their competition will not be formidable.  Within the body itself, the High Priest has it in his power to make sure that there shall be no opinions, and no exercise of mind, but such as he approves; for he alone decides the duties and local residence of all its members, and can even eject them from the body.  Before electing to be under this rule, we feel a natural curiosity to know in what manner it is to be exercised.  Humanity has only yet had one Pontiff, whose mental qualifications for the post are not likely to be often surpassed, M. Comte himself.  It is of some importance to know what are the ideas of this High Priest, concerning the moral and religious government of the human intellect.

One of the doctrines which M. Comte most strenuously enforces in his later writings is, that during the preliminary evolution of humanity, terminated by the foundation of Positivism, the free development of our forces of all kinds was the important matter, but that from this time forward the principal need is to regulate them.  Formerly the danger was of their being insufficient, but henceforth, of their being abused.  Let us express, in passing, our entire dissent from this doctrine.  Whoever thinks that the wretched education which mankind as yet receive, calls forth their mental powers (except those of a select few) in a sufficient or even tolerable degree, must be very easily satisfied:  and the abuse of them, far from becoming proportionally greater as knowledge and mental capacity increase, becomes rapidly less, provided always that the diffusion of those qualities keeps pace with their growth.  The abuse of intellectual power is only to be dreaded, when society is divided between a few highly cultivated intellects and an ignorant and stupid multitude.  But mental power is a thing which M. Comte does not want—­or wants infinitely less than he wants submission and obedience.  Of all the ingredients of human nature, he continually says, the intellect most needs to be disciplined and reined-in.  It is the most turbulent “le plus perturbateur,” of all the mental elements; more so than even the selfish instincts.  Throughout the whole modern transition, beginning with ancient Greece (for M. Comte tells us that we have always been in a state of revolutionary transition since then), the intellect has been in a state of systematic insurrection against “le coeur.”  The metaphysicians and literati (lettres), after helping to pull down the old religion and social order, are rootedly hostile to the construction of the new, and desiring only to prolong the existing scepticism and intellectual anarchy, which secure to them a cheap social ascendancy, without the labour of earning it by solid scientific preparation.  The scientific class, from whom better might have been expected, are, if possible, worse.  Void of enlarged views, despising all that is too large for their comprehension, devoted exclusively each to his special science, contemptuously indifferent