is untouched by the doubt. If, however, we once lose the consciousness that there is any such principle, or if we try to rest on a principle which we at the same time feel to be inadequate, our spiritual life, in losing its unity or harmony with itself, must at the same time lose its purity and energy. It must become fitful and uncertain, the sport of accidental influences and tendencies; it must lower its moral and intellectual aims. This, in Comte's view, is what we have seen in the past. The decay of the old faiths, and of the objective synthesis based upon them, has emancipated us from many illusions, but it has, as it were, taken the inspiration out of our lives. It has made knowledge a thing for specialists who have lost the sense of totality, the sense of the value of their particular studies in relation to the whole; and it has made action feeble and wayward by depriving men of the conviction that there is any great central aim to be achieved by it. And these results would have been still more obvious, were it not that men are so slow in realizing what is involved in the change of their beliefs were it not that the habits and sympathies developed by a creed continue to exist long after the creed itself has disappeared. In the long run, however, the change of man's intellectual attitude to the world must bring with it a change of his whole life. As the creed which reconciled him to the world and bound him to his fellows ceases to affect him, he must be thrown back upon his own mere individuality, unless he can find another creed of equal or greater power to inspire and direct his life. And mere individualism is nothing, but anarchy. That this is so, was not indeed manifest to those who first expressed the individualistic principle: on the contrary, they seemed to themselves to have, in the assertion of individual right, not only an instrument for destroying the old faith and the old social order, but also the principle of a better faith, and the means of reconstructing a better order. But to us who have outlived the period when it could be supposed that the destruction of old, involves in itself the construction of new, forms of life and thought, it cannot but be obvious that the principles of private judgment and individual liberty are nothing more than negations. For as the real problem of our intellectual life is how to rise to a judgment which is more than private judgment, so the real problem of our practical life is how to realize a liberty that is more than individual license. It is in this sense that Comte says that the last three centuries have been a period of the insurrection of the intellect against the heart, a phrase by which he means to indicate at once the gain and the loss of the revolutionary movement; its gain, in so far as it emancipated the intelligence from superstitious illusions, and its loss, in so far as it destroyed the faith which was the bond of social union, without substituting any other faith in its room. At the same time, the expression points to a peculiarity of Comte's Psychology, which affects his whole view of the history, and especially of the religious history, of man; and it is therefore necessary to subject it to a careful examination.

Is it possible for the intellect to be in insurrection against the heart? In a sense already indicated this is possible. It is possible, in short, that the moral and intellectual spirit of a belief may still control the life of one who, so far as his explicit consciousness is concerned, has renounced it. Rooted as the individual is in a wider life than his own, it is often but a small part of himself that he can bring to distinct consciousness. Further, so little are most men accustomed to self-analysis; that they are seldom aware what it is that constitutes the inspiring power of their beliefs. Generally, at least in the first instance, they take their creed in gross, without distinguishing between essential and unessential elements. They confuse, in one general consecration of reverence, its primary principles, and the local and temporary accidents of the form in which it was first presented to them, and they are as ready to accept battle à l'outrance for some useless outwork as for the citadel itself. And, for the same reason, they are ready to think that the citadel is lost when the outwork is taken; to suppose, e.g., that the spiritual nature of man is a fiction if he was not directly made by God out of the dust of the earth, or that the Christian view of life has ceased to be true if a doubt can be thrown on the possibility of proving miracles. Yet however little the individual may be able to separate the particulars which are assailed from the universal with which they are accidentally connected, his whole nature must rebel against the sacrifice which logical consistency seems in such a case to demand from him. It is a painful experience when the first break is made in the implicit unity of early faith, and it is painful just in proportion to the depth of the spiritual consciousness which that faith has produced in the individual. Unable to separate that which he is obliged to doubt from that in which lies the principle of his moral, and, even of his intellectual, life, he is "in a strait betwixt two;" and no course seems to be open to him which does not involve the surrender, either of his intellectual honesty, or of that higher consciousness which alone "makes life worth living," Such a crisis is commonly described as a division between the heart and the head, for in it the articulate or conscious logic is on the side of disbelief, and the resisting conviction generally takes the form of a feeling, an impulse, an intuition, which the individual has for himself, but which he is unable to communicate in the same force to another. And, as such feelings and intuitions of the individual are necessarily subject to continual variation of intensity and clearness, so the struggle between doubt and faith may be long and difficult, the objections, which at one time seem as nothing, at another time appearing to be almost irresistible. Not seldom the result is a broken life, in which youth is given to revolt, and the rest of existence to a faith which vainly strives to be implicit. There is, indeed, no final and satisfactory issue from such an endless internal debate and conflict, until the "heart" has learned to speak the language of the "head,"—i.e., until the permanent principles which underlay and gave strength to faith have been brought into the light of distinct consciousness, and until it has been discovered how to separate them from the accidents, with which at first they were necessarily identified. The hard labour of distinguishing, in the traditions of the past, between the germinative principles, out of which the future must spring, and those external forms and adjuncts, which every day is making more incredible, must be undertaken by any one who would restore the broken unity of man's life. We begin our existence under the shadow and influence of a faith which is given to us, as it were; in our sleep; but in no age, and in this age less than any other, can man possess a spiritual life as a gift from the past without reconquering it for himself.

In this sense, then, we can understand how Comte might speak of an insurrection of the intelligence against the heart, which must be quelled ere the normal state of humanity could be restored; for this would be only another way of saying that, in the modern conflict of faith and reason, the substantial truth, or at least the most important truth, had, up to Comte's own time, been on the side of the former. In this view, the deep unwillingness of those nourished in the Christian or Catholic faith to yield to the logical battery of the Encyclopædists was not merely the result of an obscurantist hatred of light; it was also in great part due to a more or less definite sense of the moral, if not the intellectual, weakness of the principles which the Encyclopædists maintained. For, while the insurrection was justified in so far as it asserted the claims of the special sciences, it was to be condemned in so far as it involved the denial of all synthesis whatever, and also in so far as it was blind to the elements of truth in the imperfect synthesis of the past. It thus tended to destroy the spirit of totality and the sense of duty (l'esprit d'ensemble et le sentiment du devoir).[28] It practically denied the existence of any universal principle which could connect the different parts of knowledge with each other, of any general aim which could give unity to the life of man. Its analytic spirit was fatal, not only to the fictions of theology, but also to that growing consciousness of the solidarity of men of which theology had been the accidental embodiment. The reluctance of religious men to admit the claims of what appeared to be, and, indeed, to a certain extent was, light, was thus due to a more or less distinct perception that their own creed, amid all its partial errors, contained a central truth more important than all the partial truths of science. In clinging to the past they were preserving the germ of the future, and the final victory of science could not come until this germ had been disengaged from the husk of superstition under which it was hidden. Till that was done, the logic of the heart in clinging to its superstitions was better than the logic of the head in rebelling against them. In other words, the implicit reason of faith was wiser than the explicit reason of science.

