The personal penalties of neglect of health are commonly distant, as
well as more or less uncertain, and require the additional and more
immediate sanction of moral responsibility. M. Comte, therefore, in this
instance, is, we conceive, right in principle; though we have not the
smallest doubt that he would have gone into extreme exaggeration in
practice, and would have wholly ignored the legitimate liberty of the
individual to judge for himself respecting his own bodily conditions,
with due relation to the sufficiency of his means of knowledge, and
taking the responsibility of the result.
Connected with the same considerations is another idea of M. Comte,
which has great beauty and grandeur in it, and the realization of which,
within the bounds of possibility, would be a cultivation of the social
feelings on a most essential point. It is, that every person who lives
by any useful work, should be habituated to regard himself not as an
individual working for his private benefit, but as a public functionary;
and his wages, of whatever sort, as not the remuneration or
purchase-money of his labour, which should be given freely, but as the
provision made by society to enable him to carry it on, and to replace
the materials and products which have been consumed in the process.
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