Class. 
 
 
 
 Book_ 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 The Library of Congress 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/socialphilosophy01cair 
 
THE 
 
 SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION OF 
 
 COMTE. 
 
L 
 
THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 AND RELIGION OF 
 
 COMTE. 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD ' CAIRD, LL.D., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF MORAL FHILOSOPHY IN THF. UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW. 
 
 b o 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1885. 
 

 A 
 
 "5^. 
 

 
 
 *p£iiratcfc, 
 
 WITH AFFECTION AND ESTEEM, 
 MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE 
 
 JOHN NICHOL. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Preface, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 GENERAL ACCOUNT OF COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Gomte's fundamental principles — Their bearing on his view q/"-- 
 history — Decay of theology and of the social system founded 
 on it — Metaphysic, its strength for destruction and weakness 
 for construction — It prepares the way for positive science, on 
 ivl „ the social system of the future must be based — Necessity 
 for a new religion based on science — Humanity the true object 
 of worship— The social system corresponding to the religion of 
 Humanity — Man's intellectual and moral powers evolved in 
 conflict with nature — The nature of the social organization 
 and the three forms of society, the Family, the State, and the 
 Church — The Priesthood of Humanity and its office, - 1-55 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE NEGATIVE SIDE OF COMTE's PHILOSOPHY — HIS OPPOSITION 
 TO METAPHYSIC AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 Growth of a new view of the social organism opposed at once to 
 Individualism and Socialism — Comte and the German Idealists 
 — Meaning of his attack on Metaphysic — His re al agreement 
 with modern meta physician s — He adopts Locke's principles 
 as to knoivledge, yet is opposed to the Individualism of Locke's 
 French disciples — He attacks Realism as a Nominalist and 
 Nominalism as a Realist, and is really guided by a higher 
 principle than either — His mistaken attitude towards th & 
 Critical Philosophy — Relation of Philosophy to Science — It 
 makelTmen conscious of their guiding yrinciyles — Comte' s 
 consciousness of the categories /hat guide /its thought — Con 
 sequent defects in his view of the development of Religion, of 
 Philosophy, and of Science. — Mr. Spencer's criticism and 
 Littre"s ansioer — Ambiguity in the opp>osition between the 
 universal and the particular, 56-111 
 
viii Contents. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE POSITIVE OR CONSTRICTIVE SIDE OF COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY 
 — HIS SUBSTITUTES EOR METAPHYSIC AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 His recognition of the need of substitutes for Theology and Meta- 
 physic — His assertion that his philosophy is relative and subjec- 
 tivp^Double meaning of the relativity of knowledge as involving 
 ie assertion or the denial of real or absolute knowledge — 
 Collision of Comte's earlier and later views on this point — 
 Comte's subjective synthesis not subjective in the sense of Indi- 
 vidualism, nor yet in the sense that a conscious subject is im- 
 plied in all objects — His compromise between these opposite 
 theories — His doctrine that man sees the world in ordine ad 
 hominem but not in ordine ad universum — Impossibility- 
 of separating nature from man and of criticising the whole 
 system to vihich man belongs — Defects of Comte's religion"" 
 according to his own idea of religion — Schisms in the school of 
 Comte, 112-176 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 COMTE'S VIEW OF THE RELATION OF THE INTELLECT TO THE 
 HEART — ITS EFFECT ON HIS CONCEPTION OF HISTORY AND 
 OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL. 
 
 The necessity for unity in man's intellectual and moral life — 
 Nature of the conflict between the intelligence and the heart — 
 It is really a conflict of intelligence with itself — Criticism of 
 Comte's doctrine that the intelligence must he subjected to tin- 
 heart — Its effect upon his conception of history, especially of 
 the history of Christianity — The two elements in Christianity, 
 their conflict and reconciliation in its development — The nega- 
 tive tendencies of mediaeval Catholicism and the positive ten- 
 dencies of the modern era — Comte's imp erfect conception of the 
 Reformalmi and the Revolution — His restoration of the 
 mediaeval ideal — His general position as a Philosopher. 
 
 177-249 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 This volume consists of a series of articles which 
 have already appeared in the Contemporary Re- 
 view, and which the proprietors of that review 
 have kindly permitted me to republish. A few 
 paragraphs have been re- written, and a few verbal 
 changes introduced to remove obscurity or in- 
 accuracy, but the general substance of the articles 
 remains unaltered. 
 
 In the following exposition and criticism of 
 Comte's philosophy I have considered it mainly, 
 though not exclusively, in its ethical and religi- 
 ous aspects. I have not attempted to deal with 
 the detailed discussion of the nature and methods 
 of the sciences contained in the Philosophic Posi- 
 tive, except in so far as is necessary for the 
 understanding of the Politique Positive, in which 
 
x Preface. 
 
 the social and religious aims of Comte's philosophy 
 are for the first time explicitly stated. Not, 
 indeed, that there is any very marked division 
 between his earlier and his later treatises. The 
 changes observable in the latter do not amount, 
 as has sometimes been represented, to a sudden 
 revolution, but are rather the last develojnnent 
 of tendencies which had been gaining ground in 
 Comte's mind as his work advanced, and gradually 
 carrying him away from his original principles, 
 or at least greatly modifying their first signi- 
 ficance. I have preferred, however, to confine 
 myself, in the main, to the social philosophy of 
 Comte and the restoration of religion connected 
 therewith, partly because I have not sufficient 
 scientific knowledge to estimate the value of his 
 critical review of mathematics and physics, 
 chemistry and biology, and partly because, so 
 far as I know, there has been very little serious 
 criticism of that part of his work which he 
 regarded (I think justly) as the most important 
 and original. In his earlier treatise, or at least 
 in the greater part of it, Comte was working 
 upon lines which are common to him with all 
 the . representatives of what in the last century 
 
Preface. xi 
 
 was termed " Enlightenment," and now most 
 often goes by the names of " Positivism " or 
 " Agnosticism." But the distinctive peculiarity 
 of Comte is that he does not stop at that 
 negation of metaphysics and theology which is 
 characteristic of this school, hut that Ids Posi- 
 tivism reproduces both, though in a new form. 
 It is, indeed, just this new element in Comte 
 which gives a truly " positive " meaning to his 
 well-known law of development, which in its 
 first form might more truly be described as 
 " negative." For in that form all that it dis- 
 tinctly tells us about the development of the 
 human mind is that man once believed in theo- 
 logical or metaphysical fictions, and that he 
 has now ceased, or is gradually ceasing, to believe 
 in them. In his later writings, however, Comte 
 has come to see that both theology and meta- 
 physics are based upon perennial wants of man's 
 spiritual nature, wants which, as man, he cannot 
 but feel, and for w T hich a real and not merely a 
 fictitious satisfaction can be provided. He teaches 
 us, therefore, to regard the progress of man as 
 a true development, in which the passing away 
 of the first forms of his higher life is incidental 
 
xii Preface. 
 
 to the further manifestation of the spirit, which 
 was once expressed in them. Hence the last or 
 " positive " stage of thought is conceived to be a 
 negation and abolition of the past in which all 
 that gave the past its value is reaffirmed and 
 maintained. It is a higher "positive," which is 
 reached through the negation of the lower, but it 
 is itself a great deal more than that negation. 
 
 Now, the ultimate interest of Comte's philo- 
 sophy lies in the success or failure of this 
 attempt of his to find a new satisfaction for those 
 higher wants of humanity, which Theology and 
 Metaphysic, or, as I should prefer to say, Eeligion 
 and Philosophy, have so long been supposed to 
 satisfy. It is not difficult to describe, at least 
 in general terms, what these wants are. Philo- 
 sophy professes to seek and to find the principle 
 of unity which underlies all the manifold particu- 
 lar truths of the separate sciences, and in refer- 
 ence to which they can be brought together and 
 organized as a system of knowledge. And Eeli- 
 gion, while it also is concerned with an absolute 
 principle of reality, differs from Philosophy mainly 
 in this, that it is not merely or primarily theo- 
 retical. For Eeligion what is required is such 
 
Preface. xiii 
 
 a conviction as to the ultimate basis of our 
 existence as shall enable us to find therein at 
 once an adequate object of affection and a 
 sufficient aim for all our practical endeavours. 
 Now a scientific Agnosticism, such as is common 
 at the present day, means either that there are 
 no such wants in man, or that, if they exist, no 
 provision is made for their satisfaction. Such an 
 Agnosticism could scarcely find a better expres- 
 sion for itself than the Comtean law of intellec- 
 tual development ; for, as that law is commonly 
 understood, it implies that the whole progress of 
 man has been just his gradual awakening to 
 the necessity of renouncing all effort to pene- 
 trate to the reality which is hidden behind the 
 veil of phenomena. On this view, it is vain for 
 man to ask any longer the question of Philo- 
 sophy, or to attempt to find a support for his life 
 in the faiths and hopes of religion. Man is but 
 a link or a series of links in the endless chain 
 of phenomenal causes ; his utmost knowledge 
 cannot reach beyond the relations of particular 
 things to each other and to his own particular 
 existence, and whatever he may desire, to these 
 relations he must be content practically to limit 
 
xiv Preface. 
 
 himself. Tecum hdbita et noris quam sit tibi 
 curta swpellex. 
 
 Now the peculiarity of Comte's position is that 
 he admits the principle on which this Agnostic 
 view is based, and yet at the same time 
 rejects the conclusions which are usually and 
 naturally drawn from it. He accepts the situa- 
 tion as he understands it. He admits and 
 contends that Philosophy is defeated in its attempt 
 to reach an absolute principle — a principle of 
 unity, which is at once the real or objective 
 centre of the universe, and the subjective centre 
 for our knowledge of it. He admits and con- 
 tends that there is a great gulf fixed between 
 the absolute reality of things and our conscious- 
 ness of them. ' Nevertheless, he holds that, in a 
 sense, we may still aspire to that encyclopaedic 
 or universal view of things which Philosophy 
 pretended to give ; for, though we cannot reach 
 an objective principle of unity in things, we can 
 still gather knowledge to a subjective centre, by 
 regarding all things in relation to our own needs 
 and uses. This, however, does not mean that we 
 are to view everything in relation to our own 
 individual pleasures and pains. For the indi- 
 
Preface. xv 
 
 vidual is essentially related to his race, or rather, 
 as we should say, that the " individual man is a 
 mere abstraction, and that there is nothing real 
 but Humanity." Hence, in knowledge and in 
 feeling we are carried beyond ourselves ; and as 
 in our moral life we can rise from egoism to 
 altruism, so in our intellectual life we can learn 
 to regard the world from the point of view, 
 not of the individual, but of the race. And the 
 same change brings with it the restoration of 
 religion. The " objective " or absolute God, the 
 God who made all things work together for good 
 to His creatures, has disappeared with the fictions 
 of childhood. But His place has been taken 
 by Humanity, conceived as a great providential 
 existence, which sustains and controls the life of 
 the individual man, and in which he finds a 
 sufficient object for all his devotion. Looking to 
 this Great Being, man need not feel the want of 
 any other God. He has before his eyes One 
 who can help him and whom he can love and 
 serve. Or if he should still feel something 
 wanting, as an object of worship, in a Being 
 who is not the Absolute Being, he is at liberty 
 to indulge in the poetic illusion which makes 
 
xvi Preface. 
 
 Nature, as well as Humanity, the friend of man. 
 If he does so, however, he must remember that 
 he is yielding to an illusion, which is not sup- 
 ported by anything we know of Nature ; for 
 Nature, apart from the action of man upon it, 
 shows itself as a mere fatality, which is altogether 
 indifferent to his weal or woe. 
 
 Even this short sketch of Comte's system — for 
 the detailed exposition of which the reader is re- 
 ferred to the following chapters — may suffice to 
 show where the vital spot, the Achilles' heel, of 
 Comte's philosophy lies. It lies in the idea of a 
 " subjective synthesis " or relative centre of know- 
 ledge. This idea for Comtists is the articulus 
 stantis vel cadentis philosophiae. If this central 
 principle can be securely defended, it matters 
 little to the orthodox Positivist how many of 
 the subordinate elements of Comte's thought may 
 have to be abandoned or modified. If it has to 
 be surrendered, however numerous and valuable 
 may be the separate truths and suggestions which 
 are discoverable in every part of Comte's works, 
 his philosophy as a whole must be given up. 
 From what I have read of the works of Comte's 
 most zealous and discerning followers, I am dis- 
 
Preface. xvii 
 
 posed to think that they would be ready to 
 accept this issue. Now Comte's position has 
 generally been attacked, if one might so express 
 it, from the rear, i.e., by those whose views 
 accord most with his earlier doctrine expressed 
 in the Philosophic Positive, and who regard him 
 as abandoning the true Positivism when he 
 admits any philosophical or religious synthesis 
 whatever, whether subjective or objective, whether 
 relative or absolute. It is in this way that 
 Comte was assailed by Littre, the most eminent 
 of his French disciples, and it is in this way also 
 that he was criticised by Mill and Lewes, who, 
 without being strictly his disciples, accepted most 
 of the leading ideas of his earlier work. If there 
 is any novelty in the criticism contained in 
 the following pages, it is that it starts from the 
 opposite point of view, and seeks to show that the 
 true synthesis of philosophy must be objective as 
 well as subjective, and that there can be no re- 
 ligion of Humanity which is not also a religion of 
 God. And this means that it is logically impos- 
 sible to go beyond the merely individualistic point 
 of view with which Comte started, except on the 
 assumption that the intelligence of man is, or 
 
xviii Preface. 
 
 involves, a universal principle of knowledge. The 
 same arguments, in fact, which break down the 
 division between man and man, break down also 
 the division between man and nature ; for, if 
 all Humanity be considered as organically united, 
 it becomes impossible not to recognize in nature 
 an essential relation to man, which makes it in 
 some sense a part of the same organism. The 
 history of the development of Comte's thought 
 is itself, as I endeavour in the sequel to show, 
 an evidence of this principle : for it is the history 
 of a development which ends by all but retracting 
 the negations with which it begins. And when, 
 in his Synthase Subjective, Comte sanctions the 
 poetic treatment of Space and the Earth as divine 
 friends of man, and members of a kind of Trinity 
 in which Humanity is the third person, he comes 
 very near to a complete return upon himself. 
 It has, indeed, been contended by Dr. Bridges # 
 that this is but the ordinary license of poetry, 
 such, for instance, as we find in Shelley's Earth- 
 hymn in the " Prometheus Unbound." " Sup- 
 posing any one had taken Shelley seriously to 
 task for maintaining; that the Earth is alive, should 
 * Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrine, p. 60. 
 
Preface. xix 
 
 we not think him curiously dull and pedantic ? " 
 True, it may be answered : but, supposing any 
 one had maintained that the earth is not in any 
 sense the expression of that spiritual principle 
 which expresses itself in a higher way in living 
 beings, and above all in man, and that, therefore, 
 there is nothing but fiction in the ascription of 
 life to it, should we not be entitled to say that 
 he had lost hold of the sense in which poetry is 
 truth ? Should we not consider that he had 
 degraded poetry from a sensuous and therefore 
 partly fictitious presentment of ideal truth, into a 
 mere plaything of fancy which bodies forth things 
 that are not as if they were ? In Comte's case 
 the interest of the poetic fiction consists in this, 
 that it was the imaginative anticipation of a truth 
 towards which he was moving, but which he 
 had not distinctly recognized. His imagination 
 had already emancipated him from the limits 
 of those earlier opinions of his, which still held 
 good for his understanding. If he had taken 
 one step farther, the wheel would have " come 
 full circle," and he would have restored both 
 Theology and Philosophy to the place from 
 which he expelled them. He would have 
 
xx Preface. 
 
 " burnt what he had adored, and adored what 
 he had burnt." 
 
 I cannot say so much in criticism of Comte's 
 views without adding — what every new reading 
 of his works, and especially of the Politique 
 Positive makes me feel more strongly — that the 
 value of his teaching is by no means to be 
 estimated by its mere logical result. Whatever 
 may be said of his philosophy as a whole, he 
 possessed that unmistakeable instinct for truth 
 which renders even the errors and inconsistencies 
 of men of genius more instructive than the most 
 unexceptionable reasonings of many judicious 
 persons, who follow the beaten tracks of thought 
 and, therefore, " need no repentance." 
 
 Erratum.— Page 56, Contents, 6th line, for Religion read Realism. 
 
THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION 
 OF COMTE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 GENERAL ACCOUNT OF COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Comte's fundamental principles — Their bearing on his view of 
 history — Decay of theology and of the social system founded 
 on it — M eta-physic, its strength, for destruction and weakness 
 for construction — It prepares the way for positive science, on 
 which the social system of the future must be based — Necessity 
 for a new religion based on science — Humanity the true object 
 of worship — The social system corresponding to the religion of 
 Humanity — Man's intellectual and moral powers evolved in 
 conflict with nature — The nature of the social organization 
 and the three forms of society, the Family, the State, and the 
 Church— The Priesthood of Humanity and its office. 
 
 It is impossible to understand the errors of a 
 great writer unless we do justice to the truth 
 which underlies them. In judging of Comte's 
 philosophy, and especially of his social philosophy, 
 this law of criticism has often been neglected, 
 even by those who, from their general philosophi- 
 cal point of view, might seem best qualified to 
 
__ 
 
 2 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 appreciate him. Disagreeing as I do with many 
 of his conclusions, I cannot hope to be entirely 
 successful in doing him justice. But the attempt 
 to do so may have its use, if only in bringing to 
 light the relationship of philosophies which are 
 commonly regarded as having no connection with 
 each other. The spirit of the time is greater than 
 any of its expressions, and it moulds them all, 
 under whatever outward diversity of form, to a 
 common result. If there is anything which the 
 history of philosophy teaches with clearness, it is 
 that contemporaneous movements of the human 
 spirit, even those which appear to be most inde- 
 pendent or antagonistic, are but partial expressions 
 of a truth which is not fully revealed in any one 
 of them, and which can be adequately appreciated 
 only by a later generation. The present is said 
 to be par excellence the age of historical criticism ; 
 but the historical imagination is worth little if it 
 does not enable us to discover identity of nature 
 under the most varied disguises, and, instead of 
 being confined to the formula? of any one philo- 
 sophy, to remould and renew our own ideas by 
 entering into the minds of others. In order to 
 prepare the way for a just appreciation of the 
 
Relation to Rousseau. 3 
 
 teaching of Comte, I shall, in this chapter, give 
 a short sketch of his philosophy (and more 
 particularly of his social philosophy) as far as 
 possible from his own point of view, reserving 
 for subsequent chapters what I have to say 
 in the way of criticism. 
 
