Chapter IV (1)

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 coeur, 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.