en 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 Encyclopaedists 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 Encyclopaedists
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