a spiritual being as such is one who can only save his life
by losing it in a wider life, one who must die to himself in order that
he may live. In the progress of man's spirit, therefore, there is no
necessary or possible schism between the two parts of his being; but, on
the contrary, the development of each is implied in the development of
the other. It is the more comprehensive idea, as well as the higher
social purpose, which always triumphs; and if what is called
intellectual culture sometimes seems to have the worse, it is because it
is a superficial or formal culture, and does not really represent the
most comprehensive idea.

This leads us to observe that the opposition of the heart to the
intelligence is Comte's key to the whole history of the past, especially
in relation to religion. Theology is to him a system growing out of a
natural, though partially erroneous, hypothesis, a hypothesis which in
its first appearance was well suited to excite the nascent intelligence
and satisfy the primary affections of man, but which, in its further
development, tended to secure moral and social ends at the expense of
truth, and became more and more irrational as it became more and more
useful. Fetichism, the first religion, was the spontaneous result of
man's primitive tendency to exaggerate the likeness of all things to
himself. It is "less distant from Positivity" than any other sort of
theology,[29] for its error is only that it supposes the existence of
life wherever it finds activity--an error which can "easily be brought
to the test of verification" and corrected. "We can show it to be an
error, and so get rid of it." But Polytheism, seeking for greater
generality, refers phenomena to beings who are not identified with them,
to "indirect wills belonging to beings purely imaginary," whose
"existence can no more be decisively disproved than it can be
demonstrated." Further, Polytheism extended to the order of man's life
that kind of explanation which Fetichism necessarily confined to nature,
because the latter sought to explain everything by man, and never
thought of man himself as requiring explanation. But this, while it had
the advantage of bringing human life within the domain of speculation,
at the same time reduced theology into a palpable instance of reasoning
in a circle. For "humanity cannot legitimately be included in the
synthesis of causes, from the very fact that its type is found in
man."[30] Last of all