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, form