robably accept the sentence
with the substitution of humanity for Christ. But either substitution
involves the negation of the natural tendencies, whether individual or
social, in their immediate natural form; and Comte himself, when he
placed not only the sexual but even the maternal impulse among those
that are merely "personal," virtually acknowledged that the natural or
instinctive basis of the altruistic affections is not in itself
moral.[39] But because he begins with a psychology which treats the
egoistic and altruistic desires, and again the intellect and the heart,
as distinct and independent entities, he is unable to do justice to an
account of moral experience which involves that they are essentially
related elements in one whole, or necessarily connected stages of its
development.

In the form in which it was first presented, the teaching of
Christianity was undoubtedly ambiguous, as, indeed, every doctrine in
its first general and abstract form must be. We cannot then call it
either social or anti-social, without limitations; it is anti-social and
ascetic, because of its negative relations to the previous forms of life
and culture; it is social and positive in so far as in its primary
doctrine of the unity of the divine and human--of divinity manifested
in man and humanity made perfect through suffering--it contains the
promise and the necessity of a development by which nature and spirit
shall be reconciled. The progressive tendency of Christendom was based
on the fact that from the earliest times the followers of Christ were
placed in the dilemma, either of denying their primary doctrine of
reconciliation between God and man and going back to pure Monotheism, or
of advancing to the reconciliation of all those other antagonisms of
spirit and nature, the world and the Church, which arose out of the
circumstances of its first publication. And modern history is more than
anything else the history of the long process whereby this logical
necessity manifested itself in fact. The negative spirit of the Middle
Age, its asceticism, its dualism, its formalism, its tendency to
transform the moral opposition of natural and spiritual into an external
opposition between two natural worlds, present and future, and thus to
substitute "other-worldliness" for worldliness, instead of substituting
unworldliness for both--all these characteristics were the natural
results of the fact that the idea of Christianity, in its firs