But this is not all that Comte means. For him the appeal to the heart is not merely the appeal to feelings and intuitions, which are the result of the past development of human intelligence, and especially of the long discipline by which the Christian Church has moulded the modern spirit; it is an appeal to the altruistic affections as original or "innate" tendencies in man which are altogether independent of his intelligence. It is not that the reason of man often speaks through his feelings, but that feeling and reason have in themselves different, and even it may be opposite, voices. In this sense, the attempt has often been made in modern times to stop the invasions of critical reflection by setting up the heart as an independent authority. From the Lutheran theologian who said, "Pectus theologum facit," down to Mr. Tennyson who declares that whenever he heard "the voice—Believe no more,"

"A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath, the heart Stood up and answered, 'I have felt:'"

appeals have constantly been made to the feelings to resist the intrusion of doubt. Such appeals, however, cannot be regarded as otherwise than provisional and self-defensive. "The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with its joy;" but just for that reason it has no general content or independent authority of its own. Whether the "I feel it" mean little or much, depends upon the individual who utters it. It may be the concentrated expression of a long life of culture and discipline, or it may be the loud but empty voice of untrained passion and prejudice. The "unproved assertions of the wise and experienced," as Aristotle tells us, have great value, especially in ethical matters; but it is not because they are unproved assertions, but because we otherwise know that the speakers are wise and experienced. To appeal to the heart in general, without saying "whose heart," either means nothing, or it means an appeal to the natural man—i.e., man as he is before he has been sophisticated by culture and experience; but of the natural man, in this sense, nothing can be said. The further we go back in the history of the individual or the race the more imperfect does their utterance or manifestation become; and when we reach the beginning, we find that there is no manifestation or utterance at all. The natural man of Rousseau was simply an ideal creation, inspired with that intense and even morbid consciousness of self, and that fixed resolve to submit to no external law, which were characteristic of Rousseau himself, and which in him were the last product and quintessence of the individualism of the eighteenth century. The simplicity of this ideal figure was not the first simplicity of nature, but the simplicity of a spirit which has returned upon itself and asserted itself against the world; a kind of simplicity which never existed, at least in the same form, before the great Protestant revolt. The unhistorical character of this idea becomes doubly evident when we find that, as time goes on, and the spirit of the age alters, the qualities of the natural man are also changed. To St. Simon and Fourier, as to Rousseau, man is good by nature, and it is bad institutions or bad external influences which are the source of all the ills that flesh is heir to. But while with the latter the natural man is a solitary, whose chief good lies in the preservation of his independence, with the former he is essentially social, and what is wanted for his perfection and happiness is only to contrive an outward organization in which his social sympathies shall have free play. Comte, as we might expect, rises above these imperfect theories, in so far as he refuses to attribute all the evils of humanity to its external circumstances; but he does not get rid of the essential error which was common to them all, the error of seeking for the explanation of the higher life of humanity in the feelings of the natural man—feelings which are prior to, and independent of, the exercise of his reason, and which supply all the possible motives for that exercise. There are, in his view, two sets of "innate" feelings or desires, between which man's life is divided—the egoistic and the altruistic tendencies, each separate from the others as well as from the intelligence, and having its "organ" in a separate part of the brain. The egoistic feelings at first exist in man in far greater strength than the altruistic; but by the reaction of circumstances, and the influence of men upon each other, the latter have in the past gradually attained to greater power; and it is the ideal of the future to make their victory complete. Meanwhile, the intelligence is necessarily the instrument of desire, and its highest good is to be the instrument of altruistic as opposed to egoistic desire. For it has at best only a choice of masters, and the emancipation of the intelligence from the heart could mean only its becoming a slave of personal vanity. Comte's appeal, therefore, is still to the natural man, or rather to one element in him, which, however, as he acknowledges, is never so weak as it is in man's earliest or most natural state.

The psychology implied in this theory is substantially that which found its fullest expression in Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. Hume, with that tendency to bring things to a distinct issue which is his best characteristic, declares boldly that "reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." The passions or desires are tendencies of a definite character which exist in man from the first; the awaking intelligence cannot add to their number, or essentially change their nature. It can only take account of what they are, and calculate how best to satisfy them. "We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of reason and passion," for reason in itself determines the true and false, but it sets nothing before us as an end to be pursued and avoided. It does not constitute or transform the desires, which are given altogether apart from it, and the will is but the strongest desire. When we say that reason controls the passions what we mean is simply that a strong but calm tendency of our nature, which has reference to some remote object, overcomes some violent impulse towards a present delight; but for intelligence, in the strict sense of the word, to war with passion is a simple impossibility.

The modifications which Comte makes in this view of motive are comparatively trifling. He does not, indeed, like Hume, call reason the slave of the passions; rather he says that "l'esprit doit être le ministre du cœur, mais jamais son esclave;" but this change of language does not involve any important modification of Hume's theory. The intelligence has to give to the heart all kinds of information about the objects through which it may find satisfaction, but after all the end itself has to be determined solely by feeling and desire. In Comte's language the intellect is a "slave," when theology makes it acknowledge the existence of supernatural beings who are agreeable to our desires, but who have no reality as objects of experience; it is a "master," when it pursues its inquiries into the phenomena of the objective world, at the bidding of an errant curiosity, without reference to the well-being of man; it is in its true place as a "servant" when it studies the objective world freely, but only with reference to the end fixed for it by the affections. "L'univers doit être étudié non pour lui-même, mais pour l'homme, ou plutôt pour l'humanité;" and this, Comte thinks, will not be done if the intelligence be left to itself, but only if it be made subordinate to the heart. To say, therefore, that the intelligence is not to be a slave but a servant, implies merely that it is to be left free to collect information about the means of satisfying the desires, without having its judgment anticipated by the imagination or the heart; but that, on the other hand, it must keep strictly to its position as an instrument to an end out of itself. For if it once emancipates itself from the yoke of feeling, it soon becomes altogether lawless, and disperses its efforts in every direction in the satisfaction of a vain curiosity. The intelligence, as the scholastic theologians said, is in itself, or when left to itself, a source of anarchy and confusion; it must be, not indeed the serva, but the ancilla fidei, or it defeats its own ends. The intellectual life, as such, is an unsocial, even a selfish existence; for, as reason is guided by no definite objective aim derived from itself, it must find its real motive in the satisfaction of personal vanity and self-conceit, whenever it is not subjected to the yoke of the altruistic affections.

