The first lays down the principle that the highest end of man is the utmost symmetrical education of his own powers in their individual peculiarities. To accomplish this, he must enjoy the largest freedom of thought and action consistent with the recognition of the same right in others. In regard to religion, the state should have nothing to do with aiding it, but should protect the individual in his opposition to any authoritative form of it. As a wholly personal and subjective matter, social relations do not concern it. In fine, the aim of both government and education should be the development of an individualism in which an enlightened intellect controls and directs all the powers toward an exalted self-cultivation. Comte reverses this picture. His fundamental principle is to subordinate the sum total of our existence to our social relations; real life is to live in others; not the individual but humanity is the only worthy object of effort. Social polity therefore includes the whole of development; the intellect should have no other end but to subserve the needs of the race, and always be second to the altruistic sentiments. Love toward others should absorb self-love. “_Il est encore meilleur d’aimer que d’être aimé._” Such is the contrast between the ideal of the individual as exhibited by the Religion of Culture, and the ideal of the commonwealth as portrayed in the Religion of Humanity. The whole duty of man, says the one school, is to live for others; nay, says the other, it is to live intelligently for himself; the intellect, says the former, should always be subordinated to society, and be led by the emotions; intellect, says the latter, should ever be in the ascendant, and absolutely control and direct the emotions; the theoretical object of government, says the former, is to enable the affections and thoughts to pass into action; not so, says the latter, its only use is to give the individual secure leisure to develope his own affections and thoughts. Mutual relation is the key note of the former, independence of the latter; the former is the apotheosis of love, the latter of reason. Strictly and literally the apotheosis. For, differing as they do on such vital points, they both agree in dispensing with the ideas of God and immortality as conceptions superfluous in the realization of the theoretical perfection they contemplate. Not that either scheme omits the religious sentiment. On the contrary, it is especially prominent in one, and very well marked in the other. Both assume its growing prominence, never its extinction. Both speak of it as an integral part of man’s highest nature.