“To continue to live in others,” is a very real mode of existence.[366] It is the only one which we can hope for after death; but it is also the only one which we ought to desire, if it be true that what most constitutes ourselves in us does not consist in the individual in the biological sense of the word, but truly in intelligence and good will, that is to say, in the social and human element. He who has only lived for himself, who has selfishly sought for life, has lost it: for death takes him away altogether. He who has lived for others, he who has not sought life for himself, has found it: for he survives in others. In the religions of the past, salvation was found in union with God: in the positive religion, salvation is found in union with humanity. Once incorporated in the Great Being, the individual becomes inseparable from it.[367] Being from that time withdrawn from the influence of all the physical laws, he only remains subjected to the higher laws which regulate directly the evolution of humanity. Being even withdrawn from the influence of the laws of time and space, he can live again at the same time in several organisms. Do we not see that the thought of a poet, of an artist, of a man of science revives in a great number of living men at the same time on the most distant points of the globe? Subjective immortality, renewed by an uninterrupted sequence of successive resurrections, will last as long as humanity itself. “To live with the dead,” says Comte “constitutes one of our most precious privileges.”[368] But, in the same way, the dead live with us. They live in us, and those who have been most truly men, those who have made humanity by the effort of their intellect and their will, they are within us the best and most lasting part of ourselves. For, when our generation disappears, it is this part of us which will survive. We shall also survive in the measure in which we have contributed to the increase of this inheritance, in the measure in which we shall have deserved well of our contemporaries and our successors. The present life is a trial. The “subjective” life, that is to say, incorporation into humanity, is at once a liberation and a reward for those who have passed victoriously through this trial.[369] We see to what extent the old moral and religious ideal subsists in the positive conception. We are little surprised at this, when we know that, towards the end of his life, Comte made the _Imitation_ his daily reading.