 There are two main thoughts which rule the The two 
 
 loading 
 
 mind of Comte, and are the sources of most of 1 q^^ 
 the peculiarities of his system. The one is, " the 
 law of the three stages " ; the other is the sub- 
 ordination of science to man's social well-being, 
 or, as he expresses it, of the intellect to the 
 heart. The first of these thoughts embodies his 
 criterion of knowledge ; the second is the prin- 
 ciple by which he seeks to systematize knowledge, 
 and to estimate the relative value of its parts. 
 The relation of these two points in the mind 
 of Comte will be best understood if we recall his 
 historical position and the early course of his 
 mental development. As with most educated 
 Frenchmen of his time, Comte's first thoughts on 
 social politics were suggested by the Revolution ; 
 and his youthful connection with St. Simon 
 showed that he shared in that reaction against 
 the individualistic philosophy of the Eighteenth 
 
4 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 Century, which gave rise to so many socialistic 
 and communistic theories. In the school of St. 
 Simon, Comte learned the falsehood of the gospel 
 f of Eousseau — that last quintessence of the philo- 
 ; sophy which found reality only in the individual, 
 and which, therefore, idealized the natural man 
 as he is apart from, and prior to, all society, and 
 regarded all social influence as deteriorating from 
 his original purity. The hollowness of that 
 theory had been written in letters of blood on 
 the page of recent history, and that too plainly 
 to be ignored by the most hopeful theorist on 
 social subjects. Nor could any one who had 
 read it there, fail to perceive also the less striking 
 failure of the same doctrines in their economical 
 form. The liberation of the individual had not 
 brought to man political salvation, but had rather 
 revealed his essential weakness when emancipated 
 from the restraints of social order. " Laissez 
 faire " had not, as was expected, introduced an 
 economic millennium ; but had rather given rise 
 to a struggle of interests, which, if not moderated 
 by any higher principle, might end in the dis- 
 solution of society. Hence the mere irrational 
 movement of reaction drove the mass of men to 
 
Relation to the Socialists. 5 
 
 bind again upon themselves the fetters which 
 the Revolution had broken, and taught those 
 who, like De Maistre, represented the ideas and 
 interests of the past, the speculative strength 
 of their position. De Maistre saw clearly that 
 mere individualism is anarchy, and that the 
 moral education of man is possible only through 
 some binding social force. Nor was it difficult 
 for a skilful special pleader like him to confound 
 this truth with the doctrine that the only safety 
 for civilization lay in a renewed submission to 
 the mediaeval order of Church and State. On 
 the other hand, men who were too much imbued 
 with the modern spirit to be moved by this 
 reactionary logic, were led to detach the social- 
 istic idea from the special form it had taken 
 in past history, and to seek for some new form 
 of political organization, in which individual 
 freedom should be again subordinated to social 
 order. Such men were St. Simon and Fourier— 
 not, in any sense, great or comprehensive thinkers, 
 but writers who were effective and influential 
 for the moment simply because they represented 
 the abstraction which was then rising into favour, 
 and which had at least this to recommend it, 
 
I 
 
 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 that it was the opposite abstraction to that of 
 the Revolutionists. Comte was too robust and 
 manysided to remain long under the influence 
 either of the concrete or of the abstract reac- 
 tionaries — either of those who sought to return 
 to the form, or of those who sought to return 
 to the spirit, of the past. But his temporary 
 subjection to St. Simon, and his ultimate revolt 
 against him, help us in some measure to under- 
 stand that double movement of thought out of 
 which his system sprung. His subjection in- 
 dicated that he had seen the insufficiency and 
 unreality, the abstract and unhistorical character, 
 of the gospel of mere rebellion. His emancipa- 
 tion from St. Simon indicated his discovery that 
 the simple repression of rebellion, the mere 
 closing up of the ranks of society under a social 
 despotism, was an utterly inadequate solution of 
 the difficulty. The problem before him, therefore, 
 was to do justice to the element of truth in each 
 of these movements — to the social impulse on 
 the one hand and to the critical movement of 
 intelligence on the other, — and to reconcile them 
 in a higher unity. Socialism had taught him 
 that social enthusiasm might be separated from 
 
The Need for a Theology. 7 
 
 the religious and political institutions on which 
 it had rested in the past ; and the progress of 
 science seemed to teach him that intelligence 
 has a constructive as well as a critical influence. 
 The solution, therefore, was simply to take the 
 former, as determining the end and goal of all 
 practical effort ; and the latter, as teaching us 
 the proper means for its attainment. The en- 
 thusiasm of humanity guided by science, science 
 directed so as to secure the highest happiness 
 of humanity, were thus the two ideas by which 
 the course of his thoughts was determined. 
 
 In the first place these ideas gave to Comte JJyJ^Jf 
 what seemed to him a perfect key to the history history 
 of the past. Man he conceives of as a being 
 who at first is divided between weak social 
 tendencies which bind him to his fellows, and 
 strong selfish, or, as he calls them, personal 
 instincts, which make him their rival and their 
 enemy ; yet without the triumph of the former 
 over the latter there can be no security for his 
 welfare or even for his existence. This triumph 
 of social sympathy is the first necessity of civil- 
 ization ; and in an early age any theory of life 
 must be welcome which promises to secure it. 
 
—Mi 
 
 8 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 The first social leaders of mankind, even if such 
 an idea could have presented itself to them, 
 could not wait with patience till experience had 
 revealed to them the true nature of man and the 
 world he lives in. Their ignorance and their 
 benevolent haste to organize society, and to bind 
 men together in the bonds of a definite faith, 
 made them eagerly grasp at the first explanation 
 of the universe which imagination suggested ; 
 and that first explanation was of course anthro- 
 pomorphic. "As they watched nature, as their 
 eyes wandered over the surface of the profound 
 ocean, instead of the bed hidden under the 
 waters, they saw nothing but the reflection of 
 their own faces.""" Hence the first moral order 
 and social discipline established among men was 
 based upon a theological explanation of the 
 universe. Nor did the insecurity of the founda- 
 tion seem for a long time to interfere with the 
 firmness of the superstructure. The union of 
 men was like the union of an army — a union 
 of men bound together for life and death, though 
 the bond that united them was but a fairy tale. 
 Yet, in the long run, it was impossible that 
 * Turcot. 
 
Development of Theology. J> 
 
 criticism should not make itself heard. Ad- 
 vancing experience, as it disclosed that the world 
 is no plaything of arbitrary wills but an order 
 of fixed law, gradually limited the free play of 
 imagination, and removed the gods to a greater 
 and greater distance. AVhen, therefore, pheno- 
 mena were seen to group themselves in large 
 genera, with permanent attributes and relations, 
 Polytheism rose out of Fetichism ; and when the 
 idea of the unity of the world, and of the general 
 persistency of its laws, began to prevail, theology 
 was inevitably reduced to the conception of one 
 overruling will which, directly or by its ministers, 
 controls the whole movement of things. Up to 
 this point the theological form of thought per- 
 sisted : in one point of view it might even lie 
 said that, up to this point, it was strengthening- 
 its hold upon men. For, every successive con- 
 centration of the divine power made the idea 
 of it a firmer and more comprehensive bond of 
 social order, until at length the levelling and 
 organizing genius of Eome laid the foundation of 
 the universal empire, and Christian Monotheism 
 broke down the walls of division between races 
 and nations. 
 
10 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 The But this, apparent advance of the theological 
 
 decay of r± ° 
 
 theology, gp^it was illusive, for it was really due to an 
 intellectual movement, which must, in the long- 
 run, prove fatal to that spirit. The concentration 
 of Fetichism into Polytheism, and of Polytheism 
 into Monotheism, was really the gradual with- 
 drawal of theology from the explanation of the 
 universe, till, finally, it was driven to its last 
 stronghold, its most general and abstract form. 
 Hence the hour of its greatest social triumph 
 was that which preceded its decisive fall. The 
 same growing perception of the order of the 
 world under general laws, which had forced the 
 theologian first to substitute a limited for an 
 indefinite number of divine wills, and then to 
 substitute one will for this limited number, 
 necessarily and inevitably awakened a doubt 
 whether there is in nature any indication of 
 will at all. Monotheism had represented the 
 world as a general order of fixed laws, only 
 interrupted by exceptional miracles ; but in- 
 creasing knowledge made miracles more and more 
 incredible, till at last the theologians were re- 
 duced to the assertion that their God had once 
 performed them, but that he performed them 
 
Victory of Metaphysic. 11 
 
 no longer. When this point was reached, it 
 was not difficult to see that the whole anthro- 
 pomorphic explanation of things was on the eve 
 (if disappearing. A God, who was nearer man 
 in the past than he is in the present, could not 
 he the God of the future. 
 
 But even before this period, the growing weak- And of the 
 
 A social order 
 
 ness of the theoretical basis of belief had begun withit** 
 to affect the practical life of men. The social 
 order was built upon theology, and therefore 
 the advance of the critical spirit w r as continually 
 loosening its foundations. Hence the fierce 
 hostility of the representatives of that order to 
 the freedom of the intelligence. That hostility, 
 however, is to be attributed not so much to their 
 indignation at unbelief in itself, as to their alarm 
 at the dissolution of social order which was its 
 practical result. Nor was it altogether inexcus- 
 able, so long as the assailants of the old faith 
 were unable to propound any theoretical prin- 
 ciples which could be made the basis of recon- 
 struction. Now the metaphysical principles to 
 which these assailants appealed were really 
 negations pretending to be affirmations, the purely 
 negative character of which must reveal itself 
 
12 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 as soon as their victory was achieved. Men in 
 whom the practical and organizing impulse was 
 strong, who felt the necessity for a moral order, 
 could not but see that such ropes of sand were 
 no real substitute for the old framework of social 
 and political life, and they were therefore tempted 
 to shut their eyes to the intellectual claims of a 
 truth which could be fertile only in destruction. 
 Thus arose that fatal division between the heart 
 and the intellect which has lasted down to the 
 present day, and which must last till the intellect 
 shows itself capable of producing a system which 
 can more securely sustain the social order, 
 and more completely satisfy the affections and 
 spiritual aspirations of men, than the fictions of 
 theology. 
 The The truth of this view will be more clearly 
 
 metaphysi- 
 
 ^thought, seen if we examine the nature of that intermediate 
 system of critical thought which was the great 
 weapon of attack upon theology. This system 
 was, in fact, only the last abstraction of the 
 theological anthropomorphism itself. As in 6ne 
 department of human thought after another the 
 knowledge of the uniform and unchangeable order 
 of things prevailed over the conception of accident 
 
Weakness of Metaphysic. 13 
 
 and arbitrary change, the idea of will became 
 attenuated, until it ultimately disappeared alto- 
 gether from the explanation of nature. But it 
 left behind a kind of spectre of abstraction. 
 Instead of being dominated by gods, phenomena 
 were supposed to be dominated by essences and 
 powers, which, however, were merely abstract 
 repetitions of those phenomena. How abstrac- 
 tions came to be thus substantiated as real 
 entities, separate from the phenomena in which 
 they were manifested, might be difficult to under- 
 stand, if we did not remember that they were but 
 the residua of what had once been individualized 
 pictures of imagination. The essences of the 
 Schoolmen were but the dry bones of the living- 
 creatures of poetry which the understanding had 
 slain. " The human mind," as Mill puts it, " did 
 not set out from the notion of a name, but from 
 that of a divinity. The realization of abstractions 
 was not the embodiment of a word, but the dis- 
 embodiment of a Fetich." Really, therefore, these 
 essences and powers were nothing more than the 
 pure abstractions, and therefore only the negations, 
 of the gods whose places they took. They had 
 no positive content of their own. As mere 
 
1 4 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 negatives they had no value except in relation 
 to the corresponding affirmatives, although in the 
 first instance imagination was strong enough to 
 give them the semblance of positive principles 
 occupying the place of the beliefs they expelled. 
 And it was just this temporary illusion which 
 made them such powerful weapons of destruction. 
 For the revolutionary passion can never be sus- 
 tained by negations which it recognizes as such. 
 It is impossible to march with enthusiasm to the 
 attack upon the institutions of the past, without 
 the conviction that there is something more to be 
 gained than the destruction of those institutions. 
 Develop- The metaphysical philosophy, as the necessary 
 physic, forerunner of the philosophy of experience, gradu- 
 ally extended its destructive power over all 
 branches of human knowledge. At first " it laid 
 its hand on the sciences that deal with inorganic 
 nature, and of these, first of all on those that 
 deal with the phenomena furthest from man, and 
 least subject to his control. For man discovers 
 that the phenomena of the heavens are not ruled 
 by arbitrary will, long before he discerns the 
 absence of caprice from the general course of 
 nature. In like manner, he is sensible that 
 
The Idea of Nature. 15 
 
 inorganic tilings have fixed and unchangeable 
 relations, while as yet the spontaneity of animal 
 life seems to he as unlimited as that which he 
 attributes to his own will. And only last of all 
 does it dawn upon him that his own life also is 
 limited and controlled by something, which is 
 neither his own will nor the will of a being like 
 himself whom he can propitiate or persuade — 
 something which is both within and without him, 
 to which he must conform himself, seeing it 
 will not conform to him. The last substantiated 
 abstraction, therefore, which is put in the place 
 of the divine powers, is Nature. And Nature is 
 only a name for the general course of things, 
 though it is regarded by metaphysics as existing 
 apart from and controlling them. But as Nature 
 succeeds to the place of a Clod whom men were 
 conceived to be bound to obey, but able arbitrarily 
 to disobey, so it is represented as the source of a 
 law distinct from the actual course of human life, 
 and to which it does not necessarily conform. 
 The law of nature, in this view, is a law written 
 on man's heart, but not necessarily realized in his 
 actions. In truth, however, it is but the negation 
 of that order of social life which was based upon 
 
1G The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 the theological idea, though its negative character 
 
 is necessarily hidden from those who believe in it. 
 
 its power This becomes evident whenever we examine 
 
 for de- 
 struction, the main articles contained in this supposed law 
 
 of nature. For these are simply negations of 
 different parts of that social order which was 
 based upon theology. The first of these articles 
 is the right of private judgment — that is, the 
 right of every individual to emancipate himself 
 from all spiritual authority, and to judge of 
 everything for himself. This principle is merely 
 " a sanction of the state of anarchy, which inter- 
 vened between the decay of the old discipline and 
 the formation of new spiritual ties." In other 
 words, it is not a new principle of order, but the 
 abstract expression of the ungoverned state of 
 mere individual opinion, " for no association what- 
 ever, even of the smallest number of persons and 
 for the most temporary objects, can subsist without 
 some degree of intellectual and moral agreement 
 between its members." In the next place, among 
 the articles of the law of nature, stands the 
 doctrine of equality, which has a meaning only 
 as the negation of the old hierarchy, the old social 
 and political order, but which, taken absolutely, 
 
The Formulas of Anarchy. 17 
 
 is the negation of all order whatever. For if 
 society is anything more than a collection of 
 unrelated atoms, if it is an organic unity, it must 
 have different organs for its different functions; 
 and it is as impossible that these organs should 
 all be equal, as that they should all be the same. 
 This doctrine, therefore, is but the abstract procla- 
 mation of social anarchy. To these articles are 
 commonly added the doctrines of national indepen- 
 dence, and of the sovereignty of the people. The 
 former is nothing more than the negation of that 
 spiritual supremacy of the Church, which in the 
 Middle Ages mediated between the nations of 
 Europe and made them one community ; but, taken 
 absolutely, it would imply national isolation and 
 international anarchy. The latter is the transfer- 
 ence to the governed of that fiction of divine 
 right which was formerly supposed to reside in 
 the governor, and it has no meaning except as 
 the negation of that fiction. For the people can- 
 not rule themselves ; and even to make them 
 choose their ruler, that is, to make the inferior 
 and less wise choose the superior and wiser, can- 
 not be regarded as more than a provisional ex- 
 pedient for anarchic times. 
 
18 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 its weak- The articles of the law of nature, then, like all 
 
 ness for 
 
 tfon Struc ' metaphysical principles, are merely principles of 
 insurrection and revolt. They have no positive 
 validity ; for they are just the ultimate abstrac- 
 tions, or, so to speak, the speculative phantoms of 
 the system which they destroy. As it is said that 
 a man dies when he has seen his own ghost, so, 
 according to Comte, the destroyer of theology is 
 just the ghost of itself, raised by abstraction. But 
 the ghost also vanishes when its victim is fairly 
 buried, leaving the field to the growing strength 
 of positive science. 
 
 it prepares Positive science, then, is the real cause of all 
 
 the way for 
 
 science intellectual progress, its advance constitutes the 
 nisus formativus that is concealed beneath the 
 surface struggle of theology and metaphysics. For 
 even in the earliest theological era, there was a 
 certain element of positive science, that is, of 
 knowledge of the permanent relations of things. 
 The most arbitrary will is not all arbitrary, but 
 presupposes something of a fixed order without or 
 within, and therefore the anthropomorphic analo- 
 gies by which phenomena were interpreted, still 
 left some space for the idea of law. And this 
 space was continually being widened, at the 
 
Metaphysie Allied with Science. 1<) 
 
 expense of the arbitrary and the accidental. 
 While metaphysics seemed simply to be substi- 
 tuting one transcendent explanation for another, 
 it was really disguising the abandonment of all 
 transcendent explanations whatever, and the 
 introduction of positive explanations in their 
 place. The doubts expressed in the metaphysical 
 criticism were really due to a growing sense of 
 law, which, when it became clear and self-con- 
 scious, produced the positive philosophy. Hence 
 there was, for a long time, an intimate alliance 
 between the scientific and the metaphysical spirit, 
 though the former was merely " critical" and the 
 latter " organic" And this alliance was the more 
 easily maintained, because, in the first instance, 
 neither the negative character of the former nor 
 the positive character of the latter was distinctly 
 discerned. Metaphysic was not seen to be merely 
 " critical," because its abstractions were taken to 
 be real entities. And science could not be seen 
 to be " organic," that is, to contain the principle 
 of a new organization of society, till it rose from 
 the contemplation of the inorganic world to the 
 study of life, and especially of human life. His- 
 tory, however, shows that science has always 
 
20 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 reaped the fruits of every victory won over 
 theology by metaphysic, and on the other hand 
 that metaphysic has never succeeded in maintain- 
 ing any position against theology, which has not 
 soon been occupied by science. The great 
 metaphysical movement of the Greeks left for its 
 sole permanent result the sciences of Geometry 
 and Astronomy ; while their premature specula- 
 tions on Psychology and Sociology were suppressed 
 or forgotten by the mediaeval church, which 
 directed all the intelligence of the world to the 
 practical work of civilizing and organizing men 
 by means of the monotheistic idea. When thought 
 was again awakened, the abstract metaphysic of 
 the Schoolmen was only the forerunner of the 
 renewed study of natural science, especially of 
 Physics and Chemistry, which at first appeared 
 under the forms of Astrology and Alchemy ; and 
 the victory of Nominalism over Eealism, in which 
 the scholastic philosophy ended, was the indica- 
 tion of another triumph of the scientific spirit. 
 For Nominalism is simply the negation of 
 that tendency to personify abstractions, which 
 is the essence of metaphysic. Finally, as a con- 
 sequence of that development of science which 
 
Science at War with Metapkysic. 2L 
 
 culminated in Newton, metaphysic ceased to 
 apply its method to the external world, and 
 confined itself to the sphere of Biology and 
 Sociology, from which it is now being gradually 
 driven. In the last of these applications, its 
 power for criticism and destruction, and its weak- 
 ness for reconstruction and reorganization, were 
 proved by the decisive experiment of the French 
 Revolution, in which the ideas of the rights of 
 man and the law of nature were tried and found 
 wanting. Since that time political life has fluc- 
 tuated between the theological and the meta- 
 physical principles, and therefore between the 
 opposite dangers of reaction and revolution, find- 
 ing no security for order but in the former, and 
 no security for progress but in the latter. But 
 the advance of Sociology into the positive stage, 
 which has been inaugurated by Comte, has, in 
 his view, shown that the opposite interests of 
 order and progress may be equally secured, if 
 only we base both upon a knowledge of the 
 laws by which the existence and activity of 
 man are ruled, and not on the fictions of the 
 imagination, or on the still emptier fictions of 
 the understanding. 
 
99 
 
 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 on science The aim of the future, then, is one with the 
 
 the social 
 
 thffuture a i m °f ^h.e past. That social passion which in all 
 
 must be . . 
 
 based great constructive periods 01 human history, and 
 
 especially in the Middle Ages, took hold of theo- 
 logical beliefs and made them a means to organize 
 and discipline mankind, is still to be the guiding 
 motive of all speculation and action. But the 
 system of thought which it uses for this end must 
 inevitably be changed. Eenouncing the theological 
 and metaphysical interpretations of things, which 
 have been proved to be either inconsistent with 
 facts or at least incapable of being verified by 
 facts, we must now base our effort to improve 
 man's estate upon the laws of the resemblance, 
 the coexistence, and the succession of phenomena 
 as these are determined by science. And on the 
 other hand, as we recognize that all the sciences 
 tend to lose themselves in the multiplicity of a 
 universe, where every path leads to the infinite, 
 we must seek also to organize and discipline the 
 hitherto dispersive efforts of science, so that they 
 may be directed entirely to the relief and further- 
 ance of man's estate. In this way scientific 
 knowledge and social benevolence will act and 
 react, at once limiting and supporting each other, 
 
A Wise Agnosticism. 23 
 
 and amid all the darkness of a universe which 
 absolutely is unknowable, and, even relatively 
 to himself, is only partially knowable, man can 
 yet give a kind of unity and completeness to his 
 transitory existence. For all he needs to know 
 is that which experience has constantly been 
 teaching, the uniformity and constancy of the 
 laws of phenomena, By means of this know- 
 ledge, so far as he can obtain it, and without any 
 need to penetrate into the transcendent causes of 
 things, he can foresee many phenomena, like those 
 of the heavens, over which he has no control 
 whatever, and also many phenomena, like those 
 of his own nature and his immediate environ- 
 ment, which he can, to a certain degree, change 
 and modify. And thus he can learn, with con- 
 tinually growing certainty, what are the means 
 he must use to bring within his reach the highest 
 good which the system of things allows him to 
 attain, detaching his thoughts and interests more 
 and more from the unfathomed abyss beyond, 
 which he now knows to be by him unfathom- 
 able. 
 
