Substance and Shadow

No man of Comte's intellectual make has the slightest title to prejudice the question in hand, because he has no apprehension of the spiritual uses of Philosophy, which alone supply the clew to its solution. The grand use of Philosophy is to promote the spiritual understanding in man» by disengaging the infinite in human conception from the grasp of the finite, or what is the same thing, revealing the latent harmony which pre- vails between being and seeming, between sub- stance and form, between spirit and flesh. Evi- dently then the very first requisite to a competent judgment of Philosophy is, that one believe in/ the Infinite at least as much as he believes in the finite, or be quite as unwilling to see religioil merge in science as to see science absorbed by religion. None of these men fulfil this condi- tion. They all admit the Finite, but they scout the Infinite out of sight as a rational cognition. They perfectly believe in science, but they have . a total disbelief in religion save as an early ne- 1 cessity of the scientific intellect, or at best a/ courteous dofling of the hat to Deity. They are consequently all alike incompetent to esti- mate the grandly reconciling genius and func- tion of Philosophy, just as incompetent as a one- legged man would be to run a race, or a one- eyed man to appreciate the stereoscope. It is