This theory (which, as we shall see, underlies Comte's whole conception of history) suggests two questions. It leads us to ask, in the first place, whether the tendencies of the intellectual life are thus dispersive and opposed to the social tendencies? and, secondly, whether the social tendencies in the form which they take with man, are not necessarily determined to be what they are by his intelligence? The former question really resolves itself into another: Is the intelligence of man a mere formal power of apprehending what is presented to it from without, so that when it is left to itself it must lose itself in the infinite multiplicity of individual objects in the external world? or does it carry with it any synthetic principle, any idea of the whole, to which it necessarily and inevitably seeks to bring back the difference of things? Against Comte's assertion that the natural tendency of the intelligence is to lose itself in difference without end, we might quote the well-known saying of Bacon, that the tendency of the "intellectus sibi permissus" is rather towards a premature synthesis. "Intellectus humanus ex proprietate sua facile supponit majorem ordinem et æqualitatem in rebus quam invenit." Surely, if we may speak of tendencies of the intellectual life as separated from the life of feeling, the tendency to unity and the universal belongs to it quite as much as the tendency to difference and the particular; just as in the life of feeling the tendency to isolation and self-assertion against others is combined with the tendency to society and union with others. From the first moment of intellectual life the world is to us a unity; subjectively a unity, as all its varied phenomena are gathered up in the consciousness of one self, and objectively a unity, as every object and event is definitely placed in relation to the other objects and events in one space and one time. The development of knowledge is, no doubt, the continual detection of new differences and distinctions in things, but the phenomena which are distinguished from other phenomena are at the same time put in relation to them. Nor can the intelligence find complete satisfaction until this relation is discovered to be necessary, and thus difference passes into unity again. Individual minds, indeed, may be more of the Aristotelian, or more of the Platonist, order, may tend more to divide what at first is presented as unity, or to unite what at first is presented as difference. But it is absurd to talk of either tendency as belonging to the intelligence in itself, since it is utterly beyond, or rather beneath, the powers of thought to conceive either of an undifferentiated unity, or of a chaos of differences without some kind of relation. Descending to particulars, we may bring Comte as a witness against himself; for while he declares that the sciences which deal with the inorganic world are mainly analytic in their tendencies, he at the same time maintains that the sciences of Biology and, still more, of Sociology and Morals, are synthetic, since they deal with objects in which the whole is not a mere aggregation or resultant of the parts, but in which rather the parts can be understood only in and through the whole. Hence it would seem that the dispersive tendencies of science are confined to lower steps of the scientific scale; and that the final science (as was shown more particularly in a previous article) admits and necessitates a synthesis, which is not merely subjective, but also objective. For Comte does not hold that we are to regard other men merely as means, or to seek to understand them only so far as is necessary for the gratification of some desire in ourselves as individuals. We are, on the contrary, to seek to know man in and for himself; and when we do so know him, we find that he is essentially social, and that the individual, as such, is a mere "fiction of the metaphysicians." Here, again, therefore, we find that Comte's system ends in a compromise between opposite tendencies of thought. His subjective synthesis proved after all to be objective, at least so far as mankind were concerned; and in like manner his opposition of the intellect to the heart turns out to be only partial; for when the intelligence is directed to psychology and sociology, it gives us an idea of humanity, according to which all men are "members one of another." The warfare of the heart and the intelligence thus resolves itself into another expression of that dualism between the world and man, which we found to be an essential characteristic of Comte's system.

The second question—whether the altruistic affections of man do not imply, or are not necessarily connected with, the development of his reason or self-consciousness—is even more important. Comte, like Hume, took all the desires, higher and lower, as tendencies given apart from the reason, which can only devise the means of satisfying them, and is, therefore, necessarily their servant. Reason itself on this view does not essentially affect the character of those tendencies which it obeys. "Cupiditas est appetitus cum ejusdem conscientia," said Spinoza, and he then went on to speak as if the "conscientia" made no change in the character of the "appetitus." But if we think of appetites or desires—some of them tending to the good of the individual, others to the good of the species—as existing in an animal which is not conscious of a self, these appetites will neither be selfish nor unselfish in the sense in which we apply these terms to man. Where there is no ego there can be no alter-ego, and therefore neither egoism nor altruism. The idea of the self as a permanent unity to which all the different tendencies are referred, and the rise in consequence of a new desire of pleasure, distinct from the desires of particular objects, are essential to egoism. The idea of an alter-ego, i.e., of a community with others which makes their interests our own, and hence the rise of a love for them,—which is not merely disinterested as the animal appetites are disinterested, because they tend directly to their objects without any thought of self, but disinterested in the sense that the thought of self is conquered or absorbed, is essential to altruism. Each of these tendencies may in its matter, or rather in its first matter, coincide with the appetites; viewed from the outside, they may seem to be nothing higher than hunger or thirst, or sexual or parental impulse, but their form is different. They are changed as by a chemical solvent, which dissolves and renews them; nay, as by a new principle of life, whose first transformation of them is nothing but the beginning of a series of transformations both of their matter and their form; so that, in the end, the simple direct tendency to an object—the uneasiness which sought its cure without reflection either upon itself or upon anything else—becomes changed, on the one side, into a gigantic ambition and greed, which would make the whole world tributary to the lust of the individual, and, on the other, into a love of humanity in which self-love is altogether transcended or absorbed. Neither of these, however, nor any lower form of either, is in such wise external to reason, that we can talk of them as determining it to an end which is not its own. Both are simply the expression in feeling of that essential opposition of the self to the not self, and at the same time that essential unity of the self with the not self, which are the two opposite, but complementary, aspects of the life of reason. And the progressive triumph of altruism over egoism, which constitutes the moral significance of history, is only the result of the fact that an individual, who is also a conscious self, cannot find his happiness in his own individual life, but only in the life of the whole to which he belongs. A selfish life is for him a contradiction. It is a life in which he is at war with himself as well as with others, for it is the life of a being who, though essentially social, tries to find satisfaction in a personal or individual good. The "intelligence" and the "heart" equally condemn such a life; it is not only a crime but a blunder. For a spiritual being as such is one who can only save his life by losing it in a wider life, one who must die to himself in order that he may live. In the progress of man's spirit, therefore, there is no necessary or possible schism between the two parts of his being; but, on the contrary, the development of each is implied in the development of the other. It is the more comprehensive idea, as well as the higher social purpose, which always triumphs; and if what is called intellectual culture sometimes seems to have the worse, it is because it is a superficial or formal culture, and does not really represent the most comprehensive idea.

This leads us to observe that the opposition of the heart to the intelligence is Comte's key to the whole history of the past, especially in relation to religion. Theology is to him a system growing out of a natural, though partially erroneous, hypothesis, a hypothesis which in its first appearance was well suited to excite the nascent intelligence and satisfy the primary affections of man, but which, in its further development, tended to secure moral and social ends at the expense of truth, and became more and more irrational as it became more and more useful. Fetichism, the first religion, was the spontaneous result of man's primitive tendency to exaggerate the likeness of all things to himself. It is "less distant from Positivity" than any other sort of theology,[29] for its error is only that it supposes the existence of life wherever it finds activity—an error which can "easily be brought to the test of verification" and corrected. "We can show it to be an error, and so get rid of it." But Polytheism, seeking for greater generality, refers phenomena to beings who are not identified with them, to "indirect wills belonging to beings purely imaginary," whose "existence can no more be decisively disproved than it can be demonstrated." Further, Polytheism extended to the order of man's life that kind of explanation which Fetichism necessarily confined to nature, because the latter sought to explain everything by man, and never thought of man himself as requiring explanation. But this, while it had the advantage of bringing human life within the domain of speculation, at the same time reduced theology into a palpable instance of reasoning in a circle. For "humanity cannot legitimately be included in the synthesis of causes, from the very fact that its type is found in man."[30] Last of all came Monotheism, concentrating still further the theological explanation of the universe, but rendering it still more incoherent and irrational, for "the conception of a single God involves a type of absolute perfection complete in each of the three aspects of human nature, affection, thought, and action. Now such a conception unavoidably contradicts itself, for either this all-powerful Being must be inferior to ourselves, morally or intellectually, or else the world which he created must be free from those radical imperfections which, in spite of Monotheistic sophistry, have been always but too evident. And even were this second alternative admissible, there would remain a yet deeper inconsistency. Man's moral and mental faculties have for their object to subserve practical necessities, but an omnipotent Being can have no occasion either for wisdom or for goodness."[31]

