or others; nay,
says the other, it is to live intelligently for himself; the intellect,
says the former, should always be subordinated to society, and be led by
the emotions; intellect, says the latter, should ever be in the
ascendant, and absolutely control and direct the emotions; the
theoretical object of government, says the former, is to enable the
affections and thoughts to pass into action; not so, says the latter,
its only use is to give the individual secure leisure to develope his
own affections and thoughts. Mutual relation is the key note of the
former, independence of the latter; the former is the apotheosis of
love, the latter of reason.

Strictly and literally the apotheosis. For, differing as they do on such
vital points, they both agree in dispensing with the ideas of God and
immortality as conceptions superfluous in the realization of the
theoretical perfection they contemplate. Not that either scheme omits
the religious sentiment. On the contrary, it is especially prominent in
one, and very well marked in the other. Both assume its growing
prominence, never its extinction. Both speak of it as an integral part
of man's highest nature.

Comte and Humboldt were thinkers too profound to be caught by the facile
fallacy that the rapid changes in religious thought betoken the early
abrogation of all creeds. Lessing, the philosophers of the French
revolution, James Mill, Schopenhauer and others fell into this error.
They were not wiser than the clown of Horace, who seated himself by the
rushing stream, thinking it must soon run itself out--

Expectat rusticus dum defluat amnis; at ille
Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.

Vain is the dream that man will ever reach the point when he will think
no more of the gods. Dogmas may disappear, but religion will flourish;
destroy the temple and sow it with salt, in a few days it rises again
built for aye on the solid ground of man's nature.

So long as the race is upon earth, just so long will the religious
sentiment continue to crave its appropriate food, and this at last is
recognized even by those who estimate it at the lowest. "To yield this
sentiment reasonable satisfaction," observes Professor Tyndall in one of
his best known addresses, "is the problem of problems at the present
hour. It is vain to oppose it with a view to its extirpation." The
"general thaw of theological creeds," which Spencer remarks upon, is no
sign of the loss of intere