excommunication is supposed to be.[42]

The truth is that Comte commits the same error which misled Montesquieu
and his followers, when they supposed that the great security of a free
State lay in the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial
powers,--_i.e._, in treating the different organs through which the
common life expresses itself as if they were independent organisms. In
doing so, they forgot that, if such a balance of power was realised, the
effect must either be an equilibrium in which all movement must cease,
or a struggle in which the unity of the State would be in danger of
being lost. The true security against the dangers involved, on the one
hand, in the direct application of theory to practice, and, on the other
hand, in the separation of practice from theory, must lie, not in giving
them independent positions as spiritual and temporal powers, but in the
organic unity of the society--communal, national, or, if it may be,
universal--to which the representatives of both belong. And organic
unity, though it does not mean any special form of government, means at
least two things: in the first place, that each great class or interest
should have for itself a definite organ, and should therefore be able to
act on the whole body in a regular and constitutional manner, so as to
show all its force without revolutionary violence; and, in the second
place, that no class or interest should have such an independent
position, that there is no legal or constitutional method of bringing it
into due subordination. But Comte, losing his balance in his jealousy of
the individualistic and democratic movement of modern society, has built
up a social ideal, which fails in both these points of view. And he is
consequently obliged, against his will, to contemplate revolution and
war as necessary resources of the Constitution.

It would not be fair to conclude these articles, which have necessarily
been devoted in great part to criticism and controversy, without
expressing a sense of the power and insight which are shown in the works
of Comte, especially in the _Politique Positive_. Controversy itself, it
must be remembered, is a kind of homage; for, as Hegel says, "It is only
a great man that condemns us to the task of explaining him." But if we
can sometimes look down upon such men, it becomes us to remember that we
stand upon their shoulders. Comte seems to me to occupy, as a writer, a
position in some degree si