What reconciles mankind, and especially the leaders of mankind, to these intellectually unsatisfactory conceptions of God, is their practical value in extending and strengthening the social bond. Polytheism was superior to Fetichism, because it lent itself to the formation of that wider community, which we call the State, whereas Fetichism tended rather to confine the sympathies of men to the narrower limits of the family. And Monotheism was the necessary basis of that still wider society which binds men to each other simply as men, and apart from any special ties of blood or language. This at least was the case so long as the truth of the unity of humanity had not yet assumed a scientific form, and therefore still needed an external support. But when the sciences of sociology and morals arise, this external scaffolding ceases to be necessary, and must even become injurious, as, indeed, Theology was from the first imperfectly adapted to the social end it was made to subserve.

This last point deserves special attention. According to Comte, Theology, and above all Monotheistic Theology, is a system whose direct influence is altogether unfavourable to the social tendencies, although indirectly, by the course of history, and through the wise modifications to which it has been subjected by the leaders and teachers of mankind, it has become the main instrument in developing altruism. The increasing generality of theological belief, indeed, was a necessary condition of the establishment of social unity; but, by directing the eyes of men not to themselves, but to supernatural beings, by making the event of life turn on the favour or disfavour of such beings, rather than on the social action and reaction of men upon each other, and by reducing this world into a secondary position, so that its concerns were subordinated to those of another world, Theology tended to dissolve rather than to knit closer the bonds of society. The relation of the individual to God isolated him from his fellows. Especially was this the case with the Christian form of Monotheism, with its tremendous future rewards and penalties, and the direct relation which it established between the soul of the individual and the infinite Being. "The immediate effect of putting personal salvation in the foremost place was to create an unparalleled selfishness, a selfishness rendering all social influences nugatory, and thus tending to dissolve public life."[32] "The Christian type of life was never fully realized except by the hermits of the Thebaid," who, "by narrowing their wants to the lowest standard, were able to concentrate their thoughts without remorse or distraction on the attainment of salvation."[33] What else, indeed, but egoism could be awakened by the worship of a God who is himself the supreme type of egoism? For "the desires of an omnipotent Being, being gratified as soon as formed, can consist in nothing but pure caprices. There can be no appreciable motive either from within or from without. And above all, these pure caprices must of necessity be purely personal; so that the metaphysical formula, To live in self for self, would be alike applicable to the two extreme grades of the vital scale. The type of divinity thus approximates to the lowest stage of animality, the only shape in which life is purely individual, because it is reduced to the one function of nutrition."[34] The natural result of such a religion was, therefore, to discourage the altruistic affections, and, indeed, Monotheism has systematically denied that such affections form part of the nature of man.

The alchemy which, according to Comte, turned this poison into an elixir vitæ, was found in the altruistic affections of the teachers of mankind, which led them to limit and modify the doctrine they taught, so as to subserve man's moral improvement. This, however, would not have been sufficient, if these teachers had not at an early period ceased to be a theocracy, or, in other words, if the practical government of mankind had not been wrested from their hand by the military classes. By this change, which contained in itself the germ of the separation of the Church from the State, of theory from practice, of counsel from command, the priests, prophets, or philosophers, who were the intellectual leaders of men, were reduced to that position of subordination in which alone they can concentrate their attention upon their proper work. For the influences of the intellect, like those of the affections, must be indirect if they are to be pure. "No power, especially if it be theological, cares to modify the will, unless it finds itself powerless to control action."[35] But when the theoretic class were subordinated to the practical class, they became the natural allies of the women, and, like them, had to substitute counsel for command. At first, indeed, their subjection was too absolute, for the military aristocracies of Greece and Rome did not leave to the priesthood sufficient independence, or at least sufficient authority, to permit even of counsel. But with the rise of Catholic Monotheism, supported as it was by a new revelation based upon an incarnation of God, the separation of Church and State was definitely established, and the intellectual life was put in its proper relation to the life of action.

The consequence is that the theological priesthood have continually sought to counteract the natural influences of their theological doctrines by making additions which were inconsistent with its "absolute" principle, but which rendered it better fitted for the purpose of binding men together. This was especially the case under Monotheism, where, as we have seen, such counteraction was most necessary. From this source arose a series of supplementary doctrines, generally tending to connect God with man, and men with each other. St. Paul, "the real founder of Christianity," took the first step in reducing Monotheism into a shape in which it could act as an "organic" doctrine, and his successors followed steadily in the same path. If the omnipotence of God raised him above all human sympathy, and tended to destroy human sympathy in his worshippers, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation again brought him near to them, and taught them to reverence a humanity which was thus raised into unity with God. In the Feast of the Eucharist all men celebrated and enjoyed their unity with this exalted and deified humanity. The same influence, in its further development, led to the adoration of the saints, and above all of the Virgin Mother, in whom Christian devotion really worshipped humanity, in its simplest and tenderest affections. Finally, if benevolent sympathies were denied to nature, St. Paul found a place for them by attributing them to grace, "which Thomas à Kempis admirably defines as the equivalent of love—gratia sive dilectio—divine inspiration being substituted for human impulse."[36] And the struggle between egoism and altruism was expressed in the doctrines of the Fall and Redemption of mankind.[37] Thus the social passion, which, according to the theory, could not be found in humanity, was conceived to flow from a divine influence, and became ennobled, at least as a means of salvation, in the eyes of those who would otherwise have suppressed it. At the same time, as Comte also contends, these additions or corrections of the original doctrine were inconsistent or imperfect in themselves, and inadequate to the social purpose for which they were destined; and they naturally disappeared whenever, by the emancipation of the intelligence, the immense egoism, which Monotheism consecrated in God and favoured in man, was let loose from the bonds in which the Church had confined it. Protestantism was the first indication of this change; for Protestantism is but an organized anarchy, in which the only elements of order are derived from an instinctive conservatism, clinging to the fragments of a past doctrinal system, which, in principle, has been abandoned. It contains no organic elements of its own—no positive contribution to the progressive life of humanity; it is simply the first imperfect result of that metaphysical individualism which, in its ultimate form, freed from all the limits of the Catholic system, expressed itself theoretically in Rousseau and Voltaire, and practically in the French Revolution. The hope of mankind, however, lies in the new synthesis of Positivism, which alone can give due value to the innate altruistic sympathies of man, and which therefore alone can place on a permanent scientific basis that social order which the mediæval Church attempted in vain to found on the essentially egoistic and anarchic doctrine of Monotheism.

