This theory (which, as we shall see, underlies Comte's whole conception of history) suggests two questions. It leads us to ask, in the first place, whether the tendencies of the intellectual life are thus dispersive and opposed to the social tendencies? and, secondly, whether the social tendencies in the form which they take with man, are not necessarily determined to be what they are by his intelligence? The former question really resolves itself into another: Is the intelligence of man a mere formal power of apprehending what is presented to it from without, so that when it is left to itself it must lose itself in the infinite multiplicity of individual objects in the external world? or does it carry with it any synthetic principle, any idea of the whole, to which it necessarily and inevitably seeks to bring back the difference of things? Against Comte's assertion that the natural tendency of the intelligence is to lose itself in difference without end, we might quote the well-known saying of Bacon, that the tendency of the "_intellectus sibi permissus_" is rather towards a premature synthesis. "_Intellectus humanus ex proprietate sua facile supponit majorem ordinem et æqualitatem in rebus quam invenit_." Surely, if we may speak of tendencies of the intellectual life as separated from the life of feeling, the tendency to unity and the universal belongs to it quite as much as the tendency to difference and the particular; just as in the life of feeling the tendency to isolation and self-assertion against others is combined with the tendency to society and union with others. From the first moment of intellectual life the world is to us a unity; _subjectively_ a unity, as all its varied phenomena are gathered up in the consciousness of one self, and _objectively_ a unity, as every object and event is definitely placed in relation to the other objects and events in one space and one time. The development of knowledge is, no doubt, the continual detection of new differences and distinctions in things, but the phenomena which are distinguished from other phenomena are at the same time put in relation to them. Nor can the intelligence find complete satisfaction until this relation is discovered to be necessary, and thus difference passes into unity again. Individual minds, indeed, may be more of the Aristotelian, or more of the Platonist, order, may tend more to divide what at first is presented as unity, or to unite what at first is presented as difference. But it is absurd to talk of either tendency as belonging to the intelligence in itself, since it is utterly beyond, or rather beneath, the powers of thought to conceive either of an undifferentiated unity, or of a chaos of differences without some kind of relation. Descending to particulars, we may bring Comte as a witness against himself; for while he declares that the sciences which deal with the inorganic world are mainly analytic in their tendencies, he at the same time maintains that the