s of life and thought, it cannot but
be obvious that the principles of private judgment and individual
liberty are nothing more than negations. For as the real problem of our
intellectual life is how to rise to a judgment which is more than
private judgment, so the real problem of our practical life is how to
realize a liberty that is more than individual license. It is in this
sense that Comte says that the last three centuries have been a period
of the insurrection of the intellect against the heart, a phrase by
which he means to indicate at once the gain and the loss of the
revolutionary movement; its gain, in so far as it emancipated the
intelligence from superstitious illusions, and its loss, in so far as it
destroyed the faith which was the bond of social union, without
substituting any other faith in its room. At the same time, the
expression points to a peculiarity of Comte's Psychology, which affects
his whole view of the history, and especially of the religious history,
of man; and it is therefore necessary to subject it to a careful
examination.

Is it possible for the intellect to be in insurrection against the
heart? In a sense already indicated this is possible. It is possible, in
short, that the moral and intellectual spirit of a belief may still
control the life of one who, so far as his explicit consciousness is
concerned, has renounced it. Rooted as the individual is in a wider life
than his own, it is often but a small part of himself that he can bring
to distinct consciousness. Further, so little are most men accustomed to
self-analysis; that they are seldom aware what it is that constitutes
the inspiring power of their beliefs. Generally, at least in the first
instance, they take their creed in gross, without distinguishing between
essential and unessential elements. They confuse, in one general
consecration of reverence, its primary principles, and the local and
temporary accidents of the form in which it was first presented to them,
and they are as ready to accept battle _a l'outrance_ for some useless
outwork as for the citadel itself. And, for the same reason, they are
ready to think that the citadel is lost when the outwork is taken; to
suppose, _e.g._, that the spiritual nature of man is a fiction if he was
not directly made by God out of the dust of the earth, or that the
Christian view of life has ceased to be true if a doubt can be thrown on
the possibility of proving miracles. Yet however