n
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 etre etudie non pour lui-meme, mais
pour l'homme, ou plutot pour l'humanite_;" 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 Co