But when he exaggerated this line of thought into a practical
system, in which philosophers were to be organized into a kind of
corporate hierarchy, invested with almost the same spiritual supremacy
(though without any secular power) once possessed by the Catholic
Church; when I found him relying on this spiritual authority as the only
security for good government, the sole bulwark against practical
oppression, and expecting that by it a system of despotism in the state
and despotism in the family would be rendered innocuous and beneficial;
it is not surprising, that while as logicians we were nearly at one, as
sociologists we could travel together no further. M. Comte lived to
carry out these doctrines to their extremest consequences, by planning,
in his last work, the _Systeme de Politique Positive_, the completest
system of spiritual and temporal despotism which ever yet emanated from
a human brain, unless possibly that of Ignatius Loyola: a system by
which the yoke of general opinion, wielded by an organized body of
spiritual teachers and rulers, would be made supreme over every action,
and as far as is in human possibility, every thought, of every member of
the community, as well in the things which regard only himself, as in
those which concern the interests of others.
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