In Comte’s doctrine, the idea of humanity is presented under several successive aspects, or, to put it better, the development of his system has brought to light, in turns, the various attributes of this “Great Being.” In his first career, Comte prefers to consider humanity as an object of science. In his second career, it rather appears to him as an object of adoration and of love. Here we can follow the progress of the mystical and religious feeling which, especially from 1846, filled his thoughts and modified his language, his philosophical doctrine, nevertheless, remaining essentially the same. I. We must not, says Comte, define Humanity by man, but on the contrary man by Humanity. In general this formula is understood in a moral and social sense. It is understood as a condemnation of “individualism,” and one of the directing principles of the positivist _régime_. This interpretation is not a false one, and consequences of this kind can indeed be drawn from Comte’s formula. But they are only consequences. The immediate object of the formula is not to subordinate the individual to the multitude. In the first place it expresses a fact. If we consider a man by himself, positive science only allows us to define him as an animal, in whom as in all others, the end of animal life is to insure organic life. Do we wish to define him by what is essentially human in him, that is to say, by intellect and sociability? One must then pass from the consideration of the individual to that of the species. From the strictly biological point of view M. Bonald’s saying must be reversed; we must say that man is an organism served by an intellect. It is only if we leave the biological for the social point of view, if we look upon the human species as a single “immense and eternal” individual (a conception which is justified by the continued development of intelligence and sociability),[355] that we can consider the voluntary and systematic subordination of vegative to animal life as the ideal type towards which civilised humanity is tending. We can then make use of this subordination to refine it. In a word, we are really men only _by our participation of humanity_.