 Is it, then, possible for men to sketch out the Necessity 
 
 for a new 
 
 programme of an existence limited to this " bank religion 
 
• 24 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 and shoal of time," to conceive it as a complete 
 system in itself, and r6-organiser sans Dietc ni roi, 
 par le culte sysUmatique de VhumaniU? Can 
 they, surrendering the belief in " a Divinity that 
 shapes their ends, rough hew them how they will," 
 " constitute a real providence for themselves, in 
 all departments, moral, intellectual, and ma- 
 terial" ? Comte answers that they can; and 
 in the " Politique Positive " he tries to exhibit 
 the main outlines of that social system of the 
 future by which this end is to be attained. 
 Religious His starting point is — strange as at first it 
 
 basis of 
 
 life - may seem — the idea of religion. " Since religion 
 embraces all our existence, its history must be an 
 epitome of the whole history of our development." 
 Beneath and beyond all the details of our ideas 
 of things, there is a certain " esprit d'ensemble," 
 a general conception of the world without and 
 the world within, in which these details gather 
 to a head. If this conception or picture be co- 
 herent with itself, and if at the same time it be 
 such as to present an object on which our -affec- 
 tions can rest, and an end in the pursuit of 
 which all our powers and capacities may be exer- 
 cised, then our life will have that unity and con- 
 
Religion gives Unity to Life. 25 
 
 sistency with itself which is necessary for the 
 highest efficiency and happiness. Such a har- 
 mony of existence, in which all its elements are 
 fitly co-ordinated, is what, in Comte's view, con- 
 stitutes a religion. And, since man is both an 
 individual and a social being, this harmony is 
 seen to involve two things. It involves a sub- 
 ordination of all the elements of man's individual 
 nature to some ruling tendency, and it involves a 
 certain adaptation of men to, and a combination 
 of them with, each other. Further, this harmony 
 of humanity with itself must also be a harmony 
 of man with the world in which he exists. In 
 other words, the individual can attain his highest 
 perfection and happiness only in so far as he is, at 
 once and by virtue of the same principle, in har- 
 mony with the world, with his fellow-men, and 
 with himself. 
 
 Now, this harmony cannot be produced by the Elements 
 
 ■*■ necessary 
 
 sway of personal or egoistic motives ; for these r°[i^ on . 
 are in fatal disagreement with each other, and 
 they set each man in antagonism to all other 
 men, and even to the natural conditions of his 
 own existence. The regulation and harmonizing 
 of the nature of the individual man, therefore, 
 
26 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 implies his attachment or self-surrender to that 
 which is without him, and to which he is neces- 
 sarily related — to some object in that world of 
 persons and things which hems him in on every 
 side, and which must needs be his enemy so long 
 as he is ruled by egoism. Further, if the prin- 
 ciple of religion is thus to be found without and 
 not within the individual man, it must be found 
 in some object to which he submits as a superior 
 power, and on which, at the same time, his affec- 
 tions can rest. Submission and love are both 
 necessary to religion, for if we have merely the 
 former, the utmost we can feel is resignation to a 
 fatality ; and this, though it involves a certain 
 limitation of the selfish tendencies, can never 
 overcome them, or substitute a new motive for 
 them. To retain the energy of egoism and com- 
 bine it with resignation to a power greater than 
 ours, we must love that power to which we sub- 
 mit. Finally, this submission and self-surrender 
 must be consistent with a certain relative sense 
 of independence, for no feeling is really powerful 
 which does not result in action. Hence, to sub- 
 mission and love, we must add the belief that we 
 can make ourselves useful to that Beino- to whom 
 
Three Elements of Religion. 27 
 
 we submit and whom we love. Only thus, when 
 veneration for that which is above us, is com- 
 bined with love for that which is the constant 
 source of good to us, and with benevolence to- 
 wards that which needs our help,"" can we rise 
 above the unreal and imperfect unity of selfish- 
 ness into the perfect unity of religion. Or, to 
 put it more shortly, in Comte's own language, 
 " the principal religious difficulty is to secure 
 that the external shall regulate the internal with- 
 out affecting its spontaneity " ; to secure, that is, 
 that the free subjective principles of love and 
 benevolence shall attach to the power to which 
 we believe our existence to be subordinated. For 
 if our faith be not one with our love, or if our 
 love be not a principle of activity, we cannot be, 
 in the full sense of the word, religious. 
 
 Now the difficulty of attaining such a har- Scientific 
 
 " basis for 
 
 mony or unity of existence cannot but be obvious religion. 
 to those who live in a period when " the intelli- 
 gence is in insurrection against the heart ; " when 
 what men desire and love is not by any means 
 one with what, on the authority of science, they 
 believe. If, however, we follow the course of 
 * Cf. Goethe's " Three Reverences." 
 
28 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 advancing knowledge, we shall see that this state 
 of things is merely temporary, and that completed 
 positive science gives us back all that in the 
 course of its development it seemed to take away. 
 Science, indeed, from its very dawn, when it dis- 
 covers that there is a fixed order and law in the 
 movement of the heavenly bodies, gives support 
 to one element of religion, the sense that we are 
 in the hands of a superior power. It reveals to 
 man an ultimate necessity which bounds and de- 
 termines his life — a necessity which, from the 
 nature of the case, he cannot modify. And as 
 the idea of law is gradually extended to physical, 
 chemical, and vital phenomena, this necessity is 
 seen to limit and control him on every side. 
 Phenomena, therefore, can no longer be regarded 
 as the expressions of the wills of fictitious beings 
 endowed with the qualities most admired in 
 humanity, and therefore capable of being loved. 
 And the natural effect of this is to reduce religion 
 into a mere resignation to an irresistible fate, 
 which is incapable of awaking or responding to 
 human affection. With the rise of sociology, 
 however, science changes its aspect, and begins to 
 restore to us more than all that was contained in 
 
Sociology and Religion. 20 
 
 the dreams of mythology which it has destroyed. 
 For this culminating' science teaches us to regard 
 the whole race of man as an organic and self- 
 developing unity, in which we, as individuals, arc 
 parts or members. Between our own life and 
 the merely external necessity of nature we see a 
 spiritual power which modifies it and adapts it 
 to our wants. Between the individual and the 
 world stands humanity, and the " main pressure 
 of external fatality does not fall upon the former 
 directly, but only through the interposition of the 
 latter." In passing through this medium, brute 
 necessity is changed more and more into a saving 
 providence. To be convinced of this we need 
 only to observe that, after we go beyond the 
 fixed order of the celestial system, which is the 
 ultimate necessity of our lives, and which lies 
 entirely beyond the reach of our interference, we 
 come upon various orders of phenomena — phys- 
 ical, chemical, and vital — which are capable of 
 modification, and are continuously subjected to it 
 by man, and even by plants and animals. So 
 soon as life begins, order becomes the basis of 
 progress : for the living being not only adapts 
 itself to the medium in which it lives, but con- 
 
30 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 tinually reacts upon that medium, in order to 
 render it more suitable for its wants ; (and in the 
 case of man, inasmuch as his existence has a con- 
 nection and a continuity that binds the whole race 
 together through the long succession of as;es, this 
 reaction is cumulative. The life of the indi- 
 vidual in any age is what it is, by reason of the 
 whole progressive movement of humanity ; and 
 the later the time of his appearance the more he 
 owes to his race. " The living are always more 
 and more dominated by the dead." On this 
 great benefactor, therefore, his thoughts can rest, 
 as a power which moderates and controls his 
 whole life, and which controls it not merely as a 
 fate to which he must resign himself, but as a 
 providence to which his love and gratitude are 
 due. Nor will such feelings be less powerful 
 because this Providence is one which he can 
 serve, and which needs his service. Hence he is 
 led to contemplate his life in all that makes it 
 worth living, as the gift of a " Grand Etre," to 
 whom during his short term of earthly years it is 
 his highest virtue to devote himself, and with 
 whom it is his final reward to become incor- 
 porated. For his " objective " or actual existence 
 
Religion of Humanity. 31 
 
 in time has no valuable result, unless it add 
 to the "subjective" existence of humanity, the 
 influences and memories which mould for good 
 the lot of subsequent generations. His religion, 
 in short, is to consider himself as a useful link 
 in the chain between the past and future of 
 the race, a soldier of humanity in the continual 
 struggle whereby it adapts itself to its sphere 
 of action, and its sphere of action to itself, so 
 as to realize an ever richer and more harmoni- 
 ous social existence. 
 
 It is true indeed that Humanity has no abso- Humanity 
 
 the only 
 
 lute power, that it is hemmed in by a fatality true God - 
 which it can only partially modify. " This im- 
 mense and eternal Being has not created the 
 materials which its wise activity employs, nor 
 the laws which determine the results of its 
 action." But it is as vain to attempt to raise 
 our hearts beyond this immediate benefactor, as 
 to carry the mind beyond the circle of experience 
 within which it is necessarily enclosed. Nay, it 
 is not only vain, but hurtful. " The provisional 
 regime which ends in our day has only too clearly 
 manifested the gravity of this danger, for during 
 it the greater part of the thanks addressed to the 
 
32 The Social 'Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 fictitious Being constituted so many acts of in- 
 gratitude to Humanity, the sole author of the 
 benefits for which thanks were given." " If the 
 adoration of fictitious powers was morally indis- 
 pensable, so long as the true ' Grand Etre ' that 
 rules our lives could not clearly manifest himself, 
 now at least it would tend to turn us away from 
 the sole worship that can improve us. Those 
 who would prolong it at the present day are for- 
 getting its legitimate purpose, which was simply 
 to direct provisionally the evolution of our best 
 feelings, under the regency of Goal during the long 
 minority of Humanity." Of this worship, the 
 Christian doctrine of the incarnation might be 
 regarded as an anticipation, and still more per- 
 haps the mediseval worship of the Virgin^ for 
 women, as the sex characterized by sympathy, 
 are the fit representatives of Humanity. They 
 mediate between Humanity and man, as Hu- 
 manity mediates between man and the worlcL- 
 The social But the worship of Humanity is only the 
 
 system 
 
 based on general principle from which the new life of 
 
 religion. (l g oc i ocraC y " mus t spring, it is not " Sociocracy " 
 
 itself. We have therefore to inquire what is the 
 
 order of life that corresponds to this new religion. 
 
with 
 iture. 
 
 Man and Nature. S3 
 
 I Lav does it modify our ideas of the relation of 
 men to each other and to the world? And what 
 light does it cast upon the various forms of social 
 existence, upon the Family, the State, and the 
 Church ? I can only give a brief resume of 
 Gomte's answers to these questions. 
 
 All e£vftiss#i©» or improvement depends ulti- Man in 
 
 conflict 
 
 mately on man's control over material resources, w 
 over the powers and products of nature. And, 
 on the other hand, it is the reactive influence 
 upon himself of the effort by which he appro- 
 priates and adapts these resources to his purposes, 
 which first civilizes and educates him. Man can 
 only conquer nature by obeying her laws, and 
 to obey these laws he must know them. Hence 
 it is the necessities of the practical life which 
 excite the first efforts after scientific knowledge, 
 and it is under the pressure of the same necessi- 
 ties that man first learns to surrender self-will to 
 the discipline of regular labour, and of co-opera- 
 tion with his fellows. "We might indeed imagine 
 a different kind of education for the human race. 
 If mankind generally, like some of the richer 
 classes, were placed in circumstances in which, 
 without effort or struggle, they could at once 
 
w 
 
 34 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 
 
 satisfy all their natural wants and desires, we 
 might imagine that social sympathies and intel- 
 lectual tastes would soon prevail over all the 
 personal or egoistic tendencies. For though the 
 latter were at first far the strongest, they would 
 gradually die out for lack of occasions for exer- 
 cise. Losing thus the powerful stimulus of self- 
 interest, which drives us to investigate the laws 
 of nature, the intellectual activity of such beings 
 would take an aesthetic direction, and would be 
 devoted mainly to the task of providing forms 
 of expression for the social sympathies. These 
 social sympathies would become intense, for they 
 would occupy the whole of life. But they would 
 in the first instance be confined in the circle of 
 the family ; for the social life of States gains 
 its principal interest from the ever-widening co- 
 operation which is required in the struggle for 
 •existence against external difficulties. The nat- 
 ural creed of men would be an aesthetic Fetich- 
 ism ; and this, in the course of time, when men 
 had learned to distinguish between action and 
 life, would be changed into Positivism without 
 needing to pass through the long intermediate 
 stages of theology and metaphysics ; while, in 
 
A Beneficent Necessity. 35 
 
 the practical life, the affection of the family 
 would broaden to the love of humanity, omit- 
 ting the middle term of nationality. Finally, 
 as the heart and the intelligence would continu- 
 ally gain a more marked ascendency over the 
 practical activity, it would be natural that the 
 spiritual power should rule the temporal, and 
 that women should have the supremacy over 
 men. 
 
 This ideal, however, only serves to illustrate by uses of 
 
 this con- 
 contrast the real course of things, which indeed flict - 
 
 continually advances towards the same goal, but 
 by a far longer and more stormy path, a path 
 not of untroubled and peaceful growth, but of 
 conflict, division, and pain. We shall find, how- 
 ever, as a kind of recompense for this hard pro- 
 cess of mediation, that the final reconciliation of 
 humanity with the world and with itself is far 
 more perfect and conclusive, as it is a reconcilia- 
 tion which subordinate^, while it satisfies, all the 
 different elements of his nature. For a " sociality," 
 reared on the basis of a fully developed yet con- 
 quered " personality," is a far higher ideal than 
 such an imagined paradise, in which the struggle 
 for existence, with all the intellectual and physical 
 
lines his 
 moral 
 
 nature 
 
 36 The Social Philosojihy of Comte. 
 
 exertion which it involves, would be made un- 
 necessary, 
 it awakens Our personal tendencies are strongest at first, 
 
 and discip- 
 
 and in their direct action they might lead, and 
 do indeed often lead, to a sacrifice of society to 
 the individual, and to the development in him of 
 an extravagant pride and self-will, by which both 
 heart and reason are corrupted. But man soon 
 finds that he must stoop to conquer ; that he 
 must submit his action to the laws of nature, if 
 he would make nature the servant of his pur- 
 poses ; that he must himself be instrumental to 
 the well-being of others ere he can make them 
 instruments of his own well-being. And in 
 this submission of caprice and passion to reason 
 and law, and of his own life to social ends, he 
 gradually developes his intellectual powers and 
 social sympathies till they gain a supremacy over 
 those egoistic tendencies to which in the first 
 instance they were subordinated. The highest 
 ideal of man's life is to systematize this spon- 
 taneous process, and to turn into a conscious 
 aim that moral and intellectual discipline of his 
 nature, which in the past has been the unfore- 
 seen result of his effort after personal ends. We 
 
Necessity makes us Free. 37 
 
 must, however, remember that this result would 
 not have been possible unless the beginnings of 
 these higher tendencies had existed in man from 
 the first. No empirical process could ever have 
 developed social sympathies in him, if he had 
 been by nature utterly selfish, any more than it 
 could have produced reason in a being who was 
 devoid of even the germ of intelligence. But 
 the whole history of human progress is just 
 an account of the process whereby feeble social 
 affections, using as a fulcrum the outward neces- 
 sities of man's life, gradually secure to themselves 
 the direction of all his activity. " The principal 
 triumph of humanity consists in drawing its best 
 means of perfecting itself from that very fatality 
 which seems at first to condemn us to the most 
 brutal egoism." For, " so soon as the personal 
 instincts have placed us in a situation proper 
 to satisfy our social tendencies, these, in virtue 
 of their irresistible charm, commonly guide us to 
 a course of conduct which they could not have 
 had at first the force to dictate." 
 
 These principles find their illustration in cer- Economical 
 
 . , T . . . and social 
 
 tain economical truths. in most conditions m progress. 
 which human beings are placed, the individual is 
 
38 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 capable of producing more than is immediately 
 necessary for his wants ; or, in other words, of 
 accumulating wealth. Such accumulations make 
 social existence possible, and coming, by gift or 
 conquest, into the hands of the heads of society, 
 become the means of realizing a division of labour, 
 and providing the different classes of labourers 
 with sustenance and instruments of production- 
 Division of labour, again, while it secures 
 increased efficiency, makes continually greater 
 demands upon science for guidance, and thus 
 stimulates the development of the intellectual 
 life. Thus the hard external conditions under 
 which man has to seek the satisfaction of 
 his wants become a beneficent necessity, which 
 forces him to increase his knowledge, and to 
 co-operate with an ever-widening circle of his 
 fellow-men. This co-operation, indeed, is not 
 always conscious ; and, even when it is con- 
 scious, it is not necessarily accompanied by 
 social sympathy, as is shown by the fierce 
 industrial struggles of capital with labour at 
 the present day. Yet it is inevitable that it 
 should in the long run produce a sense of the 
 solidarity of mankind. " As each one really 
 
The Forms of Social Life. 39 
 
 labours for the others, in the end he must ac- 
 quire the consciousness that he does so labour," 
 and the consciousness of being a part in a greater 
 whole must produce a willingness to serve it and 
 live for it. Thus, a movement beginning in the 
 reactive influence on man's activity of the phy- 
 sical conditions of his life, extends its effects 
 gradually to his intelligence and his heart, so 
 that the order of the elements of his nature 
 becomes, as it were, inverted ; the first becomes 
 last, and the last first. And, instead of the self- 
 concentration of the savage, we have the develop- 
 ment of a social impulse, which begins by setting 
 the family before the individual, which goes on 
 to set the state before the family, and which must 
 end in setting humanity before all. 
 
 The way in which this movement is accom- ]^ e n ^ l lf 
 
 society 
 
 plished, and the form of social life in which it ' 
 must result, are determined by principles that 
 have already been suggested. The abstract ele- 
 ments of human life, of which we are to take 
 account, are material, intellectual, and moral force, 
 corresponding respectively to the will, the intelli- 
 gence, and the heart. And these again correspond 
 to three forms of association among men — the 
 
40 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 State, the Church, and the Family ; three partial 
 societies, in the union of which alone man can 
 attain the complete satisfaction of his complex 
 being. It is scarcely necessary to intimate, 
 however, that this general correspondence of 
 the abstract and concrete divisions is not meant 
 to imply that any one of these forms of society 
 is purely material, purely intellectual, or purely 
 based upon affection. ' The great whole of the 
 universal society is made up of parts which are 
 like it, and are themselves wholes ; and in every 
 one of them we can make a division of material, 
 intellectual, and moral powers. Still, with this 
 reservation, we may say generally that the bond 
 which holds the family together is one of affec- 
 tion ; that the bond of the state is one of action, 
 or material purpose ; and that the bond of hu- 
 manity is the spiritual bond of intelligence. And 
 further, that, as in the Family the tone and temper 
 of the whole society is determined by the women, 
 so the tone and temper of the State is determined 
 by the practical classes, warlike or industrial ; and 
 the tone and temper of the Church by the priest- 
 hood, theological or scientific.,,- It is one main 
 design of Comte's sociology to organize and put 
 
Principles of Social Union. 41 
 
 in their proper relation to each other the three 
 great social powers, which have successively es- 
 tablished their claims in the long history of 
 human development. The dawn of civilization 
 saw the organization of the family, under the 
 guidance of Fetichism. Polytheism taught men 
 to combine in a civil society, under the guidance 
 of a power in which temporal and spiritual au- 
 thority were confused together. Finally, Mono- 
 theism separated the secular and spiritual powers, 
 and established a certain provisional equilibrium 
 between them. Metaphysic was powerful only 
 to destroy ; but by sapping the foundations of 
 the theological system it prepared the way for 
 Positivism, by which Family, State, and Church 
 are finally to be distinguished and harmonized, 
 or fixed in their proper organic relations to each 
 other, so as to preclude for ever their warfare or 
 intrusion upon each other's provinces. 
 
