c 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 etre 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," whe