as we think there is, the greatest difference
in their value, and the temper is not the same, nor the method. But the
two are quite capable of being regarded, and for the purposes of an
account of Comte's career ought to be regarded, as an integral whole.
His letters when he was a young man of one-and-twenty, and before he had
published a word, show how strongly present the social motive was in his
mind, and in what little account he should hold his scientific works, if
he did not perpetually think of their utility for the species. "I feel,"
he wrote, "that such scientific reputation as I might acquire would give
more value, more weight, more useful influence to my political sermons."
In 1822 he published a _Plan of the Scientific Works necessary to
reorganize Society_. In this he points out that modern society is
passing through a great crisis, due to the conflict of two opposing
movements,--the first, a disorganizing movement owing to the break-up of
old institutions and beliefs; the second, a movement towards a definite
social state, in which all means of human prosperity will receive their
most complete development and most direct application. How is this
crisis to be dealt with? What are the undertakings necessary in order to
pass successfully through it towards an organic state? The answer to
this is that there are two series of works. The first is theoretic or
spiritual, aiming at the development of a new principle of co-ordinating
social relations, and the formation of the system of general ideas which
are destined to guide society. The second work is practical or temporal;
it settles the distribution of power, and the institutions that are most
conformable to the spirit of the system which has previously been
thought out in the course of the theoretic work. As the practical work
depends on the conclusions of the theoretical, the latter must obviously
come first in order of execution.

In 1826 this was pushed farther in a most remarkable piece called
_Considerations on the Spiritual Power_--the main object of which is to
demonstrate the necessity of instituting a spiritual power, distinct
from the temporal power and independent of it. In examining the
conditions of a spiritual power proper for modern times, he indicates in
so many terms the presence in his mind of a direct analogy between his
proposed spiritual power and the functions of the Catholic clergy at the
time of its greatest vigour and most complete ind