e to
discover what immediate changes in the organization of life have become
necessary, on the other--is a division of labour which can surely be
attained without breaking up the unity of the social body. It is not
desirable that the philosopher, or priest, or man of science, should be
king--and we may even acknowledge that if he were king he would probably
be a very bad one;--on the other hand, it is desirable that he should
have his due influence, as the teacher of those general truths out of
which all practical improvement must ultimately spring. But the natural
difference of the tastes and capacities of men should, in a
well-organized State, be sufficient to secure due influence to those who
are the natural representatives of man's spiritual interests (whether
they be religious, philosophic, or scientific), without tempting them
from their proper task of discovering and teaching the truth, to the
less appropriate work of determining how much of it comes within "the
sphere of practical politics." Comte, indeed, by organizing them as an
independent power apart from, and outside of, the State, would make such
a perversion extremely probable. A hierarchy of priests, under a
despotic Pope, would soon cease to be, in any sense, a spiritual power;
and this would be only the more certain if, by the Comtist denunciation
of specialism, they were prohibited from any division of labour
according to capacity in their own peculiar sphere of scientific
research. For by this prohibition their attention would be drawn more
and more from the truth of their doctrines to their immediate practical
effects, not to mention that, in the case of all but a few comprehensive
minds, the natural result would be an omniscient superficiality, which
would be the enemy of all real culture. For he who knows one thing well
may find the whole in the part; but he who knows the whole
superficially, inevitably reduces it to the level of something partial
and subjective. Deprived of its natural aim, the Comtist Church of the
future would inevitably throw itself, with all its energy, into the task
of directly influencing the practical life of men, and there it would
find itself in the presence of a number of communal States, none of them
large enough to offer any effective resistance. Positivism must indeed
alter human nature, if such a priesthood would not seek to make itself
despotic, especially if it could wield such a formidable weapon as the
Positivist