The fundamental conception, then, which underlies Comte's view of progress is, that every past religion, with the partial exception of Fetichism, has been an amalgam of two radically inconsistent elements, one of which only was due to the theological principle itself; while the other was due, partly to the practical instinct of its priests, which led them to modify the logical results of that principle in conformity with the social wants of man; and partly also to their subordinate position, which obliged them to use the spiritual means of conviction and persuasion instead of the ruder weapons of material force. To criticise fully this position would be to re-write Comte's history of religion. It will be sufficient here to point out that his view of modern history begins in a false interpretation of Christianity, and ends in an equally false interpretation of the Protestant Reformation.

Christianity from its origin has two aspects or elements; and if we compare it with earlier religions, we may call these its Pantheistic and its Monotheistic elements. But these elements are not, as Comte asserts, joined together by a mere external necessity. They are necessarily connected in the inner logic of the system; nor can we regard one of them as more or less essential than the other. In the simplest words of the Gospels we find already expressed a sense of reconciliation with God, and therefore with the world and self, which is alien to pure Monotheism, though there is some faint anticipation of it in the later books of the Old Testament. For a spiritual Monotheism, while it awakens a consciousness of the holiness of God, and the sinfulness of the creature, tends to make fear prevail over love, and the sense of separation over the sense of union. The idea of the unity of the Divine and the human—an original unity which yet has to be realized by self-sacrifice—and the corresponding idea that the individual or natural life must be lost in order to save it, were set before humanity, as in one great living picture, in the life and death of Christ. And what was thus directly presented to the heart and the imagination in an individual, was universalized in the writings of St. Paul and St. John: in other words, it was liberated from its peculiar national setting, and used as a key to the general moral history of man. The Messiah of the Jews was exalted into the Divine Logos, and the Cross became the symbol of an atonement and reconciliation between God and man, which has been made "before the foundation of the world," yet which has to be made again in every human life. The work of the first three centuries was to give to this idea such logical expression as was then possible, in the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. It is true that this idea of the unity of man with God was not immediately carried out to any of the consequences which might seem to be contained in it. It remained for a time a religion, and a religion only; it did not show itself to be the principle of a new social or political order of life. Rather it accepted the old order represented by the Roman Empire, and even consecrated it as "ordained of God," only demanding for itself that it should be allowed to purify the inner life of men. Such a separation of the things of Cæsar and the things of God was then inevitable; for it is impossible that a new principle can ever be received simply and without alloy into minds, which are at the same time occupying themselves with its utmost practical or even theoretical consequences. In this sense there is great truth in what Comte says about the value of the separation of the spiritual from the temporal authority. The power of directly realizing a new religious principle, just because it draws away attention from the principle itself to the details of its practical application, is likely to prevent that application being either effective or even a true expression of the principle. Such practical inferences cannot safely be drawn by direct logical deduction; they will be made with certainty and effect only by spirits which the principle has remoulded. The decided withdrawal of the Christian Church from the sphere of "practical politics" was, therefore, not merely a necessity forced upon it from without; it was a condition which its best members gladly accepted, because without it the inner transformation of man's life by the new doctrine would have been impossible. If Christianity had raised an insurrection of slaves, it never could have put an end to slavery.

But while this withdrawal was necessary, it contained a great danger; for the inner life cannot be separated from the outer life without becoming narrowed and distorted. Confined to the sphere of religion and private morality, the doctrine of unity and reconciliation necessarily became itself the source of a new dualism. What had been at first merely neglect of the world was gradually changed into hostility to worldly interests; and the germs of a positive morality, reconciling the flesh and the spirit—which appear in the New Testament—were neglected and overshadowed in the growth of asceticism. Christianity, even in its first expression, had a negative side towards the natural life of man; while it lifted man to God, it yet taught that humanity "cannot be quickened except it die." But the mediæval Church, while it constantly taught that humanity in its desires and tendencies must die, had almost forgotten to hope that it could be quickened. Its highest morality—the morality of the three vows—was the negation of all social obligations; its science was the interpretation of a fixed dogma received on authority; its religion tended to become an external service, an opus operatum, a preparation for another world, rather than a principle of action in this. Its highest act of worship, the Eucharist, in which was celebrated the revealed unity of men with each other and with God, was reserved in its fulness for the clergy, and even with them was finally reduced to an external act by the doctrine of transubstantiation, in which poetry "became logic," and in becoming logic, ceased to be truth.

Now, Comte, seeing the working of this negative tendency in mediæval Catholicism, and regarding it as the natural work of Monotheism, is obliged to treat all the positive side of Christianity as an external addition suggested by the practical wisdom of the clergy. St. Paul is supposed by him to have invented (and Comte's language would ever suggest that he consciously invented[38]) the doctrine of grace, in order to reconsecrate those social affections which Monotheism, in its condemnation of nature, had either denied to exist, or, what is nearer the truth, had treated as having no moral value. But this only shows how imperfectly Comte grasped the Pauline conception of the moral change which religion produces. The idea that the immediate untamed and undisciplined will of the natural man is not a principle of morality, and that therefore man must die to live, must rise above himself to be himself, is one which has in it nothing discordant with the claims of social feeling. It is the commonplace of every powerful writer on practical ethics, from the Gospels to Thomas à Kempis, and from Luther to Goethe.

"Und so lang du das nicht hast Dies-es: Stirb und Werde, Bist du nur ein trüber Gast Auf der dunkeln Erde."

St. Paul adds that this death to self is possible only to him in whom another than his own natural will lives; "so then it is not I that live, but Christ that liveth in me." Comte would probably accept the sentence with the substitution of humanity for Christ. But either substitution involves the negation of the natural tendencies, whether individual or social, in their immediate natural form; and Comte himself, when he placed not only the sexual but even the maternal impulse among those that are merely "personal," virtually acknowledged that the natural or instinctive basis of the altruistic affections is not in itself moral.[39] But because he begins with a psychology which treats the egoistic and altruistic desires, and again the intellect and the heart, as distinct and independent entities, he is unable to do justice to an account of moral experience which involves that they are essentially related elements in one whole, or necessarily connected stages of its development.

