SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP 749
The immense multiplication of religious sects in the present day, and in history, is popularly accounted one of the least cred- itable features of civilization. The skeptics deprecate it as a bad habit, like alcoholism and immorality, into which the un- cultivated man is prone to fall. But in itself, and apart from its secondary effects, the mere proliferation of sectionally religious bodies is simply an expression of spiritual freedom. In joining this, that, or the other church, in remaining within its fold or in leaving it, the individual believes himself to be actuated by non- material motives. He believes that he is uninfluenced alike by the parliaments that make laws, the bureaucracies that administer them, and the judges that interpret, or misinterpret, them. He believes that his religious life is unconditioned by the policeman visible at the street corner, by the sovereign invisible on his throne, and the soldiers that display his royal uniform. In brief, the member of a religious community believes himself to have risen into a world of spiritual freedom, untrammeled by the pro- hibition and compulsion which in civil history are called law and politics; in natural history, tooth and claw. How far this belief in a life of spiritual freedom is real, and how far it is illusory, matters not for the moment. The point of insistence is that the members of a religious community are bound together by simi- larity of ideas and feelings, and not by bonds which rest upon a potential recourse to physical force. In other words, the social influences immediately operative upon and among a religious community are mental, moral, and aesthetic. They are not legal and political. And in this respect, at least, it is sufficiently mani- fest that the scientific community resembles a religious one.
XXI. It is one of the merits of Comte to have aided the progress of thought by generalizing under the one conception of spiritual powers all those agencies and institutions which in- fluence men by mental, moral, and aesthetic considerations. His corresponding conception of temporal powers generalizes agen- cies and institutions which operate on, or influence, conduct by an actual or potential recourse to physical force. The spiritual powers thus seek to substantiate or to modify belief using that
