Rousseau's Savoyard vicar, who has got rid of the negative or ascetic element, as completely as is possible for any one still retaining any tincture of Christianity or even of religion, and who insists so strongly on the text that "the natural is the moral," is yet forced to recognize that nature has two voices, and that the _raison commune_ has to overcome and transform the natural inclinations of the individual. In the life of its Founder, the Christian Church has always had before it an individual type of that harmony of the spiritual and natural life, which it is its ideal to realize in all the wider spiritual relations of man; nor, till that ideal is reached, can it be said that the Christian idea is exhausted, or that the place is vacant for a new religion, however great may be the changes of form and expression through which Christianity must pass under the changed conditions of modern life. That Comte was not able to discern this, arose, as we have seen, from the fact that he held a kind of Manichæism of his own. To him the egoistic and altruistic desires were two kinds of innate tendencies, both of which exist in man from the first, though with a great preponderance on the side of egoism. Moral improvement simply consists in altering the original proportions in favour of altruism, and moral perfection would be the complete extinction of egoism (which with Comte would naturally mean the extinction of all the desires classified as personal). Hence there is a distinctly ascetic tendency in some of the precepts of the _Politique Positive_,--_i.e._, asceticism begins to appear, not simply as a transitionary process through which certain natural desires 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