The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879Various
History
The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals
is involved in the change of their beliefs were it not that the habits
and sympathies developed by a creed continue to exist long after the
creed itself has disappeared. In the long run, however, the change of
man's intellectual attitude to the world must bring with it a change of
his whole life. As the creed which reconciled him to the world and bound
him to his fellows ceases to affect him, he must be thrown back upon his
own mere individuality, unless he can find another creed of equal or
greater power to inspire and direct his life. And mere individualism is
nothing, but anarchy. That this is so, was not indeed manifest to those
who first expressed the individualistic principle: on the contrary, they
seemed to themselves to have, in the assertion of individual right, not
only an instrument for destroying the old faith and the old social
order, but also the principle of a better faith, and the means of
reconstructing a better order. But to us who have outlived the period
when it could be supposed that the destruction of old, involves in
itself the construction of new, forms of life and thought, it cannot but
be obvious that the principles of private judgment and individual
liberty are nothing more than negations. For as the real problem of our
intellectual life is how to rise to a judgment which is more than
private judgment, so the real problem of our practical life is how to
realize a liberty that is more than individual license. It is in this
sense that Comte says that the last three centuries have been a period
of the insurrection of the intellect against the heart, a phrase by
which he means to indicate at once the gain and the loss of the
revolutionary movement; its gain, in so far as it emancipated the
intelligence from superstitious illusions, and its loss, in so far as it
destroyed the faith which was the bond of social union, without
substituting any other faith in its room. At the same time, the
expression points to a peculiarity of Comte's Psychology, which affects
his whole view of the history, and especially of the religious history,
of man; and it is therefore necessary to subject it to a careful
examination.
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