SANCTION OF INDIVIDUAL CONDUCT 531 



held up as antagonistic to religious belief — " permitted the preponderance 

 of our best instincts, the habitual ascendency of these would not establish 

 any real active unity without an objective basis which the intellect alone 

 is capable of furnishing. When the belief in an external power is incom- 

 plete or uncertain, the purest sentiments will never prevent strange perver- 

 sions and profound dissonances from setting in. What would be the case, 

 then, if one were to suppose human existence to be entirely independent 

 of any exterior power ? . . . Before all things, therefore, religion must 

 aun at subordinating us to an external power, the irresistible supremacy 

 of which shall leave no room for any uncertainty. ... At the beginning 

 of the century this intimate dependence of humanity on an external power 

 was still ignored by the most eminent thinkers. The gradual appreciation 

 of this truth constitutes the chief scientific acquisition of our time." ^ 



We find, in this passage from Auguste Comte, ample con- 

 firmation of our argument that idealism, if it is to be effective, 

 must be embodied in a social principle. The idealism which is 

 termed individualist idealism is deprived, by the very fact of its 

 individuahsm, of all its potency. There is, in such idealism, 

 an entire lack of faith in a principle external to the individual, 

 and superior to him ; and when we remove idealism from its 

 sociological basis, when we seek to individuahse it, we are sowing 

 the germs of that profound discord which individualism can never 

 fail to produce, and which, in itself, suffices to render the principle 

 ineffective. The individual life, left to itself, thrown on its own 

 resources, is a Hf e the value of which is reduced to the proportions 

 of the individual himself — a mere passing speck of dust in the 

 infinity of time. In order to confer an adequate sanction on 

 individual life and its sufferings, that sanction must come from 

 a principle which is external to the individual ; it must come from 

 a principle which is more lasting than the individual ; it must 

 come from a principle which is in itself possessed of adequate 

 sanction. But what principle can claim to be possessed of a 

 sanction sufficient for this purpose, if that sanction is one which 



1 A. Comte, Systeme de Politique Positive, vol. ii., pp. 12, 13. Our quota- 

 tion is from the text given in the highly interesting and valuable work of 

 F. Brunetiere, Sur les Chemins de la Croyance : I' Utilisation du Positivisme, 

 p. 286. Paris, second edition, 1905. 



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