In the form in which it was first presented, the teaching of Christianity was undoubtedly ambiguous, as, indeed, every doctrine in its first general and abstract form must be. We cannot then call it either social or anti-social, without limitations; it is anti-social and ascetic, because of its negative relations to the previous forms of life and culture; it is social and positive in so far as in its primary doctrine of the unity of the divine and human—of divinity manifested in man and humanity made perfect through suffering—it contains the promise and the necessity of a development by which nature and spirit shall be reconciled. The progressive tendency of Christendom was based on the fact that from the earliest times the followers of Christ were placed in the dilemma, either of denying their primary doctrine of reconciliation between God and man and going back to pure Monotheism, or of advancing to the reconciliation of all those other antagonisms of spirit and nature, the world and the Church, which arose out of the circumstances of its first publication. And modern history is more than anything else the history of the long process whereby this logical necessity manifested itself in fact. The negative spirit of the Middle Age, its asceticism, its dualism, its formalism, its tendency to transform the moral opposition of natural and spiritual into an external opposition between two natural worlds, present and future, and thus to substitute "other-worldliness" for worldliness, instead of substituting unworldliness for both—all these characteristics were the natural results of the fact that the idea of Christianity, in its first abstract form, could not include, and therefore necessarily became opposed to, the forms of social life and organization with which it came into contact. But while the early Christians looked for the realization of the kingdom of Heaven in some immediate earthly future, and the Middle Age postponed it to another life, Christ had already taught the truth, which alone can turn either of these hopes into something more than the expression of an egoistic desire—the truth that "the kingdom of God is within us." The reaction of the social necessities of mediæval society on the doctrine—which Comte quite correctly describes as leading to the gradual elevation of humanity and of human interests—found its main support in the principles of the doctrine itself, so soon as its lessons had been absorbed into the mind of the people. The irresistible force of the movement, whereby the intelligence was emancipated from authority, and the claims of the family and the State were asserted against the Church, lay above all in this, that Christianity itself was felt to involve the consecration of human life in all its interests and relations. Luther's appeal to the New Testament and to the earliest ages of Christianity was in some ways unhistorical, but it expressed a truth. Protestantism was not a return to the Christianity of the first century; it was an assertion of the relation of the individual to God, which was itself made possible only by the long work of Latin Catholicism. But the development of a doctrine, if it has in it any germ of truth which is capable of development, involves a continual recurrence to its first, and therefore its most general, expression. The elements successively developed in the Catholic and the Protestant, the Latin and the Germanic forms of Christianity, were both present in the original germ, and the exaggerated prominence given in the former to the negative side of Christianity could not but lead, in the development of thought, to a similarly exaggerated manifestation of its positive side. But it is nearly as absurd to say, as Comte does, that the true logical outcome of Christianity is to be found in the "life of the hermits of the Thebaid," as it would be to say that its true logical outcome is to be found in those vehement assertions of nature—naked and unashamed—as its own sufficient warrant, which poured almost with the force of inspiration from the lips of Diderot. Both extremes are equally removed from that special moral temper and tone of feeling which we can alone call Christian—the former by its want of sympathy and tenderness, no less than the latter by its want of purity and self-command. Reassertion of nature through its negation, or to put it more simply, the purification of the natural desires by the renunciation of their immediate gratification, is the idea that is more or less definitely present in all phases of the history of Christianity; and, though swaying from one side to the other, the religious life of modern times has never ceased to present both aspects. Even a St. Augustine recoiled from the Manichæism by which nature was regarded, not simply as fallen from its original idea, but as essentially impure. And, on the other hand, even Rousseau's Savoyard vicar, who has got rid of the negative or ascetic element, as completely as is possible for any one still retaining any tincture of Christianity or even of religion, and who insists so strongly on the text that "the natural is the moral," is yet forced to recognize that nature has two voices, and that the raison commune has to overcome and transform the natural inclinations of the individual. In the life of its Founder, the Christian Church has always had before it an individual type of that harmony of the spiritual and natural life, which it is its ideal to realize in all the wider spiritual relations of man; nor, till that ideal is reached, can it be said that the Christian idea is exhausted, or that the place is vacant for a new religion, however great may be the changes of form and expression through which Christianity must pass under the changed conditions of modern life.

That Comte was not able to discern this, arose, as we have seen, from the fact that he held a kind of Manichæism of his own. To him the egoistic and altruistic desires were two kinds of innate tendencies, both of which exist in man from the first, though with a great preponderance on the side of egoism. Moral improvement simply consists in altering the original proportions in favour of altruism, and moral perfection would be the complete extinction of egoism (which with Comte would naturally mean the extinction of all the desires classified as personal). Hence there is a distinctly ascetic tendency in some of the precepts of the Politique Positive,—i.e., asceticism begins to appear, not simply as a transitionary process through which certain natural desires are to be purified, but as a deliberate attempt to extinguish them. A deeper analysis would have shown that the desires in themselves, as mere natural impulses, are neither egoistic nor altruistic, neither bad nor good; and that while, as they appear in the conscious life, they are necessarily at first poisoned with egoism, yet that the ego is not absolutely opposed to the alter ego, but rather implies it. A spiritual or self-conscious being is one who can find himself, nay who can find himself only, in the life of others: and when he does so find himself, there is no natural desire which for itself he needs to renounce as impure; no natural desire which may not become the expression of the better self, which is ego and alter ego in one. But Comte, unable from the limitations of his psychology to see the true relation of the negative and the positive side of ethics, is obliged to treat the ascetic tendency of Christianity as involving a denial of the existence, or the moral value, of the social sympathies; and on the other hand, to regard the efforts of the Christian Church to cultivate those sympathies, as the result of an external accommodation. His view of Christianity, in short, practically coincides with the definition of virtue given by Paley; it is "doing good to man, in obedience to the will of God, with a view to eternal happiness." It is the pursuit of a selfish end by means in themselves unselfish, with the pleasures and pains of another world introduced as the link of connection; and it must therefore leave bare selfishness in its place, so soon as doubt is cast upon these supernatural rewards and punishments. Hence Comte is just neither to Catholicism nor to Protestantism; considering that the former was only indirectly social, and that the latter is merely the first step in a scepticism which, taking away the fears and hopes of another world, must at the same time take away the last limit upon selfishness. And, just because he is unable to understand either the negative tendencies of the former, or the positive tendencies of the latter, phase of modern life, he has an imperfect appreciation of that social ideal to which both are leading, and which must combine in itself the true elements of both. As, however, it is the temptation of writers on social subjects to be least just to the tendencies of the time which preceded their own, and against whose errors they have immediately to contend, so we find that Comte is fairer towards Catholicism than he is towards Protestantism, or towards that individualism which grew out of Protestantism, and which he is pleased to call Metaphysics. The latter he sees solely on their destructive side, as successive stages in the modern movement of revolt, without appreciating the constructive elements involved in them. Hence also he is led, in his attitude towards this great movement, to all but identify himself with Catholic writers like De Maistre; and his own scheme of the future is essentially reactionary. The restoration of the spiritual power to its mediæval position was a natural proposal for one who saw in the Protestant revolt nothing more than an insurrectionary movement, which might clear the way for a new social construction, but which in itself was the negation of all government whatever.

