To conclude, “the eternal honour”[301] of Catholicism is to have brought a decisive improvement into the theory of the social organism, by the separation of the two powers. Many causes have contributed to its being misunderstood; the excessive admiration of the modern historians for the city of classical times, the partiality of Protestants for the early Church, and finally the contempt of philosophers for the supposed darkness of the Middle Ages. We judge of it better to-day. Positive philosophy does not confine itself to rehabilitating the Catholic organisation: it takes it up again on its own account. “The more I investigate this immense subject,” writes Comte to John Stuart Mill, “the more confirmed I become in the view which I already held twenty years ago, at the time of my work upon the spiritual power, of regarding ourselves, we, systematic positivists, as the real successors of the great men of the Middle Ages, by taking up the social work again at the point to which Catholicism had carried it.”[302] Undoubtedly the conditions are not the same to-day, and we must take the differences into account. But as to the extent and the intensity of action, we may say that for each of the social relations on which the Catholic clergy had to pronounce, an analogous attribution exists for the modern spiritual power.[303] In a word, excepting for the dogma, Comte borrows from the Catholicism of the Middle Ages almost everything, its organisation, its _régime_, its worship, and, if he could, its clergy and its cathedrals. His religion will be a Catholicism raised upon another basis. III. The separation between the temporal and spiritual power realised by Catholicism in the Middle Ages marks a decisive progress in the history of humanity. But it was not finally established. The _régime_ of which it formed a part was bound to disappear, because of the “mutual antipathy” between the elements included within it. The Catholic organisation of the thirteenth century was first shaken and then destroyed by the advancing ascendancy of the positive spirit, and the resistance of theological dogma. From this “organic” period European society has passed to a “critical” period which has filled centuries, and which positive philosophy alone is able to bring to a close. The whole of modern history, political, religious, scientific, æsthetic, economic, etc., is, at bottom, merely the succession of the necessary stages in this double work; the decomposition of the _régime_ of the Middle Ages, and the preparation for the positive period. In a first phase, which occupies the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the movement remains a spontaneous one. It ignores the end to which it is tending. In the second, which extends to the end of the eighteenth century, the disorganisation becomes deeper under the influence of an entirely negative philosophy.[304]