appiness when each pursues his own, under the
rules and conditions required by the good of the rest, than when each
makes the good of the rest his only subject, and allows himself no
personal pleasures not indispensable to the preservation of his
faculties? The regimen of a blockaded town should be cheerfully
submitted to when high purposes require it, but is it the ideal
perfection of human existence? M. Comte sees none of these difficulties.
The only true happiness, he affirms, is in the exercise of the
affections. He had found it so for a whole year, which was enough to
enable him to get to the bottom of the question, and to judge whether he
could do without everything else. Of course the supposition was not to
be heard of that any other person could require, or be the better for,
what M. Comte did not value. "Unity" and "systematization" absolutely
demanded that all other people should model themselves after M. Comte.
It would never do to suppose that there could be more than one road to
human happiness, or more than one ingredient in it.

The most prejudiced must admit that this religion without theology is
not chargeable with relaxation of moral restraints. On the contrary, it
prodigiously exaggerates them. It makes the same ethical mistake as the
theory of Calvinism, that every act in life should be done for the glory
of God, and that whatever is not a duty is a sin. It does not perceive
that between the region of duty and that of sin there is an intermediate
space, the region of positive worthiness. It is not good that persons
should be bound, by other people's opinion, to do everything that they
would deserve praise for doing. There is a standard of altruism to which
all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond it which is not
obligatory, but meritorious. It is incumbent on every one to restrain
the pursuit of his personal objects within the limits consistent with
the essential interests of others. What those limits are, it is the
province of ethical science to determine; and to keep all individuals
and aggregations of individuals within them, is the proper office of
punishment and of moral blame. If in addition to fulfilling this
obligation, persons make the good of others a direct object of
disinterested exertions, postponing or sacrificing to it even innocent
personal indulgences, they deserve gratitude and honour, and are fit
objects of moral praise. So long as they are in no way compelled to this