For what was Protestantism? To the Protestant it seemed to be simply a return to the original purity of the Christian faith; to the Catholic, it seemed to be a fatal revolt against the only organization by which Christianity could be realized. Really it partook of both characters. It involved at once a dangerous misconception of the social conditions, under which alone the religious life can be realized and developed, and a deeper and truer apprehension of that religion, which first recognized the latent divinity or universal capacity of every spiritual being as such, and which, therefore, seemed to impose upon every individual man the right or rather the duty of living by the witness of his own spirit. Comte saw only the former of these aspects of it. Hence he regarded the French Revolution as a practical refutation of the individualism which grew out of the Protestant movement, and not, as it was in truth, a critical event, which should force men to distinguish and separate its true and its false elements. And he drew from it the lesson that the individual has no moral or religious life of his own, but that it is only in proportion as he transcends his own individuality and lives the life of humanity, that his own spiritual life can have any depth or riches in it. Like Burke he could say, "We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages." But because he discerned this, he regarded the effort of Protestantism to throw individuals back upon themselves as merely tending to empty their minds of all valuable contents, and to deliver them over to their own individual caprice. Private judgment and popular government are to him only other forms of expression for intellectual and political anarchy; and his remedy for the moral diseases of modern times is the restoration of that division of the spiritual and temporal authorities, which existed in the Middle Ages. But there is another aspect of the Protestant movement and of these apparently anarchical doctrines, to which Comte pays no attention. Catholicism, as we have seen, had developed one aspect of Christianity, until, by its exclusive prominence, the principle of Christianity itself was on the point of being lost. It had changed the opposition of laity and clergy, world and Church, from a relative into an absolute one; it had presented its doctrine, not as something which the spirit of the individual may ultimately verify for itself, but as something to which it must permanently submit without any verification. It had made the worship into an opus operatum instead of a means through which the feelings of the worshipper could be at once drawn out and expressed. Now, it is as opposed to these tendencies that the Protestant movement had its highest importance. It would, no doubt, be intellectual anarchy, for every individual to claim to judge for himself, on subjects for which he has not the requisite training or discipline; but it is a slavery scarcely less corrupting in its effect than anarchy, when he is made to regard the difference between himself and his teachers as a permanent and absolute one. In the former case, he has no sufficient feeling of his want to make him duly submissive to teaching; in the latter, he has no sufficient consciousness of his capacity to awake a due reaction of his thought upon the matter received from his teachers. Again, the decline of the sovereignty of the people would be the negation of all rule, if it meant that the uninstructed many should govern themselves by their own insight, and that the instructed few should simply be their servants and their instruments. But where the people are not recognized as the ultimate source of power, where their consent is not in any regular way made necessary to the proceedings of their governors, they are by that very fact kept in a perpetual tutelage, and cannot possibly feel that the life of the State is their own life. Now, the most important effect of the Protestant movement was just this, that it awakened in each individual the consciousness of his universal nature, in other words the consciousness that there is no external power or sovereignty, divine or human, to which he has absolutely and permanently to submit, but that every outward claim of authority must ultimately be justified by the inner witness of the spirit. The freedom of man is that his obedience to the State, to the Church, even to God, is the obedience of his natural to his spiritual self. The essential truth of the Reformation lay in its republication of the doctrine that the voice of God speaks within and not only without us, and indeed that "it is only by the God within that we can comprehend the God without." And the nations, which had learned that lesson in religion, soon hastened to apply it to the social and political order of life. It is undoubtedly a dangerous lesson, as may be seen, not only in the tendency of many Protestant sects to put the inner life in opposition to the outer, and so to deprive the former of all wider contents and interests; but also in the ultimate substitution, by Rousseau and others, of the assertion of the natural, for the assertion of the spiritual, man. In such extreme cases we find the mere capacity of man for a higher life treated as if it were the higher life itself; forgetting that the capacity is nothing unless it be realized, and that its realization requires the surrender of individual liberty and private judgment to the guidance and teaching of those, in whom that realization has already taken place. But it is not the less true that the consciousness of the capacity, and the consequent sense of the duty of becoming, not merely a slave or instrument, but an organ, of the intellectual and moral life of mankind, is the essential basis of modern life. "Henceforth, I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth; but I have called you friends," is a word of Christ which scarcely began to be verified till the Reformation. And while its verification cannot mean the negation of that division of labour upon which society rests,—cannot mean that each one should know and judge, any more than that each one should do, everything for himself,—it at least means that every power and authority should henceforth be, in the true sense of the word, spiritual, and rest for its main support upon the opinion of those who obey it. It is because he has not appreciated this truth that Comte so decidedly breaks with the democratic spirit of modern times, and seeks to set up an aristocracy in the State and a monarchy in the Church. Yet the spirit of the age is, after all, too strong for him, and while he refuses to the governed any regular and legitimate way of reacting upon the powers that govern them, he recognizes that the ultima ratio, the final remedy for misgovernment, lies in their irregular and illegitimate action. As regards the State, he declares that "the right of insurrection is the ultimate resource with which no society should allow itself to dispense."[40] And as regards the Church he says that if "the High Priest of Humanity, supported by the body of the clergy, should go wrong, then the only remedy left would be the refusal of co-operation, a remedy which can never fail, as the priesthood rests solely on conscience and opinion, and succumbs, therefore, to their adverse sentence." The civil government, in fact, can bring the spiritual power to a dead-lock, by "suspending its stipend, for in cases of serious error, popular subscriptions would not replace it, unless on the supposition of a fanaticism scarcely compatible with the Positive faith, where there is enthusiasm for the doctrines, rather than for the teachers."[41] Comte also desiderates among the proletariate a strong reactive influence of public opinion, by which the officers, both of Church and State, are to be kept to their work. But if this is desirable, why should the proletariate have no regular means of making their will felt? An "organic" theory of the constitution of society must surely provide every real force with a legitimate form of expression; if a social theory embodies the idea of revolution in it, it is self-condemned.

Comte's social ideal is in many respects a close reproduction of the mediæval system, with its régime dispersif of feudalism in secular politics, and its concentration of Papal authority in the Church. For him, the growth of national States to their present dimensions, and, on the other hand, the increasing division of labour in the realm of thought, are equally steps in the wrong direction. Still more strongly, if possible, does he reprobate that interference of the State with spiritual matters, such as the education of the people and its religious life, which has been the natural consequence of the failure of the mediæval Church to maintain its old authority. Notwithstanding his worship of humanity, the idea of a "parliament of man, a federation of the world," by which all the powers of mankind should be united for the attainment of the highest material and spiritual good, has no attraction for him. To reduce the State to the dimensions of a commune, and to confine it to the care of purely material interests, is his first political proposal. France, England, and Spain (and we may now add Germany and Italy) are, in his view, "factitious aggregates without solid justification," and they will only become "free and durable States," when they are broken up into fragments, each with a population of two or three millions, and a territory not exceeding that of Belgium or Tuscany. The "West" will thus be divided into seventy republics, and the earth into five hundred, and the main work of the patriciate will be to direct and regulate the industrial life of the community; each member of the banker triumvirate, who are to be at the head of the State, having one of the great industrial departments under his special superintendence. On the other hand the unity of humanity is to be represented solely by the spiritual power, in whose hands is to be left the whole work of extending science, teaching the people, and exercising a moral censorship over all Governments and individuals. And while this spiritual power is, for practical purposes, to be strictly organized on the model of the mediæval Church, it is also, like that Church, to remain, for scientific purposes, inorganic. In other words, it is to admit no scientific division of labour, but every one, like a mediæval doctor, is to profess all science, adding to this the priestly office, which, with Comte, includes both the cure of souls and of bodies.

