but, in a subordinate degree, our humble auxiliaries, those animal races which enter into real society with man, which attach themselves to him, and voluntarily co-operate with him, like the noble dog who gives his life for his human friend and benefactor.  For this M. Comte has been subjected to unworthy ridicule, but there is nothing truer or more honourable to him in the whole body of his doctrines.  The strong sense he always shows of the worth of the inferior animals, and of the duties of mankind towards them, is one of the very finest traits of his character.

We, therefore, not only hold that M. Comte was justified in the attempt to develope his philosophy into a religion, and had realized the essential conditions of one, but that all other religions are made better in proportion as, in their practical result, they are brought to coincide with that which he aimed at constructing.  But, unhappily, the next thing we are obliged to do, is to charge him with making a complete mistake at the very outset of his operations—­with fundamentally misconceiving the proper office of a rule of life.  He committed the error which is often, but falsely, charged against the whole class of utilitarian moralists; he required that the test of conduct should also be the exclusive motive to it.  Because the good of the human race is the ultimate standard of right and wrong, and because moral discipline consists in cultivating the utmost possible repugnance to all conduct injurious to the general good, M. Comte infers that the good of others is the only inducement on which we should allow ourselves to act; and that we should endeavour to starve the whole of the desires which point to our personal satisfaction, by denying them all gratification not strictly required by physical necessities.  The golden rule of morality, in M. Comte’s religion, is to live for others, “vivre pour autrui.”  To do as we would be done by, and to love our neighbour as ourself, are not sufficient for him:  they partake, he thinks, of the nature of personal calculations.  We should endeavour not to love ourselves at all.  We shall not succeed in it, but we should make the nearest approach to it possible.  Nothing less will satisfy him, as towards humanity, than the sentiment which one of his favourite writers, Thomas a Kempis, addresses to God:  Amem te plus quam me, nec me nisi propter te.  All education and all moral discipline should have but one object, to make altruism (a word of his own coming) predominate over egoism.  If by this were only meant that egoism is bound, and should be taught, always to give way to the well-understood interests of enlarged altruism, no one who acknowledges any morality at all would object to the proposition.  But M. Comte, taking his stand on the biological fact that organs are strengthened by exercise and atrophied by disuse, and firmly convinced that each of our elementary inclinations has its distinct cerebral organ, thinks it the grand duty of life not only to strengthen the