Humanity so understood will inspire us with the strongest feelings of gratitude. Do we not owe to her all that is good, precious and human in us? Man will see “co-operators” in the men of all time.[357] Each of us has to reflect only upon his physical, intellectual and moral being to realise what he owes to the whole of his predecessors. The man who would think himself independent of others could not even formulate this error (which in Comte’s eyes becomes blasphemy) without contradicting himself; for is not language itself a collective and social work?[358] History will become the “sacred science” of humanity. To put it more simply, it will be the ever clearer consciousness which humanity will have of itself, through the study of its intellectual and moral activity in the past. Gradually, with the progress of the historical spirit, the idea of an evolution subject to laws, the idea of “order conceived as capable of development,” will become substituted to the prejudice which attributes to man boundless power of action upon social facts. It will become apparent that the part played by each generation in the common work of humanity is necessarily a very small one, as compared with what is transmitted to it by previous generations. To refuse this inheritance would be to refuse to be what we are: it would be an absurd and immoral pretention, and, moreover, entirely fruitless. It is impossible for man to disown humanity without ceasing to exist. He necessarily represents, while he lives, a long past of intellectual and moral efforts. And this is the most essential attribute of human life, although we meet with more or less developed solidarity also among other animal species. But continuity belongs to humanity alone. In a word, according to Comte’s fine formula: “Humanity is made up more of the dead than of the living.” However, neither the “yoke” which presses upon the living with all the weight of history and of prehistoric times, nor the _consensus_ which makes of humanity a great “collective organism” take from man his liberty of action. The consequence of human solidarity and continuity is not a kind of fatalism. Individuals remain responsible. We must regard them neither as the wheels in a machine, nor as the cells in an organism, nor as the members of an animal colony. Humanity is not a polyp. This comparison, says Comte, “shows a very imperfect philosophical appreciation of our social solidarity, and a great biological ignorance of the kind of existence peculiar to polypi.”[359] It likens a voluntary and deliberate association to an involuntary and indissoluble participation. Humanity, as a collective organism, stands out, on the contrary, as distinct by its own characteristics from animal colonies. In these colonies, the individuals are physically bound together and physiologically independent. In humanity, the individuals are independent physically, and are only bound together in space and in time by their highest functions.