 In determining the nature and relation of these The 
 
 organi- 
 
 three forms of social union, Comte lays down two gg^ 1 
 principles. The first is, that there can be no 
 society without a government, any more than 
 there can be a government, or effective power 
 among men, without a society. " A true social 
 
42 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 force is the result of a more or less extended 
 co-operation, gathered up into an individual 
 organ." It is a result in which many are con- 
 cerned, yet which finds its final expression 
 through the will of one. As to the former 
 point, that a social basis of force is necessary,. 
 Comte says that " there is nothing individual, 
 except physical force," and even physical force 
 is very limited when it is merely individual. 
 Every other kind of power, whether intellectual 
 or moral, is essentially social, dependent on the 
 co-operation of many minds in the present, and 
 generally also on a slow accumulation of energy 
 in the past. As Goethe said, " It is not the 
 solitary man that can accomplish anything, but 
 only he who unites with many at the right time." 
 Nor, on the other hand, can we have social force 
 without government. The concurrence of many 
 can never be really effective, until it finds an in- 
 dividual organ to gather it up, and concentrate it 
 to a definite result. Sometimes the individual 
 comes first, fixes his mind on a determinate pur- 
 pose, and then gathers to himself the various 
 partial forces which are necessary to achieve it. 
 More often in the case of great social movements, 
 
Natural and Spiritual Rule. 43 
 
 there is a spontaneous convergence of many par- 
 ticular tendencies, till, finally, the individual 
 appears who gives them a common centre, and 
 binds them into one whole. But in all cases 
 the effective co-operation, the real social force, is 
 not present till it has thus concentrated and 
 individualized itself. 
 
 The second principle is one that has been outward 
 
 subordina- 
 
 already illustrated. It is, in Comte's view, the ^° f t0 
 law of the world that the higher should imme- 
 diately subordinate itself to the lower. Thus 
 the organic finds its life controlled and limited 
 by the inorganic world, and man has to work 
 out his destiny in submission to all the necessi- 
 ties, physical, chemical, and vital, which are pre- 
 supposed in his existence. The higher, therefore, 
 can overcome the lower only by obedience ; if it 
 is to conquer, it must at least " stoop to conquer." 
 And this law holds equally good in the case of 
 the social life of man. As it is the satisfaction 
 of material wants that is, and must be, the first 
 motive of his life, so it is in the effort to main- 
 tain his outward existence, and to employ the re- 
 sources of nature for the satisfaction of his desires, 
 that his powers are first excited and disciplined. 
 
<•«■ 
 
 44 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 Hence it is the practical activities — military or 
 industrial according to the state of civilization 
 — which must bear the immediate rule in his 
 life ; not because they are the highest, but be- 
 cause they are the indispensable basis of every- 
 thing else. Moral and intellectual influences can 
 only come in afterwards, in the second place, to 
 modify the ruthless energy of the practical life. 
 They are essentially restraining, correcting, guid- 
 ing, and not in the first instance stimulating or 
 originative forces. It is when they act in this 
 indirect way that they are really most efficient, 
 and their direct action, if it were possible, would 
 defeat itself. Their purity cannot be secured 
 except by their withdrawal from the sphere of 
 action and command ; their power is dependent 
 on their self-abnegation and rejection of imme- 
 diate authority and rank. They cease to in- 
 fluence men when they begin to dominate. 
 jSTay, even if their purity were secured, and 
 they could reign without rivals, we have seen 
 that they would produce a less beneficent result 
 than when they come in as moderators. The 
 purely " altruistic " and intellectual being, in , 
 whom personal motives did not exist, would 
 
Woman and the Family. 45 
 
 have a less exalted ideal of life set befor< 
 him than one in whom the personal motives 
 exist in all their energy, but are remoulded in 
 conformity with social interests. 
 
 On this basis we have to consider the order The Family, 
 of the Family, the State, and the Church. The 
 family is the first instrument of man's social 
 education. It takes him at the lowest point, to 
 raise him to the highest. Its life is the " only 
 natural mediation which can habitually disengage 
 us from pure personality, to raise us gradually to 
 true sociability." In it the man, according to 
 the above principle, must bear rule, though it 
 be the woman, who, "par I'affectueuse reaction 
 du conseil sur le commandcmcnt" ultimately deter- 
 mines the spirit of the society. A shadow also 
 of the other spiritual power, the power of intelli- 
 gence, often appears in the family, especially in 
 the early patriarchal societies, in the customary 
 authority given to the moderating counsel of 
 the elders who are beyond the age for active 
 service. 
 
 The State is the peculiar sphere of the active The state. 
 or secular power, which, after being military, has 
 now become distinctly industrial. During the 
 
46 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 military stage, the harmony of the different 
 classes in the State was less difficult to preserve, 
 seeing that common danger bound together the 
 soldier classes, and confirmed their fidelity to 
 their leaders ; while, in general, the industrial 
 offices were committed to slaves or serfs, who 
 were deprived of all political power. The change 
 to an industrial order of political life brings with 
 it many dangers to the unity of the State, especi- 
 ally as it has taken place at a time when the 
 old theological basis of belief is undermined. 
 Hence the already difficult task of organizing 
 society, on the basis of individual freedom and 
 without the external pressure of danger, is 
 rendered still more difficult. The capitalists, 
 who are the natural leaders of an industrial 
 society, have often been wanting in the con- 
 sciousness of their social function, and in their 
 conduct towards their workmen, and towards 
 each other, have been given up to the action 
 of personal motives. On the other hand, the 
 labourers, or " proletaires," filled with the new 
 sense of independence and excited by revolu- 
 tionary doctrines of individual right, have lost 
 the sense of loyalty, and have filled their minds 
 
Church and State. 47 
 
 with Utopias of equality, which really involve 
 the negation of the division and co-operation of 
 labour — i.e., of all social organization. The aim 
 of all social reform, therefore, must he to bring 
 hack that willing subordination to leaders inspired 
 by the sense of social duty, which characterized 
 the military regime in its best form. But this, 
 in the decay of theology, and the consequent 
 loss of influence by the Catholic Church, requires 
 the development of a new social doctrine based 
 upon science, and the rise of a new spiritual 
 power to teach and apply it to modern society. 
 The State cannot be perfectly organized without 
 the revival of the Church, for it is the wider 
 spiritual unity of humanity that alone can give 
 renewed strength to the bonds of material order 
 in the State. 
 
 The great achievement of the Middle Ages The church, 
 was the separation of the spiritual from the 
 temporal power. This has often been taken 
 as a historical accident, but really it was the 
 necessary expression of the true relation of theory 
 and practice, which, in their demands and re- 
 quirements, are essentially opposed, and which 
 therefore cannot be fully developed except in 
 
48 The Social Philosophy of Comte. '-. 
 
 relative independence of each other. Theory is 
 general, and cannot attain its highest point unless 
 it is universal. Practice is particular, and its 
 greatest success is the fruit of concentration upon 
 special circumstances and objects. Theory there- 
 fore becomes stunted, and loses its freedom and 
 impartiality, if it is brought into close connection 
 with the narrower aims of the outward life. 
 Practice, on the other hand, loses little by the 
 egoism of personal will and desire, and, indeed, 
 within proper limits requires it. To gain the 
 full benefit of this distinction, we must adopt 
 with all its consequences the mediaeval division 
 of clergy and laity, Church and State. On the 
 one hand, therefore, we must reduce the State 
 to the dimensions of a city, with its proper 
 complement of rural domain, " for experience 
 has proved that the city, when completed, and 
 sufficiently supported by material resources, is 
 the largest political society that can be produced 
 and maintained without oppression " ; as it is 
 also the society which secures the most definite 
 and specialized reaction of man's social activity 
 on the physical medium by which he is sur- 
 rounded. Further, within the city so constituted. 
 
The Social Order. 4Q 
 
 we must have as intensive a division of labour 
 as possible, the government being concentrated 
 in the hands of those capitalists whose occupa- 
 tions are of the greatest generality (i.e., the 
 bankers) ; the other capitalists (merchants, manu- 
 facturers, and agriculturists) taking their rank 
 according to the same principle ; and the pro- 
 letaires following, organized in fraternal equality. 
 Finally, the various offices are to be handed 
 down from one generation to another according 
 to the principle of " heredite* sociocratique," each 
 official choosing his successor, subject to the 
 approval of his superiors ; for this, and not the 
 anarchic principle of the choice of superiors by 
 inferiors, is the true modern principle of govern- 
 ment, which succeeds to the old method of 
 inheritance by birth. On the other hand, the 
 order of the priesthood is to be in everything 
 the exact opposite of the order of the laity. 
 In the first place, motives of personal interest 
 are to be excluded, so far as possible, from their 
 lives. There is to be no competition of trade 
 among them, but all spiritual work is to be 
 paid by salaries from the public, and these 
 salaries are to be fixed at so low a rate, even 
 
 D 
 
•50 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 in the case of the highest members of the order, 
 that there shall be no inducement to enter the 
 order from motives of cupidity. In the second 
 place, although there will necessarily be a certain 
 subordination of rank, in order to secure discipline 
 and combined action, and all the priesthood will 
 be arranged in a hierarchy under the "grand 
 Pretre de l'Humanite," yet there must be no 
 specialization of function, or division of labour 
 among them. The modern anarchy of science is, 
 as Comte maintains, due to the fact, that scientific 
 men are mostly specialists ; and his priests there- 
 fore are to be trained in all science, from mathe- 
 matics, through physics, chemistry, and biology, 
 to sociology and morals — for which last all the 
 other sciences are to be regarded, as preparatory. 
 In this way the "esprit d'ensemble" will prevail 
 among them, and science will be preserved from 
 its present uncertain aberrations into regions from 
 which no gain can be brought back for the fur- 
 therance of humanity. Nay, Comte appears to 
 regard even the separation of Art from Science as 
 a step toward anarchy, and demands that his 
 priesthood should be the artistic as well as the 
 philosophic teachers of men. At the . same time 
 
The Work of the Priesthood. 51 
 
 they must avoid, as the most fatal source of cor- 
 ruption, all tendency to interfere more directly in 
 practical affairs. Their business is to "modify 
 the wills, without ever commanding the acts of 
 men," and they cannot preserve the universality 
 which is their characteristic without a complete 
 renunciation of the right to compel. The farthest 
 point to which they may go in this direction, is to 
 excommunicate, or affix a social stigma on offen- 
 ders ; which, however, in a positivist society, will 
 be a sufficiently severe punishment. 
 
 Such a priesthood will be the natural repre- The priest . 
 
 • r> i • hood of 
 
 sentatives of the unity or solidarity of mankind, as humanity, 
 opposed to the particular interests of individuals 
 and classes. They will also be the represen- 
 tatives of the continuity of the life of humanity, 
 in the past and the future, as opposed to the 
 excessive claims of the present hour. It will be 
 their duty to make men conscious that their 
 occupations are social functions, and that every- 
 thing that is valuable in their lives has been 
 gained for them by the long-continued labours of 
 humanity, whose gratuitous gifts it is their highest 
 privilege to preserve, and hand down increased 
 by their own contributions to posterity. The 
 
52 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 clergy will thus be, as in the old system, the 
 natural allies of the women; for what they have 
 to do is simply to generalize and support, by a 
 complete scientific view of the world and of 
 human life, those lessons of the heart which are 
 first learned by man in the narrower circle of the 
 family. By their encyclopaedic view of know- 
 ledge, the intelligence, which under the dispersive 
 regime of science has become a rebel against the 
 heart, is to be brought back to its allegiance, and 
 the civic and human relations to be reconstituted 
 on the type of the family. 
 Thepracti- In impressing such a view of life upon man- 
 
 calworkof r O JT 
 
 the chmcb. kindj the p ositivist Church will avail itself of all 
 the aids of art, and will use the power of imagin- 
 ation to fill up those voids and imperfections 
 which sober science undoubtedly leaves in our 
 knowledge of things. For it is the function of 
 poetry not merely to give body and substance to 
 the necessarily abstract ideas of science ; it may 
 even, justifiably, outrun the possibilities of know- 
 ledge, though in that case we must not forget the 
 unverified nature of the illusions to which we 
 yield. In the first of these uses Art will give 
 precision and force to the worship of Humanity, 
 
Poetry and Truth. 53 
 
 or of its representative — Woman. It will provide 
 language for those exercises of prayer and praise, 
 by which we make vivid and real to ourselves our 
 union with others, and dedicate ourselves to a life 
 of " Altruism." It will thus intensify and deepen 
 the subjective life, through which past humanity 
 lives in us, and enable us to look forward with 
 joy to our only personal reward, that of being 
 incorporated in Humanity, and living again in 
 the subjective life of others. For " toute Ve'ducation 
 liu maim doit preparer ehacun a vicrc pour autrui, 
 <ifin do vivre dans autrui ;" which is the true 
 social doctrine of immortality, as opposed to the 
 anti-social doctrine of an objective immortality for 
 ourselves. The other use of poetry, in which it 
 transcends the strict limits of science, is to revive 
 something like the early fetichist belief that 
 everything lives and is moved by human desires 
 and affections. Thus, as a matter of fact, the 
 inorganic world, so far as we know it, is governed 
 by a fatality which is indifferent to the well-being 
 of man. Nay, in its first action, it seems to call 
 forth those tendencies in us which most need to 
 be repressed and subdued. And it is only by 
 the providence of Humanity that this very hos- 
 
54 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 tility and opposition of Nature are made instru- 
 mental to the attainment of a higher good. Yet, 
 the victory being won, we may be allowed, at least 
 in poetic rapture, to forget the discord between 
 man and the world he inhabits ; or to regard it as 
 existing only with a view to that higher good 
 which has resulted from it. For, " I 'existence 
 humaine ne s'informe guere du temps qui exigea so, 
 preparation spontande." When we consider Nature 
 as summed up in man, we learn " to love the 
 natural order as the basis of the artificial order," 
 produced by humanity, " so as to renew, under 
 a better form, the fetichist affections." In his 
 last work, Comte carries this extension of poetic 
 license to its farthest point, and bids us acid to 
 our adoration of humanity, as the " Grand Etre," 
 an adoration of space, as the " Grand Milieu," and 
 of the earth, as the " Grand Fetiche " ; and he 
 would have us think of these two as yearning for 
 the birth and development of Humanity. In 
 Comte's system, therefore, as in a more familiar 
 text, " the earnest expectation of the creature 
 waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of 
 God " ; and that optimism, which is rejected at 
 the beginning as truth, is brought in at the 
 
The Positive Life. 55 
 
 end as poetry. Only, poetry is not, as with the 
 Apostle, the anticipation or foretaste of know- 
 ledge; it is the substitute provided because 
 knowledge is absent and unattainable. 
 
 For our purpose it is not necessary to go 
 beyond this point. The minute prescriptions of 
 the fourth volume of the " Politique Positive " add 
 little or nothing to the general meaning of the 
 system. The positivist New Jerusalem is as 
 definitely determined and measured as the Holy 
 City of the Apocalypse ; but the main interest of 
 such details is for the church and not for the 
 world. 
 
56 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 THE NEGATIVE SIDE OF COMTE's PHILOSOPHY HIS 
 
 OPPOSITION TO METAPHYSIC AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 Growth of a new view of the social organism opposed at once to 
 Individualism and Socialism — Comte and the German Idealists 
 — Meaning of his attack on Metaphysic — His real agreement 
 with modern metaphysicians — He adopts Locke's principles 
 as to knowledge, yet is opposed to the Individualism of Locke's 
 French disciples — He attacks Religion as a Nominalist and 
 Nominalism as a Realist, and is really guided by a higher 
 principle than either — His mistaken attitude towards the 
 Critical Philosophy — Relation of Philosophy to Science — It 
 makes men conscious of their guiding principles — Comte 's un- 
 consciousness of the categories that guide his thought — Con- 
 sequent defects in his view of the development of Religion, of 
 Philosophy, and of Science — Mr. Spencers criticism and 
 LittrSs answer — Ambiguity in the opposition between the 
 universal and the particular. 
 
 In the previous chapter I have given a sketch 
 of Comte's system, and especially of that part of 
 it which has attracted least attention in this 
 country — the social philosophy of the " Politique 
 
New Views of the Social Bond. 57 
 
 Positive." In this and the subsequent chapters 
 I propose to make a few criticisms on the system, 
 with the view of exhibiting the fundamental ten- 
 dencies of thought which are manifested in it, 
 and of contrasting the manifestation of those 
 tendencies in Comte, with their manifestation 
 in other writers, especially in the great German 
 idealists of the beginning of this century, In 
 these criticisms I shall observe the same relative 
 limitation as in the previous chapter, and shall 
 give most attention to the social and religious 
 results of Comte's philosophy. As, however, it 
 is impossible to separate these from the philo- 
 sophical principles upon which .they are based, 
 it will be necessary, in the first place, to examine 
 the ideas of Comte as to the development of 
 human thought in general, and of science in 
 particular. 
 
 Comte, like every great writer, was a son of Tendency 
 
 of Comte's 
 
 his time ; and his greatness is measured by the time to a 
 
 ° " new view of 
 
 degree in which he brought to articulate expres- organism, 
 sion the ideas which were unconsciously, or half 
 consciously, working upon the minds of those 
 around him. The great emancipating movement 
 of thought in the eighteenth century, which found 
 
•58 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 its clearest expression in the works of Hume and 
 Voltaire, and which was kindled into revolution- 
 ary passion by Kousseau, awakened, by way of 
 reaction, an equally extreme movement both in 
 theory and practice, toward the reassertion of 
 authority and social order. But in the midst of 
 this flux and reflux of the popular consciousness, 
 and still more after the extreme limits of each of 
 these movements became clearly marked, a new 
 idea was gradually taking possession of all minds 
 that could rise above the atmosphere of party. 
 Emancipation, pushed to the extent of isolating 
 the individual from that general life through 
 which alone he can become a moral, or even a 
 rational being, and rebellion, pushed to the ex- 
 tent of severing the present from that past upon 
 which it is necessarily based, had for their natural 
 counterparts an equally exaggerated panic of re- 
 action, and an equally indiscriminate admiration 
 of past forms of thought and life. Even in Eous- 
 seau the idea of savage isolation is crossed by 
 longing reminiscences of the patriarchal state, and 
 of the republics of antiquity ; and the romantic 
 spirit, with its revival of mediaeval types and 
 models, soon began to spread through the litera- 
 
The Social Organism. 59 
 
 ture of Europe, and to affect its social and political 
 life. Between these opposing tendencies the con- 
 ception of society as a unity, yet not a mechanical 
 but an organic unity, of living and independent 
 members, presented itself as the reconciliation of 
 socialism and individualism, or, in other words, 
 of the opposing interests of unity and freedom. 
 And with this came another kindred idea — 
 ih,. idea of development or organic evolution — 
 which made it possible to admit men's obliga- 
 tions to the past without denying the claims of 
 the present and the future. Condorcet, Kant, 
 and Edmund Burke are three writers of very 
 different temper and tendency, but in all of them 
 "we find this consciousness of the organic unity 
 and evo lution of t he life of men and nations. 
 All equally oppose the crude theory of a Social 
 Contract and recognize that the unity of the 
 State or of Society is something better "than a 
 partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and 
 coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low 
 concern, to be taken up for a little temporary 
 interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the 
 parties ; " that it is, on the contrary, " a partner- 
 ship in all science, a partnership in all art, a 
 
60 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 partnership in every virtue, and in all perfec- 
 tion." All equally recognize that the social state, 
 to which they look forward as the ideal of the 
 future, cannot be merely an historical accident, 
 or a success achieved by the skilful contrivance 
 of individuals ; but that it must be the final 
 realization of a principle, which has been working 
 through all the past history of man, and which 
 has underlain not only the old order of European 
 civilization but also the movement of rebellion 
 against it."" Finally, after Kant's suggestive, 
 though imperfect, application of it to history, the 
 same idea, with a deeper metaphysical perception 
 of its meaning, became the central thought in the 
 philosophies of Schelling and Hegel as early as 
 the first years of this century. 
 Analogous Comte, ignorant for the most part of the work 
 
 tendencies 
 
 and irTthe °f an 7 exce pt his French predecessors, was led to 
 
 idealists the same fundamental conception by the political 
 
 experiences of France, as well as by the conflict 
 
 of the opposite schools of Eousseau and St. Simon 
 
 * This is not strictly accurate, for Condorcet seems to 
 except from his list of the elements of progress the whole 
 social and ecclesiastical system which existed previous to 
 the Revolution, while Burke can see no element of growth 
 or improvement in the Revolution itself. 
 
