ires are to be purified, but as a deliberate attempt to
extinguish them. A deeper analysis would have shown that the desires in
themselves, as mere natural impulses, are neither egoistic nor
altruistic, neither bad nor good; and that while, as they appear in the
conscious life, they are necessarily at first poisoned with egoism, yet
that the _ego_ is not absolutely opposed to the _alter ego_, but rather
implies it. A spiritual or self-conscious being is one who can find
himself, nay who can find himself only, in the life of others: and when
he does so find himself, there is no natural desire which for itself he
needs to renounce as impure; no natural desire which may not become the
expression of the better self, which is _ego_ and _alter ego_ in one.
But Comte, unable from the limitations of his psychology to see the true
relation of the negative and the positive side of ethics, is obliged to
treat the ascetic tendency of Christianity as involving a denial of the
existence, or the moral value, of the social sympathies; and on the
other hand, to regard the efforts of the Christian Church to cultivate
those sympathies, as the result of an external accommodation. His view
of Christianity, in short, practically coincides with the definition of
virtue given by Paley; it is "doing good to man, in obedience to the
will of God, with a view to eternal happiness." It is the pursuit of a
selfish end by means in themselves unselfish, with the pleasures and
pains of another world introduced as the link of connection; and it must
therefore leave bare selfishness in its place, so soon as doubt is cast
upon these supernatural rewards and punishments. Hence Comte is just
neither to Catholicism nor to Protestantism; considering that the former
was only _indirectly_ social, and that the latter is merely the first
step in a scepticism which, taking away the fears and hopes of another
world, must at the same time take away the last limit upon selfishness.
And, just because he is unable to understand either the negative
tendencies of the former, or the positive tendencies of the latter,
phase of modern life, he has an imperfect appreciation of that social
ideal to which both are leading, and which must combine in itself the
true elements of both. As, however, it is the temptation of writers on
social subjects to be least just to the tendencies of the time which
preceded their own, and against whose errors they have immediately to
contend, so w