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 excommunication is supposed to be.[42] The truth is that Comte commits the same error which misled Montesquieu and his followers, when they supposed that the great security of a free State lay in the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers,--_i.e._, in treating the different organs through which the common life expresses itself as if they were independent organisms. In doing so, they forgot that, if such a balance of power was realised, the effect must either be an equilibrium in which all movement must cease, or a struggle in which the unity of the State would be in danger of being lost. The true security against the dangers involved, on the one hand, in the direct application of theory to practice, and, on the other hand, in the separation of practice from theory, must lie, not in giving them independent positions as spiritual and temporal powers, but in the organic unity of the society--communal, national, or, if it may be, universal--to which the representatives of both belong. And organic unity, though it does not mean any special form of government, means at least two things: in the first place, that each great class or interest should have for itself a definite organ, and should therefore be able to act on the whole body in a regular and constitutional manner, so as to show all its force without revolutionary violence; and, in the second place, that no class or interest should have such an independent position, that there is no legal or constitutional method of bringing it into due subordination. But Comte, losing his balance in his jealousy of the individualistic and democratic movement of modern society, has built up a social ideal, which fails in both these points of view. And he is consequently obliged, against his will, to contemplate revolution and war as necessary resources of the Constitution.