Relation to German Idealism. 61 
 
 with each other and with the Catholic De Maistre. 
 Yet, despite this independence, there is a certain 
 parallelism between Conite's interpretation of the 
 idea of development and that of the German 
 idealists. That the first " Synthesis," or system 
 of doctrine upon which man's intellectual and 
 moral life is based, was poetic or imaginative ; 
 that it was therefore disintegrated and destroyed 
 by the critical understanding ; and that it re- 
 quires to be restored and reconstituted on a 
 rational basis, a basis which shall satisfy the a- 
 wakened intelligence, as well as the heart and the 
 moral sympathies — all this was a commonplace. 
 of German philosophy long before the advent of 
 positivism.""" The condemnation which Comte 
 pronounced upon the individualistic and revolu- 
 tionary theories of Rousseau is little more than an 
 echo of the Germaii_at tack upon the "_Aufklar- 
 ung." Even Conite's denunciation of the " meta- 
 physical " explanation of the world by transcen- 
 dent causes or " entities," which are not capable 
 of empirical verification, and his assertion that 
 man's knowledge is confined to the relative and 
 
 * Cf. especially Fichte's Characteristics of the Present 
 Age. Many of Carlyle's characteristic expressions and 
 ideas seem to have been suggested by this book. 
 
62 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 phenomenal, finds a close parallel in the lang- 
 uage of Kant. And Kant's idealistic followers, 
 though they assert the possibility of a knowledge 
 that goes beyond the phenomenal, do not assert it 
 in the sense in which Comte denies it ; for with 
 them the negation of an absolute dualism between 
 the noumenal and phenomenal is, as will after- 
 wards be shown, only the necessary result of the 
 doctrine of the relativity of knowledge itself. In 
 all ways, therefore, the question between Comte 
 and those whom he would have called metaphys- 
 icians is of a much more definite and specific 
 kind than he or his followers have generally re- 
 cognized. The general basis of thought — which 
 belongs rather to the time than to any indi- 
 vidual — is common to him with all the greater 
 philosophic writers of his own, and even of the 
 preceding generation. And the only point for 
 controversy is whether he gave the most con- 
 sistent and satisfactory development to those 
 principles, which we cannot indeed say that he 
 derived from others, but which he was certainly 
 not the first to express. The question in short 
 is, in the first place, how far Comte had a clear 
 consciousness of the source and bearing of his 
 
His Negations. 63 
 
 own leading ideas; and, in the second place, how 
 far lie has heen successful in applying them. I 
 venture to think that in both points of view a 
 careful examination of his works shows him to 
 be defective. He fails to apprehend with clear- 
 ness the logic by which his own thoughts are 
 guided, he fails to follow out that logic to its 
 legitimate result, and his system, therefore, with 
 all its comprehensiveness, ends in inconsistency 
 and self-contradiction. 
 
 In the first place, then, Comte's starting-point Meaning of 
 
 his attack 
 
 was fixed for him by the sensationalist philosophy °? m . eta - J 
 
 " r x " physic and 
 
 of the last century. He begins where Hume t ieo ogy ' 
 ends, with the denial of the scientific value of 
 metaphysics and theology. This denial he only 
 modifies so far as to maintain that, while neither 
 theology nor metaphysics can be regarded as 
 forms of real knowledge, both must be regarded 
 as necessary stages in the process by which real 
 knowledge is attained. They are, in short, transi- 
 tory forms of thought, which now survive only 
 as stages in the culture of childhood and youth, 
 or as prejudices in the minds of those who have 
 not yet heen awakened to the spirit of their 
 time. Notwithstanding this wholesale rejection 
 
64 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 of metaphysic and theology, however, it may 
 easily be shown that Comte's own theory, like 
 every intelligible view of the world, involves a 
 metaphysic, and ends in a theology ; and that he 
 only succeeds in concealing this from himself, 
 because he is unconscious of the presuppositions 
 he makes, because he uses the word " meta- 
 physic " in a narrow and mistaken sense, and 
 because he conceives it, as well as theology, to 
 be bound up with a kind of " transcendentalism," 
 which all the great metaphysicians of modern 
 times agree in rejecting. 
 His real Hostility to metaphysic, if by metaphysic be 
 
 moderlr -meant the explanation of the facts of experience 
 cians. by entities or causes, which cannot be verified 
 in experience or shown to stand in any definite 
 relation to it, is the common feature of all 
 modern philosophy, idealist or sensationalist. 
 It is as clearly manifested in Descartes as in 
 Bacon, in Kant and Hegel as in Locke and 
 
 7 O 
 
 Hume. If Bacon accuses the scholastics of 
 anticipating nature by unverified hypotheses or 
 presuppositions not derived from the study of 
 nature, Descartes is no less emphatic in his 
 denunciation of a philosophy of authority, and 
 
What is Metaphysics 65 
 
 in his demand for a fundamental reconstruction 
 of belief. If the former bases all truth upon 
 experience, does not the latter seek the evidence 
 of his principles in the most intimate of experi- 
 ences, the consciousness of self ? Leibnitz is as 
 ready as Locke, Kant is as ready as Hume, to 
 maintain that philosophy must not introduce 
 transcendent principles into its explanations of 
 experience. As Luther rejected a God who did 
 not reveal himself directly to the heart and in- 
 telligence of his worshipper, but only through 
 the mediation of a priest and in an external 
 tradition, so the greatest modern philosophers of 
 all schools are agreed in rejecting all principles 
 which do not find their evidence in being an 
 integral part of the experience of men. It 
 would be too much to say that they all con- 
 sistently develop this principle to its necessary 
 consequence, or that traces of scholastic modes 
 of thought are not to be found even in those of 
 them who most strongly denounce scholasticism ; 
 on the contrary, it may be admitted that no 
 one before Kant saw what was involved in the 
 renunciation of the transcendent as an object of 
 
 knowledge. Even Kant himself did not see all 
 
 E 
 
€6 The Social Philosophy of C orate. 
 
 its consequences. Still, the assertion of the prin- 
 ciple itself, and the effort to realize it, is perhaps 
 the most general and invariable characteristic of 
 modern philosophy. In so far, therefore, as what 
 Comte means by metaphysics is anything like 
 the scholastic philosophy, with its transcendent 
 or authoritative principles, no objection need be 
 taken to his assertion that metaphysic is an ex- 
 ploded mode of thought, from which the philo- 
 sopher and the man of science must now seek 
 to free themselves. But then it must be added 
 that, in this sense, none of the greater specula- 
 tive writers of modern times is, in principle, a 
 metaphysician ; and that the metaphysic which 
 they cultivate is of a totally different nature. 
 If, indeed, we could consider Comte's remarks 
 as aimed at the great metaphysicians of his 
 own day, at Kant and his successors, the de- 
 scription, and therefore the censure founded 
 upon it, would be almost ludicrously inappli- 
 cable, 
 msantece- To understand the bearing of Comte's denial 
 
 dents. 
 
 theOT eS of °f me taphysics, however, we must keep in view 
 
 nowe ge. j^ g historical antecedents. This negation was, as 
 
 I have already said, part of his heritage from the 
 
Locke's Neiv Way of Ideas. 07 
 
 sensationalist philosophy of the last century, which 
 had reached its most consequent and definite ex- 
 pression in Hume. It was a conclusion, the first 
 step towards which was taken by Locke in his 
 attack upon the Cartesian doctrine of innate 
 ideas. In Locke's view, innate ideas were prin- 
 ciples apprehended independently of all experi- 
 ence — possessions of the individual mind which 
 it finds in itself at once, and apart from any 
 process of development, or intercourse with any- 
 thing but itself. And, to disprove their exist- 
 ence, it was enough for him to point to the fact 
 that, prior to such intercourse with the world, 
 the mind has no contents at all, and can scarcely 
 be said even to exist. This obvious truth, how- 
 ever, was immediately confused by him with the 
 doctrine that reality — the objective world of in- 
 dividual things as such— is immediately given in 
 sense apart from any " work of the mind," and 
 that any ideas or universals added by thought 
 to the data of sense, must, ipso facto, be fictions. 
 In making this assumption, Locke was yielding to 
 a tendency of thought which had already shown 
 itself in the nominalism of Hobbes. Locke, in- 
 deed, was not a nominalist, he was what is called 
 
68 The Social Philosophy of Connie. 
 
 a conceptualist ; but in the Essay on the Human 
 Understanding no distinct ground is ever stated 
 for giving to universals more than that subjective 
 value which even Hobbes allows to them. In 
 his criticism of the ideas of substance and cause, 
 Locke is always seeking to reduce fact and reality 
 to the isolated sensations through which, as he 
 supposes, individual things are given. And the 
 same tendency of thought leads him also to re- 
 gard the individual mind as apprehensive only 
 of its own ideas and sensations, and excluded 
 from all direct contact with the world. It 
 soon, however, became obvious to the followers 
 of Locke, that, on these terms, no knowledge, or 
 even semblance of knowledge, is possible; that 
 the individual mind, if it were thus confined to 
 its own isolated feelings, could never dream of 
 the existence of an objective world ; and that 
 to make possible the reference of sensations to 
 objects, it is necessary that they should be con- 
 nected together according to general principles. 
 In other words, it became obvious that the uni- 
 versal, or some substitute for the universal, is 
 required to make knowledge and experience 
 possible. And to meet this want the theory 
 
The Association of Ideas. G9 
 
 of association was devised, and the atomic ele- 
 ments of the intelligible given in sense, were 
 supposed to be linked together by the prin- 
 ciples of resemblance, contiguity, and succession. 
 It was not perceived that in these principles 
 there is already implied the unity of the self- 
 conscious intelligence, and, indeed, the whole 
 body of categories which the theory of associa- 
 tion is used to explain or explain away. It 
 was the work of Kant to show this ; to show, 
 in other words, that the attempt to empty 
 knowledge of its universal element must be 
 suicidal, that it must be fatal not only to 
 theology and metaphysics, but to all knowledge, 
 even of the simplest facts of experience. But 
 Hume — and it may be added most of his Eng- 
 lish followers, such as Mill and Mr. Spencer 
 — halt half-way in the development of their 
 sensationalism, and therefore think it possible 
 to maintain, that while the ultimate reality of 
 things is hid from us, because we cannot tran- 
 scend our own ideas, we can still have knowledge 
 of phenomena, because these ideas are combined 
 in the minds of all men according to the same 
 principles of association. It is from this point 
 
70 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 of view that Hume tells us that the principle of 
 causality, based as it is upon mere association, 
 may be fairly used to connect phenomena with 
 each other, but that it is altogether insufficient 
 to enable us to rise from phenomena to noumena 
 — from the world to God. Thus the principles of 
 the association of ideas are to the mind of man 
 something like what wings are to the ostrich ; 
 they help him to run on the ground, but they 
 are not strong enough to make him fly. As 
 a succedaneum for that universal element in 
 thought, which would raise us to the know- 
 ledge of things as they really are, they enable 
 us to arrange the appearances — the shadows of 
 our cave — and that, for the practical purposes 
 of the cave, is all that we require. 
 And the While the English followers of Locke thus 
 
 social Atom- 
 
 uponifby confined themselves to the development of his 
 pasdists. ideas on the theory of knowledge, his French 
 followers seized upon his individualistic theory 
 of existence, and used it as an instrument to 
 undermine the Catholic faith, and the whole 
 political and social system connected therewith. 
 Diderot and D'Holbach found in Atomism the 
 readiest weapon to assail the popular theology. 
 
Dale rot and Rousseau. 71 
 
 The former writer, indeed, sometimes plays with 
 the atomic theory in a way that reminds us of 
 the earth-shaking laughter of Aristophanes. In 
 infinite time, he asks, in the infinite number of 
 throws of the atomic dice, why should not, at 
 one moment or another, a Cosmos spring out of 
 chaos ? and the Abbe Galiani can only hint, by 
 way of answer, that, somehow or other, " les des 
 de la Nature sont pipes." Rousseau, applying 
 the same idea to Sociology, proclaims the eman- 
 cipation of the natural man, and develops the 
 theory of the Social Contract, the theory which 
 reduces the state to a creation of the individual 
 will. Yet Rousseau had some uncertain glimpses 
 of the truth that the individual has no rights or 
 claims, except so far as he is an organ of the 
 universal, and with strange inconsistency he de- 
 clares, that it is only through social life that the 
 human being " ceases to be a dull and limited 
 animal, and becomes an intelligent being and a 
 man." 
 
 Now it is curious that Comte, while in his He accepts 
 
 the former, 
 
 theory of knowledge he accepts many of the ideas Jg£°* the 
 of the school of Locke, in his social theory takes 
 up a position of intense hostility to the results of 
 
li The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 the same philosophy. That very individualism, 
 which in Locke and Hume had been the ground 
 and presupposition of the whole attack upon 
 metaphysic, is assailed by Comte as the very es- 
 sence of "metaphy sic. "The metaphysical spirit," 
 he is never weary of saying, " is radically incom- 
 patible with the social point of view ; " it has 
 " never been able to escape from the sphere of 
 the individual." From the empirical philosophy 
 Comte accepted most of its negatives, especially 
 its rejection of the possibility of metaphysics or 
 theology as sciences of things in themselves, and 
 its denial that even the principles, on which ex- 
 perience is based, are themselves derived from 
 anything but experience. But the school of 
 Locke had generally denied the abstract uni- 
 versal in favour of the equally abstract indi- 
 vidual, and here Comte declines to follow them. 
 Individualism is seen by him to be an inade- 
 cpiate basis for social or even for biological 
 theory, and the blame, as a matter of course, 
 is cast upon metaphysics. The " fate of meta- 
 physical theory," he declares, " is decided by its 
 inability to conceive of man otherwise than in- 
 dividually " ; whereas " the true human point of 
 
The Universal not unreal. 73 
 
 view is not individual but social." " Man is a 
 mere abstraction, and there is nothing real but 
 humanity, regarded intellectually and yet more 
 morally." # It is in fact just this thought of 
 the unity and the solidarity of man — not the 
 mere abstract unity of a genus, but the concrete 
 unity of one life, manifesting itself in many mem- 
 bers—which enables Comte to look at the history 
 of the past in a way so different from most of his 
 predecessors, and to recognize the affinity of that 
 social synthesis of the future, which he himself 
 is trying to realize, with the previous theological 
 synthesis of Catholicism. It is this also which 
 leads him to create a new religion of humanity, 
 and even, in the end, to justify that poetic license 
 which seems necessary to complete the synthetic 
 view of life, and to bring nature into unity with 
 man. In the " Politique Positive " Comte's oppo- 
 sition to metaphysics as tending, in the language 
 of Burke, to dissolve society " into the dust and 
 powder of individuality," becomes even more 
 emphatic ; and with it is combined a continual 
 denunciation of the " dispersive regime " of the 
 particular sciences, which in the present day he 
 * Phil. Pos. vi. p. 692, Miss Martineau's Trans, ii. p. 508. 
 
74 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 declares to be pursued by mere specialists, with 
 an extreme waste of human faculty, and without 
 any regard to the legitimate end of all science, 
 the furtherance of man's estate. The conception 
 of life and science, as a connected whole, all 
 whose parts are to be estimated and developed 
 in relation to each other, and to the idea of the 
 whole, is by Comte as firmly held and as reso- 
 lutely carried out to its consequences as by the 
 most extreme idealist or pantheist. The only 
 difference — which still shows the trace of the 
 individualistic philosophy out of which Positiv- 
 ism was developed — is that the synthesis of 
 Comte is, in his own language, subjective, not 
 objective ; by which he means that the whole, in 
 relation to which all things are to be interpreted, 
 and of which the individual man is to be re- 
 garded only as a part or member, is humanity, . 
 and not the universe. In other words, Comte 
 holds that we transcend the limits of knowledge 
 when we seek to regard ourselves as parts of the 
 universal whole or system of things, and therefore 
 as living under the providence of God ; but that 
 we do not transcend the limits of knowledge 
 when we regard ourselves as parts of the one 
 
Homo Mensura. 75 
 
 great organism of humanity, and therefore as 
 living under its continual providence. We are 
 not, as Berkeley and Hume had taught, confined 
 to the phenomena of our individual conscious- 
 ness ; but neither are we capable of reaching a 
 purely objective point of view. We can see 
 things from the point of view of a whole, hut not 
 of the whole : at least we cannot so regard them 
 except in that poetry of religion by which the 
 earliest fetichist affections are renewed, and space 
 and the earth are worshipped as the friends of 
 Humanity. This, however, is mere poetic license ; 
 for we have no reason to believe that man has 
 any friend but himself, and in its first direct 
 action upon him the world shows itself to be 
 anything but a system arranged for his benefit. 
 
 Now, without for the present discussing the He combines 
 
 nominalism 
 
 truth of this view, we may remark that it is ™* h real " 
 obviously the result of a compromise between the 
 two opposite tendencies of thought, which divided 
 the earlier history of modern philosophy. In 
 the Cartesian philosophy there was a tendency — 
 which manifested itself fully in the two great- 
 est followers of Descartes, in Malebranche and 
 Spinoza — to regard all things from the point of 
 
76 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 view of the absolute unity of the Universe, and 
 to treat the separate existence of the parts as a 
 fiction of abstraction. On this view the indi- 
 vidual's consciousness of himself as an individual 
 is an illusion, and Spinoza would have said the 
 same thing of his consciousness of himself as a 
 member of the race. The only true consciousness 
 is that in which both man and humanity are seen 
 as absorbed in Nature, or, what is the same thing, 
 in God. The followers of Locke, again, went so 
 far in the opposite direction that they regarded 
 the universal as a fiction of abstraction, and the 
 individual as the sole reality. Hence they 
 sought to. confine the individual in theory to 
 the perception of his own sensitive states, and 
 in practice to the seeking of pleasant, and the 
 avoidance of painful, feelings. Comte steers a 
 path midway between the two extremes. To 
 him, as to Locke and Hume, Nature is the 
 vainest of abstractions, the last delusion of meta- 
 physics ; and all attempts to penetrate into the 
 real being of things are the efforts of a finite 
 creature to get beyond his own limits. Yet, on 
 the other hand, to him, as to Spinoza, it seems 
 irrational to separate the individual from the 
 
Introspective Psychology. 77 
 
 whole to which he belongs, and therefore, Hu- 
 manity, instead of being regarded as a vague 
 abstraction like Nature, is asserted to be the 
 most real of all things or beings. " Man is a 
 mere abstraction, and there is nothing real but 
 Humanity." And Comte is so far from saying 
 that the individual is confined to the data of 
 his own individual consciousness that he rather 
 maintains that we are unable to know ourselves, 
 except as we know something else. Thus in 
 criticizing the psychological method of internal 
 observation — which, by the way, he supposes to 
 be the essential method of metaphysics — Comte 
 says : — " This pretended psychological method is 
 essentially defective, for consider to what suicidal 
 procedures it immediately leads ; on the one 
 side it bids you isolate yourself as far as possible 
 from every external perception, and therefore 
 prohibits you from carrying on any intellectual 
 labour ; for if you are employed in any, even 
 the simplest calculation, what would become of 
 the internal observation ? On the other hand, 
 after having finally by elaborate effort and ar- 
 rangement attained this perfect state of intel- 
 lectual slumber, you are called upon to watch 
 
78 The Social Philosophy of G orate. 
 
 the operations which are going on in your mind, 
 when in fact there is nothing going on at all."* 
 Comte sees the absurdity of a psychological 
 method, in which the mind is isolated from the 
 world and treated as one object among the others 
 which have to be observed, instead of being- 
 regarded as a " part of all it knows," although 
 he does not clearly indicate the source of the 
 error. But the only result, as we have seen, is 
 a compromise, in which the individual is sup- 
 posed to be capable of objective knowledge, 
 though only of phenomena, and capable also 
 of objective aims, which, however, he cannot 
 identify with the absolute end of all things. 
 We can know, in Comte's opinion, not merely 
 what is relative to our individual minds, but 
 to the human mind ; and we can seek as our end, 
 not merely our own individual pleasure but the 
 happiness of Humanity. But we cannot know 
 what things really are, apart from their appear- 
 ance to us : we cannot worship any God who is 
 in nature as in man, or identify ourselves with 
 any divine purpose which reaches beyond the 
 compass of this transitory existence. Whether 
 *Phil. Pos. i. p. 36. 
 