To criticize the details of this scheme seems to be unnecessary after what has been already said. It is not to be denied that the division of Church and State in the Middle Age was a most important and even necessary condition of progress. Christianity could never have been impressed upon the minds of men, if its concrete application and development had been too rapid. The essential condition of such development was that men should not concern themselves too prematurely with it. For the consequences of a moral and religious principle cannot be reached by direct logical deductions; it is like a living germ, in which, by no analysis or dissection, you can discover the lineaments of the future plant. To know what it really is, or involves, you must plant it in the minds of men, and let it grow. Hence the mediæval Church was strong in its weakness, and it was its very victories over the temporal power that were its greatest danger. It became corrupt and lost its hold upon the minds of men, just when it seemed to have established its right to an absolute supremacy. Comte, following De Maistre, attaches great importance to the position of the Popes as arbiters between the Sovereigns and nations of mediæval Europe. But he forgets that, in claiming and maintaining this position the Popes were distinctly ceasing to be a spiritual power, if it be the function of a spiritual power to inculcate principles rather than to use them to solve present difficulties. A power interfering in this way with the immediate struggle of interests, could not but be invaded by the passions they excite, and it was the more certain to be corrupted by these passions, because it conceived them to be evil, and pretended altogether to renounce them. The mediæval authority of the Church might have its value, as an anticipation of the peaceful federation of the nations under one supreme Government, but it was at the same time the first step towards the erasing of the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual power.

The truth seems to be that the distinction, of secular and spiritual powers, except in the sense already indicated, is essentially irrational, and that the attempt to realise it in practice must involve, as it did involve in the Middle Ages, a continual internecine struggle. To set up two regularly constituted powers face to face with each other, one claiming man's allegiance in the name of his spiritual, and the other in the name of his temporal, interests, is to organize anarchy. So long as man's body and soul are inseparable, it will be impossible to divide the world between Cæsar and God; for in one point of view all is Cæsar's, and in another all is God's. In the Middle Ages the conflict of two despotisms was necessary to the growth of freedom; but, when government ceases to be despotic, the need for such division of power passes away. The relative separation between the speculative and the practical classes—between the scientific and moral teachers of mankind, on the one hand, and the statesmen or administrators who have to discover what immediate changes in the organization of life have become necessary, on the other—is a division of labour which can surely be attained without breaking up the unity of the social body. It is not desirable that the philosopher, or priest, or man of science, should be king—and we may even acknowledge that if he were king he would probably be a very bad one;—on the other hand, it is desirable that he should have his due influence, as the teacher of those general truths out of which all practical improvement must ultimately spring. But the natural difference of the tastes and capacities of men should, in a well-organized State, be sufficient to secure due influence to those who are the natural representatives of man's spiritual interests (whether they be religious, philosophic, or scientific), without tempting them from their proper task of discovering and teaching the truth, to the less appropriate work of determining how much of it comes within "the sphere of practical politics." Comte, indeed, by organizing them as an independent power apart from, and outside of, the State, would make such a perversion extremely probable. A hierarchy of priests, under a despotic Pope, would soon cease to be, in any sense, a spiritual power; and this would be only the more certain if, by the Comtist denunciation of specialism, they were prohibited from any division of labour according to capacity in their own peculiar sphere of scientific research. For by this prohibition their attention would be drawn more and more from the truth of their doctrines to their immediate practical effects, not to mention that, in the case of all but a few comprehensive minds, the natural result would be an omniscient superficiality, which would be the enemy of all real culture. For he who knows one thing well may find the whole in the part; but he who knows the whole superficially, inevitably reduces it to the level of something partial and subjective. Deprived of its natural aim, the Comtist Church of the future would inevitably throw itself, with all its energy, into the task of directly influencing the practical life of men, and there it would find itself in the presence of a number of communal States, none of them large enough to offer any effective resistance. Positivism must indeed alter human nature, if such a priesthood would not seek to make itself despotic, especially if it could wield such a formidable weapon as the Positivist excommunication is supposed to be.[42]

The truth is that Comte commits the same error which misled Montesquieu and his followers, when they supposed that the great security of a free State lay in the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers,—i.e., in treating the different organs through which the common life expresses itself as if they were independent organisms. In doing so, they forgot that, if such a balance of power was realised, the effect must either be an equilibrium in which all movement must cease, or a struggle in which the unity of the State would be in danger of being lost. The true security against the dangers involved, on the one hand, in the direct application of theory to practice, and, on the other hand, in the separation of practice from theory, must lie, not in giving them independent positions as spiritual and temporal powers, but in the organic unity of the society—communal, national, or, if it may be, universal—to which the representatives of both belong. And organic unity, though it does not mean any special form of government, means at least two things: in the first place, that each great class or interest should have for itself a definite organ, and should therefore be able to act on the whole body in a regular and constitutional manner, so as to show all its force without revolutionary violence; and, in the second place, that no class or interest should have such an independent position, that there is no legal or constitutional method of bringing it into due subordination. But Comte, losing his balance in his jealousy of the individualistic and democratic movement of modern society, has built up a social ideal, which fails in both these points of view. And he is consequently obliged, against his will, to contemplate revolution and war as necessary resources of the Constitution.

It would not be fair to conclude these articles, which have necessarily been devoted in great part to criticism and controversy, without expressing a sense of the power and insight which are shown in the works of Comte, especially in the Politique Positive. Controversy itself, it must be remembered, is a kind of homage; for, as Hegel says, "It is only a great man that condemns us to the task of explaining him." But if we can sometimes look down upon such men, it becomes us to remember that we stand upon their shoulders. Comte seems to me to occupy, as a writer, a position in some degree similar to that of Kant. He stands, or rather moves, between the old world and the new, and is broken into inconsistency by the effort of transition. Like Kant, he is embarrassed to the end by the ideas with which he started, and of which he can never free himself so as to make a new beginning. Comte had only a small portion of that power of speculative analysis which characterized his great predecessor, but he had much of his tenacity of thought, his power of continuous construction; and he had the same conviction of the all-importance of morals, and the same determination to make all his theoretic studies subordinate to the solution of the moral problem. Also, partly because he lived at a later time, and in the midst of a society which was in the throes of a social revolution, and partly because of the keenness and strength of his own social sympathies, he gives us a kind of insight into the diseases and wants of modern society, which we could not expect from Kant, and which throws new light upon the ethical speculations of Kant's idealistic successors. To believe that his system, as a whole, is inconsistent with itself, that his theory of historical progress is insufficient, and that his social ideal is imperfect, need not prevent us from recognizing that there are many valuable elements in his historical and social theories, and that no one who would study such subjects can afford to neglect them. A mind of such power cannot treat any subject without throwing much light upon it, which is independent of his special system of thought, and, above all, without doing much to show what are the really important difficulties in it which need to be solved. And, especially in such subjects, to discover the right question is to be half-way to the answer. Further, as Comte himself somewhere says, it is an immense advantage in studying any complex subject to have before us a distinct and systematic attempt to explain it; for it is only by criticism upon criticism that we can expect to reach the truth, in which all its varied sides and aspects are brought to a unity.

Edward Caird.