A General View of Positivism. Auguste Comte
habits and intellectual culture of modern life have already been sufficiently diffused to call out an instinct of fraternity stronger than any that has ever existed before. It is strong enough to prevent the subject of social regeneration from being ever regarded as a merely national question.
And this is the point of view which displays the character of the second phase of the Revolution in its truest light. The first phase, although in its results advantageous to the other nations, was necessarily conducted as if peculiar to France, because no other country was ripe for the original outbreak. Indeed French nationality was stimulated by the necessity of resisting the counter-revolutionary coalition. But the final and constructive phase which has begun now that the national limits of the crisis have been reached, should always be regarded as common to the whole of Western Europe. For it consists essentially in spiritual reorganization; and the need of this in one shape or other presses already with almost equal force upon each of the five nations who make up the great Western family. Conversely, the more occidental the character of the reforming movement, the greater will be the prominence given to intellectual and moral regeneration as compared with mere modifications of government, in which of course there must be very considerable national differences. The first social need of Western Europe is community in belief and in habits of life; and this must be based upon a uniform system of education controlled and applied by a spiritual power that shall be accepted by all. This want satisfied, the reconstruction of governments may be carried out in accordance with the special requirements of each nation. Difference in this respect is legitimate: it will not affect the essential unity of the Positivist Republic, which will be bound together by more complete and durable ties than the Catholic Republic of the Middle Ages.
Not only then do we find from the whole condition of Western Europe that the movement of opinion transcends in importance all political agitation; but we find that everything points to the necessity of establishing a spiritual power, as the sole means of directing this free yet systematic reform of opinion and of life with the requisite consistency and largeness of view. We now see that the old revolutionary prejudice of confounding temporal and spiritual power is directly antagonistic to social regeneration, although it once aided the preparation for it. In the first place it stimulates the sense of nationality which ought to be subordinate to larger feelings of international fraternity. And at the same time, with the view of satisfying the conditions of uniformity which are so obviously required for the solution of the common problem, it induces efforts at forcible incorporation of all the nations into one, efforts as dangerous as they are fruitless.
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