Comtes Metaphysic. 79 
 
 this compromise is more than a compromise, 
 whether it is a true solution of the difficulty, 
 or a reconciliation of the opposite tendencies 
 of thought in a higher unity, we have yet 
 to consider. 
 
 The point, however, to which I wish here to He is reaUy 
 
 guided by 
 
 call attention is, that Comte's protest against ^ ei th i^ in - 
 metaphysic loses almost all its weight because 
 of his ignorance of the real scope and tendency 
 of the metaphysical theories of the past, and of 
 his own relation to them. He seems to have no 
 perception of the essential distinction between 
 the two tendencies of thought which he is partly 
 opposing and partly reconciling. Beginning with 
 a denunciation of metaphysic, because it treats 
 universals as real entities, he ends by insisting 
 on the truth that the Family, State, and Hu- 
 manity, though they undoubtedly are universals, 
 are at the same time objectively real. In the 
 attempt to rise above the abstractions of earlier 
 thought he is in harmony with the best meta- 
 physics of his time. The defect lies in his 
 unconsciousness of his own metaphysic, i.e., of 
 the categories which rule his thought, and which 
 enable him to interpret the facts of experience, 
 
80 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 and especially the facts of man's social life, so 
 differently from his predecessors. For him, in- 
 deed, there is an easy explanation of this differ- 
 ence between himself and the philosophers of an 
 earlier time. They were " metaphysical," while 
 he is not ; they made assumptions, and substi- 
 tuted their own ideas for the teaching of experi- 
 ence, while he has simply made his mind into a 
 mirror of nature, and stated the facts as they are. 
 Comte forgets what his own principles led him 
 on other occasions to perceive, that the world is 
 what it is to us by the development of our own 
 thoughts, and that we find in it only what we 
 are prepared to find. Locke also, when he at- 
 tacked the Cartesians, seemed to himself to be 
 substituting experience for mere ideas, reality 
 for fiction. He did not observe that he was 
 substituting for the presupposition that the uni- 
 versal alone is real, the opposite presupposition 
 that the individual alone is real ; and that the 
 one presupposition is as much an idea as the 
 other. And Comte, in his turn, guided by his 
 new organic idea of social life and development, 
 advances to the attack upon the individualistic 
 philosophy, with the same naive confidence that 
 
The Critical Philosophy. 81 
 
 his idea is not an idea at all, but a fact. With 
 all his talk of experience, he has never asked, or 
 he has not understood the hearing of the Kantian 
 question, What is experience ? For if he had 
 done so, he must have discovered that his own 
 so-called positive thought was as metaphysical as 
 that either of the Eealists or of the Nominalists, 
 and was indeed possible only as the result of a 
 development which included both. 
 
 It is true that Comte in his " Politique Posi- His view of 
 
 *- the critical 
 
 tive " refers to Kant's criticism of experience, p " L "' up 5 ' 
 though in a way that seems to show that his 
 knowledge was derived only from hearsay. 
 Kant is supposed by him to be a philosopher 
 who first extended to the mind the general 
 biological truth of the action and reaction of 
 organism and medium upon each other. Be- 
 cause of this action and reaction, in which the 
 mind modifies the object, as well as the object 
 the mind, our thoughts do not correspond to the 
 reality of things in themselves ; they do not 
 represent the medium as it is, but only as it 
 appears to us, and our conception of the world 
 is not therefore absolute, but only relative. On 
 the other hand, we must not exaggerate this 
 
82 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 truth so far as to suppose that the development 
 of our thought is purely subjective ; or, in other 
 words, that it belongs to the mind apart from the 
 action of the world upon it (a view which Comte 
 attributes to the German idealists). The true 
 theory is " to regard the world as furnishing the 
 matter, and the mind the form, in every positive 
 notion. The fusion of these elements cannot 
 take place except by reciprocal sacrifices. Ex- 
 cess of objectivity would hinder every general 
 view, for generality implies abstraction. But 
 the analysis which permits us to abstract would 
 be impossible, unless we could suppress the 
 natural excess of subjectivity. Every man, as 
 he compares himself with others, spontaneously 
 takes away from his observations that which is 
 peculiar to himself, in order to realize that social 
 agreement which constitutes the main end of 
 contemplative life ; but the degree of subjectivity 
 which is common to all our species usually 
 remains, and remains without any serious incon- 
 venience. Nor could we reduce its amount, 
 ■except by intellectual intercourse with the other 
 animals, an intercourse which is rare and imper- 
 fect. Besides, however we might restrict or 
 
The Critical Philosophy. 83 
 
 diminish the subjective influences that mould 
 our thoughts, in the effort to come to an under- 
 standing' with intelligences unlike our own, still 
 our conceptions could never attain to a pure 
 objectivity. It is, therefore, as impossible as it 
 is useless to determine exactly the respective 
 contributions of the internal and the external in 
 the production of knowledge." '"" 
 
 It is easy from this passage to see that Comte Kant's real 
 
 J x a view of 
 
 has not fully apprehended the bearing of the nowese - 
 Kantian criticism. Kant does not seek to show 
 that knowledge springs out of the action and 
 reaction of subject and object on each other, 
 but that there are certain universals, or forms 
 of thought, by which the intelligence must de- 
 termine the matter of sense ere we can know 
 objects as such. The question which he dis- 
 cusses is, how experience, and objects of experi- 
 ence, as such, are possible. Kant would not, 
 therefore, say that it is impossible " to determine 
 exactly the respective contributions of the inter- 
 nal and the external in the production of know- 
 ledge ; " but that the problem is an absurd one, 
 since subject and object are correlative elements 
 * Pol. Pos. ii. 38 
 
84 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 
 
 in the unity of knowledge, and not two separate 
 
 things, by the action and reaction of which upon 
 
 each other knowledge is produced. The unity of 
 
 experience is incapable of being transcended, and 
 
 it is a false abstraction by which we attempt to 
 
 take either subject or object out of that unity, 
 
 and seek to determine it as a thing in itself. 
 
 The intelligi and the esse of things are one, in 
 
 such a sense, that it is transcending the limits 
 
 of experience to attempt to determine either of 
 
 these apart from the other.* All knowledge or 
 
 experience implies and presupposes the unity of 
 
 the knowing mind and the categories through 
 
 which it determines its objects, and it is only in 
 
 virtue of these that there exists for us any 
 
 objective world of experience at all. Hence to 
 
 leave out the intelligence in our account of the 
 
 intelligible, to forget the constitutive power of 
 
 thought in speaking of existence (as is done by 
 
 materialistic and so-called empirical theories), is 
 
 * It is, no doubt, inconsistent with this that Kant 
 could admit the existence of a thing in itself, which 
 produces sensations in us, as in many passages he seems 
 to do. But it would carry us too far to discuss this 
 subject here. Comte, it may be admitted, could have 
 found many things in the letter of Kant to give plausi- 
 bility to his view. Cf. below p. 124. 
 
The Work of Philosophy. 8'5 
 
 to mutilate and distort the essential facts of the 
 case. 
 
 This Kantian view of nature and experience ™-ects ti.e 
 leads directly to certain important conclusions as of science. ' 
 to the work of philosophy. For, if its truth he 
 admitted, it necessarily follows that the ordinary 
 consciousness of men — even the ordinary scien- 
 tific consciousness — is, in its view of the world 
 essentially abstract and imperfect. The ordi- 
 nary consciousness generally, we might even say 
 invariably, deals with objects as if they were 
 given independently of any thinking subject. 
 It proceeds as if an intelligible world could 
 exist without an intelligence, and thus leaves 
 out of account an element, and indeed the most 
 important element, in the facts of experience. 
 And the business of the philosopher or meta- 
 physician must be to correct the abstractness of 
 ordinary, even of scientific, thought, to bring to 
 clear consciousness the element which they ne- 
 glect, and to determine how the new insight 
 into the nature of knowledge, which by this 
 process he has attained, must modify and trans- 
 form our previous view of the objects known. 
 In doing so, the metaphysician (or transcen- 
 
86 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 dentalist, as Kant calls him) is not introducing 
 a new method ; he is simply following the 
 method according to which we are continually 
 obliged to correct and complete the results of 
 one science by another. Science is necessarily 
 abstract, in so far as it investigates and deter- 
 mines certain aspects and relations of things, 
 apart from their other aspects and relations. 
 Thus, in geometry, abstraction is made of every- 
 thing except the relations of lines and figures 
 in space, in order that the spatial conditions 
 of things may be fully determined, apart from 
 their other conditions. And in like manner> 
 " the dynamic laws of weight would still be 
 unknown to us, unless we had first abstracted 
 all consideration of the resistance, or the motion, 
 of the atmosphere or other medium." The 
 science of political economy is based on an 
 effort to isolate, so far as is possible, the econo- 
 mical from all the other conditions of social life. 
 In short, all the separate sciences, in this point 
 of view, are abstract ; and they tend to become 
 more and more abstract as the scientific division 
 of labour increases. That is, they tend to con- 
 fine themselves to the investigation of certain 
 
Philosophy corrects Abstraction. 87 
 
 definite relations of objects, leaving out of ac- 
 
 count all their other relations ; or (what comes 
 to much the same thing) to the examination of 
 certain definite objects, without taking into 
 account their manifold relations to other objects. 
 Now, as Comte himself says, " these preliminary 
 simplifications without which there could be no 
 such thing as science in the true sense of the 
 word, always involve a corresponding process 
 of recomposition, when prevision of actual fact 
 is called for." To attain a complete view of the 
 truth, we must return from the abstraction of the 
 isolated sciences to the unity of nature, in which 
 all these separate objects and relations are brought 
 together, and in which they modify and determine 
 each other. And philosophy only goes a step 
 farther in the same direction, when it corrects 
 that abstraction from the thinking self, the 
 unity of knowledge, which is common to all 
 the sciences. The only difference is, that the 
 abstraction of science from the unity of the 
 objective world, as it is the result of a definite 
 act of thought, is generally conscious ; while the 
 abstraction which philosophy seeks to correct is 
 generally unconscious. The geometrician cannot 
 
88 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 but see that there are other than spatial con- 
 ditions of existence, and that, for his own pur- 
 poses, he has left all such conditions out of 
 account. But it is quite possible, as every 
 day's experience proves, to investigate the laws 
 of the intelligible world, without ever adverting 
 to its necessary relation to the intelligence, and 
 without being conscious of the abstractness of a 
 view of things, in which this relation is left out 
 of account. Philosophy, therefore, has to detect 
 and bring to the light of day certain facts or 
 relations which enter into the constitution of 
 things, which indeed are presupposed in all 
 our consciousness of them, but which, never- 
 theless, generally escape without notice. Of 
 this work of philosophy or metaphysics, how- 
 ever, Comte has no idea, or he confuses it with 
 the methods of an empirical psychology, which, 
 by an opposite abstraction, would separate the 
 thinking mind from the world to which it is 
 related. But the method of philosophy is not 
 mere abstraction ; it is rather, if the expression 
 may be allowed, concretion. Philosophy, as 
 Hegel said, is " thinking things together " — 
 i.e., thinking them in a unity that transcends 
 
Philosophy is Self-consciousness. 89 
 
 and explains their differences ; or, if it ever 
 abstractly considers the unity and movement 
 < )f thought in itself, it is only (as geometry abs- 
 tractly considers the relations of space) in order 
 more surely and clearly to discern that unity 
 and movement in all the objects of thought. 
 
 It is to Kant, principally, that this new way ^^ Ac 
 of stating the problem of philosophy is due ; but S^otus 
 
 guiding 
 
 it would be altogether a mistake to suppose that principles, 
 he essentially 'changed the problem itself. Meta- 
 physicians, from the time of Socrates and Plato, 
 have always sought to get beyond the presuppo- 
 sitions of the ordinary consciousness, and to re- 
 mould that consciousness by bringing to light the 
 principles upon which it rests. One of the best 
 definitions that has been given of philosophy is 
 " clear self-consciousness." And it is, indeed, 
 just this character of metaphysical thought which 
 renders plausible Comte's attack upon it. It is 
 in the metaphysical writers of the past that we 
 can most clearly discern the errors of the past, 
 for by these writers the errors of the past are 
 not merely implied and presupposed, but explic- 
 itly stated. Hence such writers are continually 
 suffering from that natural illusion by which we 
 
DO The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 take, as the prominent representatives of an idea 
 or tendency of thought, those authors by whom 
 it has been most distinctly expressed ; whereas it 
 is rather they who first enable us, even if they 
 do not enable themselves, to see the limitations 
 of that idea or tendency, and to transcend it. 
 But as it is in the metaphysicians that we find 
 the clearest and most definite expressions of those 
 defective principles of past thought which we are 
 seeking to transcend, it is not unnatural that we 
 should attribute the defect itself to metaphysic. 
 What, however, is really due to metaphysic is 
 not the error, but rather that clearness and de- 
 finiteness of its expression which makes our re- 
 futation of it and our higher point of view pos- 
 sible. Thus the limit of Greek thought, the 
 point at which, by its own development, it falls 
 into error and self-contradiction, would have been 
 by no means so easy to discern, if its presup- 
 positions had not been raised into ideal clearness 
 in the works of Plato and Aristotle. The indi- 
 vidualism of the Stoics and Epicureans gives us a 
 key, which we would otherwise want, to those new 
 experiences of independence and isolation which 
 came to men under the Empire of Borne, after 
 
Philosophy and Progress. 91 
 
 the breaking up of the ancient municipal organ- 
 ization of social life. Descartes and Spinoza re- 
 veal the open secret of that new view of the 
 relation of man to God, which was partly ex- 
 pressed by Luther and Calvin, and which was so 
 powerful in moulding the political and social life, 
 especially of Protestant countries, and in awak- 
 ing in them a consciousness of individual and 
 national independence, combined with a still more 
 intense consciousness that the individual is noth- 
 ing, except as the servant of a higher power. 
 Hence it was in a criticism of these philosophies 
 that Locke and Leibnitz found the starting-point 
 for their fuller assertion of the claims of the indi- 
 vidual. Finally, it is through a struggle with 
 Individualism, especially in its fullest expression 
 in Hume and Rousseau, that Kant and his sue- 
 cessors in Germany, and Comte in France, were 
 led to that higher organic idea in which the indi- 
 vidual and universal cease to be opposed to each 
 other as reality to fiction, and come to be re- 
 garded as different but complementary aspects of 
 reality. If we no longer say, "The universal 
 alone is real, and the individual is an abstrac- 
 tion ; " or, " The individual alone is real, and the 
 
92 The. Social Philosophy of Comtc. 
 
 universal is a name ; " but, " The individual is 
 real, but only as the realization of the universal, 
 and the universal is real, but only as manifesting 
 itself in the individual," it is due to the whole 
 past movement of philosophic thought. Nor, 
 again, would it be difficult to show that the suc- 
 cesses or failures of science at different times 
 were closely connected with the sufficiency or 
 insufficiency of the ultimate principles of think- 
 ing then acknowledged or presupposed. For 
 it is the development of man's spirit which en- 
 ables him to ask and to answer new questions in 
 regard to the world of objects ; nor can his 
 growing knowledge of that world be separated 
 from his growing consciousness of himself. To 
 one who regards metaphysic from this point of 
 view, its continual apparent failures will be as 
 little suggestive of a despair of philosophy as the 
 fall of the Greek State, or of the feudal system, 
 is suggestive of a disbelief in the possibility of 
 social and political life. It may even be said 
 that no stage of culture, no limited form of 
 human thought or existence, is ever completely 
 exhausted and transcended, till it has risen to a 
 clear consciousness of itself in a metaphysic, or 
 
Metaphysic of Positivism. {)'■> 
 
 something' of the nature of a metaphysic. It 
 is the disentanglement of the principle, the cen- 
 tral idea, the fundamental category, which has pre- 
 viously ruled men almost without their knowing- 
 it, that first enables them to see its value and 
 relation to that unity of the whole, with which 
 it was necessarily confounded so long as it re- 
 mained merely a moving force in the depths of 
 the popular mind. Comte himself was meta- 
 physical, in so far as he sought to transcend 
 the one-sided and imperfect categories of earlier 
 philosophy, and to reconcile them by means of 
 a higher thought. His defect lay in this, that 
 he was not metaphysical enough, that his analysis 
 of his own thought was imperfect, and that la- 
 was therefore the instrument of a movement of 
 human intelligence, of the meaning of which 
 lie was never clearly conscious. Otherwise he 
 would have perceived that his " positive " stage 
 was not simply a negation of the metaphysical 
 and theological stages which preceded it and a 
 return to fact and experience, hut that it was 
 essentially a new reading of experience, which 
 implied, therefore, a new form of metaphysics 
 and theology. 
 
94 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 Comte's It is this unconsciousness of his own fuiida- 
 
 unconscious- . . 
 
 nessofws mental categories, which explains Comte s radical 
 
 own guiding 
 
 principles, misconception of the whole history of theology 
 and metaphysics. The third stage of Positivism 
 is not the unity which transcends, while it re- 
 conciles, the previous stages of human develop- 
 ment ; on the contrary, it involves the total re- 
 nunciation of those principles of thought which 
 had prevailed during the two previous stages. 
 According to this view, all that we can say is, that 
 a germ of positive thought existed from the first, 
 and that, by its development, theology and meta- 
 physics were gradually driven from the whole 
 sphere of knowledge. Positivism is thus the 
 concentration of human thought within certain 
 limits, which at first it did not respect, but which 
 it gradually learns to be, for it, impassable. And 
 the only result of the process is, that the whole 
 field of the non-phenomenal is abandoned to 
 poetry, which is still to be permitted under 
 certain restrictions to fill up the vacant spaces 
 of the unknowable with shapes drawn according 
 to our wishes. Theology and metaphysics are 
 but more or less thinly disguised anthropo- 
 morphisms, which once subserved a social pur- 
 
Development by Negation. 95 
 
 pose, and which apart from that purpose have no 
 value for the intelligence; nor is there any element 
 of truth in them which needs to be preserved 
 under the new intellectual regime. Their history 
 was not a development, but a purely negative pro- 
 cess — a process whereby they became attenuated 
 and dissolved, until the rich concrete meaning of 
 the first Fetichism had entirely disappeared in the 
 negations of the revolutionary philosophy. Mono- 
 theism, the last religion, was but the bare ab- 
 stract residuum of theology, as the idea of Na- 
 ture was the last abstract residuum of meta- 
 physics. And the whole result of the long 
 striving of human intelligence to penetrate into 
 the absolute is merely the knowledge of its own 
 limits. 
 
 Now, it is not too much to say that this view consequent 
 
 defect in hi; 
 
 involves a fundamental misrepresentation, and ^kj- the 
 
 . f. i . • ment of 
 
 even inversion, of the whole history ot religion religion 
 and philosophy. Its plausibility at first sight 
 arises from a common confusion as to the idea of 
 abstraction. In one sense it may be said that 
 there is no one so concrete in his view of things 
 as the child or the savage ; in another sense, it 
 may be said that there is no one so abstract. 
 
96 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 The mind of the child clings to the immediate 
 images of things; it cannot rise above their 
 pictured presence in space and time ; it cannot 
 sever them in thought from their immediate 
 surroundings. On the other hand, the child's 
 thought is abstract and simple ; it confuses all 
 things together ; it scarcely distinguishes at first 
 between animate and inanimate, between man 
 and animal. With Comte we may call the child 
 a Fetichist ; not because his imagination raises 
 all things to the level of man, but because he 
 still lives in a simplicity or confusion of thought 
 for which there are no distinct differences of 
 level. On the other hand, as the child advances 
 to maturity, the pictures of sense may partially 
 fade, but his ideas of things become more com- 
 plex and adequate. It ceases to be impossible 
 for him to separate objects from the definite cir- 
 cumstances of space and time, in which they 
 have been at first perceived ; but at the same 
 time, his knowledge of those objects, in their 
 unity and difference — their permanent nature and 
 their manifold phases and aspects — is continually 
 growing. If, therefore, the movement of his 
 thought, in one point of view, is toward greater 
 
Development of Religion. 97 
 
 generality and abstractness, in another point of 
 view it is toward greater particularity and con- 
 creteness. To use a favourite modern phrase, 
 the development of human thought is by differen- 
 tiation and integration, by induction and deduc- 
 tion at once. Now Comte's history of theology 
 and metaphysics is greatly distorted by the fact 
 that he detects in it only a movement of general- 
 ization and abstraction ; and not also a move- 
 ment towards greater complexity and complete- 
 ness. Yet, even a superficial glance at the de- 
 velopment of religion is enough to let us see 
 that the Christian idea of God in man is less 
 simple and abstract than Jewish Monotheism 
 or Oriental Pantheism. If indeed, we were to 
 judge of a religion by mere wealth of fantastic 
 sensuous symbolism, it might seem possible to 
 regard the earliest religions as the richest; though 
 even this might be disputed, seeing that the 
 fancy of the savage Fetichist, while capricious 
 and wayward, is at the same time singularly 
 monotonous and uninventive. But to any one 
 who would classify religions according to the 
 complexity and depth of the thought involved 
 
 in them, it must be apparent that they become 
 G 
 
98 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 more full and definite — not more vague and 
 simple — as time advances. Their progress to- 
 ward greater universality is at the same time a 
 progress toward greater specification. In the 
 Indian faith we discern, from very early times, 
 the presence of an idea of the divine unity. But 
 it is a vague and abstract idea, and for that very 
 reason it stands side by side with, or produces, 
 a lawless Polytheism, in which there is neither 
 method nor meaning ; which, as Goethe says, 
 does not subserve the true purposes of a religion, 
 since it adds another chaotic element to life, 
 instead of supplying a guiding principle through 
 all its confusion and difficulty. In the Jewish 
 religion we have a true Monotheism, in which 
 the unity is no longer that of an abstract sub- 
 stance, but of a spiritual or self-conscious being 
 — a personal will which manifests itself in a 
 definite purpose, in a moral government of men 
 and nations. In Christianity, finally, we have 
 the idea of a God, who is not merely an absolute 
 substance — not merely a Creator and Euler of 
 the world, but a self-revealing Spirit ; a Spirit 
 who reveals himself in, as well as to, his crea- 
 tures — an idea which combines in one the earlier 
 
Development of Philosophy. 99 
 
 Pantheistic and Monotheistic conceptions. To 
 regard the process in which these are three of 
 the main stages as merely a process of abstrac- 
 tion and negation is surely to take a most ex- 
 ternal and superficial view of it. The truth is, 
 that this and the similar sketch in Hume's " Dia- 
 logues on Natural Eeligion " are rather based on 
 a preconceived theory as to the development of 
 human thought in religion, than on the phe- 
 nomena of religious history. And in Comte's 
 " Social Dynamics," he has frequently to mention 
 facts which are altogether inconsistent with it, 
 
 Nor is Comte's view of the history of meta- Defect in his 
 
 view of the 
 
 physic less fictitious and inaccurate. According deve , lo P; 
 
 x u o ment uf 
 
 to that view, the earliest philosophies ought to P BS ° P y " 
 be the most concrete and complete, and the 
 latest, the most simple and abstract ; but the 
 very reverse is the fact. It is in the dawn of 
 speculation that men are content to explain the 
 universe by such abstractions as " being " and 
 " becoming." The ancient philosophy contrasts 
 with the modern, as simple with complex ; 
 fur while the former is occupied with ques- 
 tions about "the one" and "the many," the 
 " universal " and the " particular," the latter is 
 
100 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 concerned from the first with the relations 
 of self-consciousness to the objective world. 
 Again, confining ourselves to modern phil- 
 osophy, we find the abstract Universalism (if 
 we may use the expression) of Descartes and 
 Spinoza, yielding in the next generation to 
 two opposite forms of Individualism, and ending 
 in the attempt of Kant and his successors " to 
 read Locke with the eyes of Leibnitz, and Leib- 
 nitz with the eyes of Locke,""* and (we may add) 
 to unite the elements of truth in both by a 
 deeper view of the principle imperfectly ex- 
 pressed in Spinoza. In short, the whole move- 
 ment of philosophy is a movement towards a 
 more complex, and at the same time towards 
 a more systematic, view of the world. Philo- 
 sophical thought is ever seeking on the one 
 hand to distinguish, and even to oppose to 
 each other, the different sides of truth which 
 were at first confused together ; and again, on 
 the other hand, to show that what were at 
 first supposed to be contradictory, are really 
 complementary, aspects of things. This ]3rogress 
 of philosophy by differentiation and integration 
 * Green's Introduction to Hume. 
 
Development of Science. 101 
 
 Oomte's theory does not explain, but it explains 
 him. For, as has been indicated, Comte's whole 
 view of the relation of the individual to society, 
 and of the present to the past, manifests that 
 same effort to concentrate and combine in one 
 different and even opposed motives of thought 
 which is shown in the idealistic philosophy of 
 Germany. Only, as Comte is not conscious of 
 this affiliation of his thought, but, on the contrary, 
 supposes Positivism to be the simple negation of 
 metaphysics, his possession of the higher idea 
 shows itself, not in a new metaphysic, but only 
 in a better comprehension of the social life and 
 development of the race. Hence, also, he sees no 
 positive connection between his own specula- 
 tions and the previous history of philosophy, 
 but connects it solely with the past progress 
 of physical science. 
 
 This inadequacy of Comte's view of the his- Defect in 
 
 J- J his view of 
 
 tory of philosophy and theology leads to an£° n ^ elop - 
 
 opposite inadequacy in his view of the history 
 
 of science. As the former is conceived by him 
 
 to be a mere process of abstraction, which ends 
 
 in nothing, so the latter is conceived by him — 
 
 at least, in his first general account of it — purely 
 
102 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 as a movement from the abstract and general 
 to the concrete and particular. There are thus 
 two laws for the progress of the human mind — 
 the law of its progress to science, and the law 
 of its progress in science. The progress to 
 science is merely the gradual destruction of 
 the imaginative synthesis in which civilization 
 began ; the process in science consists in the 
 gradual building up of the scientific synthesis 
 in which civilization must end. Science begins 
 with the consideration of the simplest and most 
 abstract relations of things, with arithmetic and 
 geometry, and it ends with the investigation of 
 their most complex and concrete relations^jwith 
 sociology and morals. This, with slight modifica- 
 tions, is the historical order of the genesis of the 
 sciences, and, what is even more important in 
 Comte's eyes, it is the order of their logical de- 
 pendence or filiation, and therefore the order of 
 a duly arranged scientific education. For each of 
 the successive sciences — mathematics, astronomy, 
 physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and morals 
 — includes a deductive part, in which it depends 
 on previous sciences, and an inductive part, in 
 which it makes a fresh start from experience 
 
Mr. Spencer's Criticism. 108 
 
 for itself; and therefore no one can be fully 
 equipped for the investigation of the more com- 
 plex, who has not made himself master of the 
 laws of the simpler, phenomena. Like Plato, 
 Comte would write over the portals of science, 
 [xr] ayewiueTprjTos eicrirco, and he would add, — 
 Let no one enter upon the study of chemistry 
 who is not a master of the principles of physics ; 
 upon the study of biology, who is not a master 
 of the principles of chemistry ; nor upon the 
 study of sociology, who is not a master of the 
 principles of all the previous sciences. 
 
 This view of the historical and logical filiation Mr. spencer's 
 
 criticism of 
 
 of the sciences has been attacked with consider- that view - 
 able force in an Essay by Mr. Spencer upon 
 the " Genesis of Science." In that Essay, Mr. 
 Spencer points out, what, indeed, Comte himself 
 had very fully acknowledged, that Mstoriccdly 
 every science in turn has been an instrument 
 in the development of the others. Even in the 
 time of Aristotle politics and biology had made 
 no inconsiderable advance, while as yet physics 
 and chemistry could scarcely be said to be in 
 existence. And this is only what was to be 
 expected, for some knowledge of the conditions 
 
104 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 of social order is a practical condition of the 
 development of any other kind of science ; and 
 the necessary art of medicine forced men at a 
 very early period to pay some attention to phy- 
 siology. Astronomy had to wait for optics to 
 furnish it not only with instruments but with 
 definite conceptions of the dispersion and refrac- 
 tion of light ; and physical investigation could 
 not proceed very far without some kind of 
 solution of biological and even psychological 
 questions in relation to sense perception. It 
 was the advance of geometry that led to the 
 invention of algebra, and the transcendental 
 analysis of Newton and Leibnitz was directly 
 suggested by the problems of physics. These 
 and many other facts of the same kind seem to 
 show that a serial arrangement of the sciences 
 misrepresents at once the historical order of 
 their development and the logical order of their 
 dependence. And in both points of view it 
 would be nearer the truth to regard the dif- 
 ferent sciences (as Cointe himself sometimes re- 
 gards them) as "les diverses branches d'un tronc 
 unique." For this " suggests the facts that the 
 sciences had a common origin, that they have been 
 
Littre's Defence of Comte. 105 
 
 developing simultaneously, and that they have 
 been from time to time dividing and subdivid- 
 ing." Yet even this metaphor is inadequate, for 
 " it does not suggest the yet more important fact 
 that the divisions and subdivisions thus arising 
 do not remain separate, but now and again re- 
 unite in direct and indirect ways. They inos- 
 culate ; they severally send off and receive 
 connecting growths ; and the intercommunion 
 has been ever becoming more frequent, more 
 intricate, more widely ramified. There has all 
 along been higher specialization that there might 
 be a larger generalization ; and a deeper analysis 
 that there might be a better synthesis. Each 
 larger generalization has lifted sundry special- 
 izations still higher; and each better synthesis 
 has prepared the way for still deeper analysis.""" 
 
 To these objections, Comte would probably -^^0°^ 
 have answered,! as Littre has answered for him, tSpencer - 
 that there is a difference between the determi- 
 nation of some of the laws of a particular class 
 of phenomena and the constitution of a science 
 of these phenomena ; and that a science cannot 
 
 * Spencer's "Essays," i. p. 145. 
 
 tCf. Pol. Pos. i., Introduction Fondamentale passim. 
 
106 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 be regarded as constituted till its inductive and 
 deductive parts are separated. It cannot be 
 denied that physics involves all the relations 
 discussed in mathematics, and something more ; 
 that chemistry involves all the relations dis- 
 cussed in physics, and something more; that 
 biology involves all the relations discussed in 
 physics and chemistry, and something more ■ 
 and that sociology involves the relations dis- 
 cussed in all the previous sciences, and something 
 more. Now, it is a hopeless task for the weak 
 human intellect to deduce this "something more" 
 in the more complex, from the principles of the 
 less complex sciences, even if absolutely such a 
 deduction is possible. Hence we cannot regard 
 a science as constituted, until its special subject- 
 matter has been separated from the subject-matter 
 of the simpler sciences, and until, in relation to 
 that subject-matter, certain laws have been de- 
 termined which cannot be deduced from the 
 principles of those sciences. Thus, in Comte's 
 opinion, biology was not constituted as a science 
 until, in quite modern times, the phenomena of 
 life were seen at onCe in their relative depend- 
 ence on, and their relative separation from, 
 
The Universal and the General. 107 
 
 physical and chemical phenomena. Nor could 
 sociology be constituted as a science until, by 
 Comte himself, the law of social development 
 was determined, and the phenomena of human 
 life were thereby separated from phenomena of 
 life in general, which fall under the province of 
 biology. In this sense, therefore, it is argued 
 that the historical and the logical order of the 
 sciences are coincident ; and that, while it is 
 quite true that the advance of one of the 
 simpler sciences is often stimulated by recpaire- 
 ments of the more complex sciences, it is equally 
 true that the more complex science has to wait 
 for the development of the simpler science, ere 
 it can rise above its first empirical stage. 
 
 It would be beyond the scope of this volume, Ambiguity 
 
 of the opposi- 
 
 even if it were in the power of the writer, to {jj^J^raai 
 discuss in all their bearings these different views particular, 
 as to the arrangement of the sciences ; but it 
 may be remarked that the most important of Mr. 
 Spencer's objections are directed, not against the 
 specific account which Comte gives of the his- 
 torical and logical relations of the sciences, but 
 rather against his assertion that science pro- 
 gresses from the general to the particular, from 
 
108 The Social Philoso r £jhy of Comte. 
 
 the abstract to the concrete. That progress, he 
 maintains, is " at once from the special to the 
 general, and from the general to the special." 
 If arithmetic comes before geometry, and geo- 
 metry before physics ; on the other hand it is 
 equally true, that geometry comes before algebra, 
 and algebra before transcendental analysis, in 
 which mathematics reaches its highest general- 
 ization. The " special " geometry of the ancients 
 is contrasted by Comte himself with the " gen- 
 eral" geometry of the moderns, and the New- 
 tonian theory of gravitation was more general 
 than the laws of Kepler, by the aid of which it 
 was discovered. Now, looking at such illustra- 
 tions as these by which Mr. Spencer supports 
 his case, we cannot but think that the controversy 
 really turns upon the ambiguity of " general " or 
 " abstract," to which reference has been made ; 
 and that in spite of what both Comte and his 
 critic have said about the different meanings 
 that may be given to these words, neither of 
 them has consistently kept in view the difference 
 between the " general " with which science be- 
 gins, and that with which it ends. In one 
 sense of the word, transcendental analysis is 
 
The Universal as Principle. 10D 
 
 more "general" than arithmetic and algebra, 
 but in another sense it is more specific. For 
 transcendental analysis includes and explains 
 both arithmetic and algebra, and casts its light 
 even beyond their sphere ; but it does so, not 
 by becoming vaguer and less definite, but quite 
 the contrary. It is a universal that does not 
 leave out of account the differences of the par- 
 ticulars included under it, but rather determines 
 them more fully. And the same thing may be said 
 of the laws of Newton as contrasted with the 
 laws of Kepler. It is easy enough to reach 
 the general, if all that is wanted is a common 
 element ; for in that case we need only to ab- 
 stract from everything but the simple idea of 
 " being," and we have at one step reached the 
 top of the logical tree of Porphyry, the highest 
 universal of thought. But the universal of 
 science and philosophy is something different 
 from this ; it is not merely a generic name, 
 under which things are brought together, but a 
 principle which unites them and determines 
 their relation to each other. It is a unity, the 
 thought of which does not exclude, but rather is 
 correlative with, a knowledge of the differences. 
 
110 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 In this point of view the Platonic view of 
 science, as a search for unity and the universal, 
 and the Aristotelian view of it as a search for 
 difference and the particular, are but opposite 
 sides of the shield of knowledge, which cannot 
 be separated from each other. Now the defect 
 of Comte's general description of the progress of 
 science is, that he has chosen to look solely at 
 one side of the shield, and to regard it merely 
 as a movement of specification ; and the conse- 
 quence is, that in the sequel he is obliged 
 continually to correct himself, and to observe 
 in particular cases that it involves also a move- 
 ment of generalization. Mr. Spencer sees both 
 sides, and therefore progress is for him a move- 
 ment at once of differentiation and integration ; 
 yet in his criticism of Comte, and in his " First 
 Principles," there are passages in which he 
 seems to confuse the universal of science with 
 a mere abstraction or logical genus, and to 
 overlook the essential correlativity and inter- 
 dependence of the two opposite movements of 
 thought* The defects of both writers, however, 
 
 * Mr. Spencer, it may be remarked, takes, like Comte, 
 a negative view of the progress of religion, and to him, 
 
Comte's Negations. Ill 
 
 lie mainly on the metaphysical side ; in their 
 analysis of the idea of development more than 
 in their application of it. And it is the power 
 and fertility of resource with which they apply 
 it to life and history, which gives them, and 
 especially which gives Comte, a claim to an 
 important place among modern philosophical 
 writers. 
 
 In this chapter I have tried to trace to 
 their origin Comte's ideas of social and intel- 
 lectual development, and to examine the motives 
 winch led him to reject theology and metaphysics, 
 as legitimate forms of science. In the following 
 chapter I shall go on to consider more carefully 
 the subjective synthesis by which he would 
 supply their place. 
 
 therefore, the last religion is the worship of the Un- 
 known, and, indeed, of the Unknowable. But Comte 
 practically retracts this view when he makes the worship 
 of Humanity the last form of religion. 
 
112 The Social Philoso'phy of Comte. _ 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 THE POSITIVE OK CONSTRUCTIVE SIDE OF COMTE'S 
 
 PHILOSOPHY HIS SUBSTITUTES FOR METAPHYSIC 
 
 AND THEOLOGY. 
 
 His recognition of the need of substitutes for Theology and Meta- 
 physic — His assertion that his philosophy is relative and subjec- 
 tive — Double meaning of the relativity of knowledge as involving 
 the assertion or the denial of real or absolute knowledge — ■ 
 Collision of Comte's earlier and later views on this point — 
 Comte's subjective synthesis not subjective in the sense of Indi- 
 vidualism, nor yet in the sense that a conscious subject is im- 
 plied in all objects — His compromise between these opposite 
 theories — His doctrine that man sees the world in ordine ad 
 hominem but not in ordine ad universum — Impossibility 
 of separating nature from man or of criticising the whole 
 system to which man belongs — Defects of Comte's religion 
 according to his own idea of religion — Schisms in the school of 
 Comte. 
 
 In the preceding chapter I have tried to explain 
 how Comte was led to treat Metaphysics and 
 Theology as merely transitional forms of human 
 thought, and to show that this view not only in- 
 volves a false conception of their nature, but also 
 
His View of Development. 113 
 
 necessitates an entire misrepresentation of the 
 course of their historical development. To re- 
 gard the history of Metaphysics and Theology as 
 a purely negative process, by which the first con- 
 crete fulness of religious conceptions was gradually 
 attenuated till nothing remained but the bare ab- 
 stract idea of Nature, and, on the other hand, to 
 think of the history of science as the correspond- 
 ing positive process, by which the mind of man 
 advanced from the general to the special, from 
 the investigation of the simplest numerical and 
 spatial relations of things to the knowledge of the 
 complex social nature of man — this is a view of 
 man's intellectual history, recommended by its 
 simplicity and clearness, as well as by its corre- 
 spondence with the most popular philosophy of 
 the present time. But, as we have seen, it in- 
 volves a one-sided conception of the movement of 
 human thought in its scientific, and still more in 
 its theological and metaphysical, aspects. Comte 
 himself enables us to see that his first description 
 of the history of science is incomplete, if not mis- 
 leading; and that its movement is towards greater 
 generality as well as towards more definite speci- 
 fication. Now, as Metaphysic is only the clearest 
 
 H 
 
114 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 form of self-consciousness, and as man's conscious- 
 ness of himself deepens and widens with his con- 
 sciousness of the objective world, we might ex- 
 pect to find that Metaphysic also develops at once 
 towards the universal and towards the particular; 
 and when we look at the facts of the history of 
 Philosophy we find this expectation amply realized. 
 Nor is it otherwise with religion — which is to the 
 heart and the imaginative intuitions of man what 
 philosophy is to his self-conscious intelligence ; for 
 the latest religion is at once the deepest and the 
 richest, the most complex and the most universal. 
 Need of sub- We cannot, however, give a completely satis- 
 
 stitutes for 
 
 ™id a theo- ic factory answer to Comte's criticism of Metaphysics 
 and Theology without considering more fully the 
 substitutes which .he would put in their place. 
 For Comte is not simply an Agnostic; he does not 
 deny the reality of the wants which Metaphysics 
 and Theology have hitherto striven to satisfy; nor 
 does he hold that these wants are, by the nature 
 of things and of the human intelligence, for ever 
 precluded from satisfaction. He does not, like 
 some modern writers, reduce philosophy into a 
 consciousness of the limits of the human mind, 
 and relioion into a vasme awe of the Unknowable. 
 
Need of Philosophy and Religion. 115 
 
 On the contrary, lie holds that Positivism for the 
 first time supplies complete satisfaction to all 
 the tendencies of the many-sided nature of man, 
 whereas all earlier systems had been obliged to 
 purchase one kind of culture at the expense of 
 another, — -to gratify the affections by the sacrifice 
 of intellectual freedom, or to cultivate the intelli- 
 gence to the neglect of the claims of the heart. 
 To the Metaphysician he grants the necessity of 
 a systematizing of knowledge in relation to one 
 general principle, which shall furnish at once its 
 first presupposition and its end. To the Theo- 
 logian he grants that that inner harmony with 
 self and with the world, which we call religion, 
 can only be secured by a firm belief and trust in 
 some " Grand Etre " who transcends and compre- 
 hends our narrow individuality, " in whom we 
 live, and move, and have our being." But while 
 (in opposition to the tendencies of that scientific 
 empiricism, to which the name of Positivism is 
 usually given) Comte thus recognizes those claims 
 of the intelligence and of the heart for which 
 Philosophy and Theology had tried to provide, he 
 still adopts as his own the empiricist condemnation 
 of both, and seeks to show that, on the basis of 
 
11 G The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 empiricism itself, we may secure the complete 
 satisfaction of all our spiritual wants. It is to 
 this claim of Comte, to occupy" in the name of 
 Science the place from which Theology and Meta- 
 physics have been expelled, that we must now 
 direct our attention. 
 Distinctions The contrast which Comte draws between his 
 
 of subjec- 
 
 jective, d r°ia- own philosophy and religion, and those of his pre- 
 absoiute. decessors, is expressed in the words " relative " 
 
 synthesis 
 
 and " subjective." His purpose, he tells us, 
 is a " subjective synthesis," while his prede- 
 cessors had aimed at an " objective synthesis " 
 — i.e., they had endeavoured to comprehend the 
 world in itself, by carrying its phenomena back 
 to an objective principle to which they are all 
 equally related, and of which they are all 
 the manifestations ; while he is content to take 
 his stand on the subjective unity of the human 
 race, a unity which has grown out of the con- 
 scious or unconscious co-operation of all past 
 generations, and which now manifests itself in 
 the love and reverence of men for each other, and 
 for the Grand Mre, Humanity, that compre- 
 hends them all.*"" For the existence of this 
 * I need not do more than refer to Comte's view of 
 
Relativity of Knowledge. 117 
 
 Great Being is a fact which we can empirically 
 verify, although we are totally unable to discover 
 the meaning of that wider objective fatality, to 
 which ultimately the fortunes and life of man- 
 kind are subjected. Again, Comte contrasts his 
 own philosophy with that of his predecessors, as 
 " relative " with " absolute." By this he means 
 that Positivism does not seek to base itself on 
 absolute knowledge, i.e., on that knowledge of nou- 
 menal causes which was claimed by metaphysic, 
 but merely on a knowledge of the laws of phe- 
 nomena, and that, therefore, the only centre to 
 which our knowledge can be referred and by re- 
 ference to which it can be organized is the rela- 
 tive centre of Humanity and not the real or abso- 
 lute centre of the universe. Comte also often uses 
 the word " relative " in a slightly modified sense 
 to indicate that his philosophy takes due account 
 of all the various conditions under which human- 
 ity progresses towards its ideal, and does not seek 
 to set up an absolute standard of perfection with- 
 out reference to the necessary limitations of each 
 stage of development. Now, as it is always best 
 
 Humanity as " incorporating" only its best members with 
 itself. Something will be said of this below. 
 
118 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 to criticize a writer by reference to his own prin- 
 ciples and aims, I shall attempt to show that 
 the main errors of Comte arise from his being not 
 " subjective," not " relative " enough, even in the 
 sense which he himself gives to these words. He 
 is not " subjective " enough ; for in the develop- 
 ment of his theory he admits a kind of separation 
 between thought and existence, which a logical 
 development of his own principles must have led 
 him to reject. And he is not " relative " enough ; 
 for he starts from philosophical principles which 
 involve the denial of any necessary connection 
 between man and the world, and even between 
 the different elements in the nature of man, and 
 he ends with a religion in which poetry is di- 
 vorced from truth, and truth from poetry. 
 Ambiguity In the first place, however, it is necessary to 
 
 in the idea 
 
 of relativity, dear up a certain ambiguity as to the idea of 
 relativity. It is a commonplace of the sensation- 
 alist and empiricist school at the present day, that 
 we are confined to the knowledge of phenomena, 
 and cannot rise to the knowledge of noumena, or 
 things in themselves. Comte usually expresses 
 this idea by saying that science is limited to the 
 investigation of the laws of phenomena, and that 
 
Two Views of Relativity. 119 
 
 it was the error of Theology and Metaphysics to 
 seek to determine their causes. When, however, 
 we try to ascertain the exact force of this opposi- 
 tion, we find that it may have two distinct mean- 
 ings. For it is one thing to say, that Theology 
 and Metaphysics gave false answers to a legiti- 
 mate question, which was afterwards more cor- 
 rectly answered by science ; and it is quite an- 
 other thing to say that they attempted to answer a 
 question different from the question of science, 
 and which it is beyond the powers of the human 
 mind to answer. Now, Comte sometimes speaks 
 as if the error of the Theologians were simply 
 that they sought to explain all phenomena by re- 
 garding them as the expressions of divine wills 
 and intelligences analogous to our own ; and as if 
 
 DO / 
 
 the error of the Metaphysicians were simply that 
 they repeated this explanation in a more irra- 
 tional form, substituting personified abstractions 
 for Gods. At other times, he speaks as if the 
 error of Theology and Metaphysics were that they 
 attempted to determine the real nature of things, 
 which can be known by us only in their phe- 
 nomena. On the former view, Theology and 
 Metaphysics are provisional hypotheses, in rela- 
 
1 20 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 tion to the objects of experience, which disappear 
 when it is discovered, that many of these objects, 
 which were at first assumed to be like man, are in 
 many ways unlike him. On the latter view, they 
 are pretended sciences, which do not relate to the 
 phenomenal objects of experience at all, but to 
 certain realities, supposed to be beneath or be- 
 hind them. When we disentangle these two dif- 
 ferent views from each other, we find that they 
 do not rest on the same logical basis, and that 
 they do not by any means imply each other. 
 The former view implies only that our ideas of 
 the world are confused and imperfect, and require 
 to be continually corrected by fresh thought and 
 experience. The latter implies that there are cer- 
 tain objects other than phenomena, the existence 
 of which we know, but the nature of which we 
 gradually discover ourselves to be incapable of de- 
 termining. It implies, in fact, that our intelli- 
 gence can discern its own limits, or, what is the 
 same thing, can know that there is something 
 beyond those limits. Now while, with certain 
 modifications we might not hesitate to grant the 
 truth of the former of these doctrines, we should 
 require some proof of the latter, or even of its 
 
Things in Themselves, 121 
 
 logical possibility. For by it we are brought face 
 to face with the difficulty of conceiving how we 
 should be able to ask questions, which— not from 
 external circumstances, but from the essential na- 
 ture of our intelligence — are altogether unanswer- 
 able, and which therefore, we can say with cer- 
 tainty, we shall never be able to answer. This, 
 which Mr. Spencer attempts to prove — by very 
 inadecpLiate reasonings as it seems to me — Comte 
 assumes without any proof at all. Hence, while 
 he pretends to renounce metaphysics, he has com- 
 mitted himself to one of the most indefensible of 
 all metaphysical positions. For the assertion that 
 we know only phenomena, has no meaning except 
 in reference to the doctrine that there are, or can 
 by us be conceived to be, things in themselves — 
 i.e., things unrelated to thought ; and that, while 
 we know them to exist, we cannot know what 
 they are. Now this dogma is simply the schol- 
 astic realism, or what Comte calls metaphysics, 
 in its most abstract and irrational form. It is a 
 residuum of bad metaphysics, which, by a natural 
 nemesis, seems almost invariably to haunt the 
 minds of those writers who think they have re- 
 nounced metaphysics altogether. 
 
122 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 idealistic The authority of Kant is often quoted in sup- 
 
 view of the 
 relativity of p 0r t f the doctrine of the existence of things in 
 
 knowledge. r ° 
 
 themselves : indeed, it seems to be the doctrine 
 which is most generally associated with his name. 
 But, in spite of some ambiguities, Kant was pre- 
 cisely the writer who, by the general direction 
 and tendency of his thought, did most to free 
 modern speculation from such an illusion. For 
 it was his main aim and purpose to show that 
 the determination of objects as such, is possible 
 only in relation to the unity of apperception, or, 
 in other words, of self-consciousness, and by 
 means of certain universal principles of thought 
 which he calls the Categories. Kant, indeed, says 
 that the objects thus known are merely pheno- 
 mena, and that things in themselves are unknow- 
 able. But even things in themselves are not, in 
 his view, altogether out of relation to conscious- 
 ness. They are thinkable, though they are 
 not knowable ; we have a consciousness of them 
 through the ideas of reason, though they are 
 not objects of experience ; and our moral life, 
 bringing with it a consciousness of freedom, 
 turns the thought of them into a conviction of 
 their reality. Further, the later German phil- 
 
Idealistic View of Relativity. 123 
 
 osophers, who sought to develop the principles 
 of Kant to further issues, and to clear away the 
 inconsistencies of his first expression and appli- 
 cation of them, found it necessary to bridge over 
 the gulf, which Kant had left, between faith and 
 reason, between nouniena and phenomena. Ac- 
 cordingly we find them insisting upon the 
 correlation between object and subject, and 
 pointing out that, if this correlation be taken 
 strictly, it is a false abstraction to speak at all 
 of tilings in themselves which are not relative 
 to thought, or of a iioumenon which is a mere 
 negation of the phenomenal. There can be no 
 absolute opposite or negative of that unity of 
 thought and being, which is presupposed in all 
 knowledge and experience, and even to speak of 
 its existence is to use words without meaning. 
 As Heine says, " The distinction of objects into 
 phenomena and nouniena, i.e., into things that 
 for us exist, and things that for us do not exist, 
 is an Irish bull in philosophy." Comte some- 
 times, especially in the Politique Positive, comes 
 near to the perception of this truth, but his full 
 apprehension of it is prevented by the presuppo- 
 sitions from which he started, and from which he 
 
124 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 could never completely free himself. Thus, in a 
 passage quoted in the previous chapter,* Comte's 
 idea seems to be that the images of things — 
 individual objects as such — are immediately 
 given in sense ; that the mind reacts, in the 
 processes of abstraction and generalization, to 
 raise perception into knowledge ; and that this 
 knowledge, just because of its generality, is sub- 
 jective or relative knowledge. Now this seems 
 to be only a revival of Locke's view that general 
 ideas are necessarily fictitious, because they are 
 the " work of the mind." Yet, in the same 
 paragraph Comte goes on to speak as if 
 the one defect of our knowledge, which 
 prevents it from being adequate to reality, were 
 that our point of view is not quite universal, 
 and that we are incapable of entirely freeing it 
 
 * In Pol. Pos. i. 439, Comte seems to come still nearer 
 to the Kantian principle that all existence is existence for 
 a conscious self, but (1) he confounds this principle with 
 the idea that there is an action and reaction between sub- 
 ject and object, which are identified with the organism 
 and the environment respectively ; and (2) he does not 
 draw the necessary inference that the thing in itself is a 
 fiction of abstract thought, or, in other words, that there 
 is no meaning whatever in speaking of an existence which 
 is not relative to the thinking self. Cf. Pol. Pos. iii., p. 
 18 seq. 
 
Uncertainty of Comte's Language. 125 
 
 from what is subjective. By comparing our 
 
 views with those of other men, we can rise above 
 individual and national prejudices, but we cannot 
 free our views from those idola tribus, which are 
 common to the whole human race, because we 
 are unable to establish an)' satisfactory com- 
 munication with the animals. Whatever may 
 be thought of the last suggestion, the passage at 
 least shows a view of the hindrances to knowledge 
 which is not consistent with any absolute divi- 
 sion between phenomena and noumena. For, if 
 man can escape from the necessity of viewing 
 things in online ad individuum, i.e., in relation to 
 his individual self, he is at least on the way 
 towards regarding them in online ad universum. 
 This point, however, will be considered below, 
 when we come to treat more directly of the 
 sense in which Comte's synthesis is " subjective." 
 Here we need only call attention to the differ- 
 ence of this view from that which is suggested 
 by other passages (especially in his exposition of 
 the " law of the three stages") in which the know- 
 ledge of relations of phenomena is contrasted with 
 the knowledge of causes. From such passages we 
 should gather that causes belong to an order of 
 
126 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 reality, which is absolutely hidden from us, and 
 to the knowledge of which all our acquaintance 
 with phenomena does not enable us to make 
 any approximation. 
 
 meiXor Tne truth seems to be fchat the absolute dis- 
 
 itseif, is tinction of phenomena and noumena — resting 
 
 really the 
 
 universal, ag j^ joes on an i rra tional separation between 
 thought and being— is tenable only from the 
 point of view of a philosophy which regards the 
 individual as the. only reality, and the universal 
 as a name or an abstraction. From the point of 
 view of Individualism, it was natural and even 
 necessary for Comte to assail a metaphysic 
 which claimed to apprehend a reality beyond 
 and beneath the phenomenal individuals and 
 their external relations to each other, and which 
 found in this reality the vera causa of all pheno- 
 menal existence. It was natural for him to 
 maintain that such reality is unknowable for 
 us, and that the general terms which seem to 
 express it are mere collective names for indi- 
 viduals, or, at best, abstract ideas of elements 
 common to many individuals. 
 
 and, there- But when Comte had so far changed his point of 
 
 fore, can be ox 
 
 known. v i ew as to hold that " man is a mere abstraction, 
 
Causes and Laws. 127 
 
 and that there is nothing real but humanity," he 
 had lost the right to use such language. He 
 had seen that the individual is an abstraction, 
 and he was even in danger of forgetting that 
 the mere universal is an abstraction also. Now 
 modern metaphysic, by showing the relativity of 
 objects to a thinking subject, has banished the 
 idea of real entities, or things in themselves, 
 lying behind and beyond the phenomena ; and, at 
 the same time and by the same process of rea- 
 soning, it has proved that the individual can- 
 not be separated from the universal, any more 
 than the universal can be separated from the 
 individual. In other words, it has proved that 
 the world cannot be conceived in the spirit 
 of abstract nominalism as a collection of in- 
 dividual objects and events, related merely as 
 similar or dissimilar, or co-existent or successive, 
 any more than it can be conceived in the spirit 
 of scholastic realism, as a mere phenomenal 
 appearance of certain noumenal substances, which 
 correspond to general terms. From this point 
 of view, the universal is at once a law and 
 a cause ; for it is a principle of unity, which 
 manifests itself in the differences of particulars, 
 
128 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 and through their relations binds them into one 
 individual whole. If Comte had realized the 
 meaning of the categories by which he was 
 really guided, he must have altered his 
 whole conception of the relation of metaphysic 
 to positive science. For it was his own best 
 achievement to apply this idea of the unity of 
 the universal and particular to one great depart- 
 ment of science. It was to show that society, 
 whether in the form of the family, of the nation, 
 or of humanity, is not merely a collection of 
 similar individuals, but a unity of organically 
 related members ; and that its development is 
 not merely a succession of events, but the evolu- 
 tion of one life which remains identical with 
 itself through all its changes. And in this he 
 was not refuting metaphysic, but following di- 
 rectly in the course of the great metaphysicians 
 of the preceding generation. It might, indeed, 
 be shown, that none of the greatest names in 
 philosophy — not Plato or Aristotle, not Spinoza 
 or Leibnitz — was, strictly speaking, either a 
 scholastic realist or a scholastic nominalist, 
 though in all before Kant there were tendencies 
 to one or other of these extremes. But the 
 
The Subjective Synthesis. 120 
 
 idealistic movement that took its origin with 
 K an t — and which Comte should have criticized, 
 if his criticism on metaphysic was to be, accord- 
 ing to his own frequent phrase, " on the level ol 
 his age " — had set before itself as its distinctive 
 purpose and aim, to transcend this opposition. 
 In that philosophy Comte would have found 
 just what he wanted — a way of asserting the 
 reality of the universal, which should not involve 
 the denial of the reality of the individual. For 
 want of this principle, the end of his system 
 conies into contradiction with its beginning. For 
 while Comte begins with a vehement denial 
 of the universal as existent in itself, — a denial 
 which is expressed in the individualistic lan- 
 guage of the school of Locke, — he ends with an 
 equally vehement assertion of the social uni- 
 versal against the individualism of Rousseau. 
 And his "subjective synthesis," even its latest 
 form, is embarrassed by hesitations and incon- 
 sistencies, which are due mainly to his inability 
 to shake himself free from that implicit nom- 
 inalism with which he had started. 
 
 It is to this last point that we must now His subjj£; 
 
 sis is not 
 
 direct our attention. What does Comte mean sensational- 
 
130 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 by saying that the ultimate synthesis of know- 
 ledge is " not objective but subjective " ? If we 
 took the words in their most natural meaning, 
 we should be led to suppose that Comte held 
 that theory of subjective individualism, which 
 was the logical result of Berkeley's so-called 
 idealism, and the basis of the scepticism of 
 Hume. Among later writers this theory has 
 been most fully expressed in some of the works 
 of J. S. Mill, and it is still offered by Mr. 
 Spencer and Professor Huxley as one of the two 
 alternative theories (the other being materialism) 
 between which philosophy must for ever fluctu- 
 ate. According to this view, the individual 
 directly knows nothing except the states of his 
 own subjectivity ; or, if he seems to know any- 
 thing else, it is through a process of association, 
 the result of which can never be verified, seeing 
 that no one can go beyond the bounds of his 
 own consciousness. Now it is obvious that, if 
 this be the truth, " the subjective " and " the 
 individual " go together and imply each other ; 
 for, if we cannot transcend our own individuality, 
 so as to apprehend other things, or come into 
 communication with other beings, then we must 
 
Tlte Subjective which is Objective. 131 
 
 live a purely subjective life. And if, on the 
 other hand, it can be shown that we know other 
 tilings and beings as directly and immediately 
 as we know ourselves, then our subjectivity is 
 no longer a limit to us, but a "subjective 
 synthesis " may be at the same time " objective." 
 Now, it was one of the principal results of the 
 German idealism to show that this latter view 
 was the true one, and that thought is not merely 
 a state of the individual subject as such. To 
 speak of the consciousness of the individual as 
 limited to the apprehension of his subjective states, 
 is, indeed the reverse of the truth ; for jhe co n- 
 sciousness of self implies the conscious ness of the 
 not-self, and grows with it, and by moans of it. 
 Wo are " a part of all that jye have kn own.'Land 
 all that we have known is a part of us. Our life 
 widens with our world, and is indeed the same 
 thing from an opposite point of view. When we 
 realize this correlativity of subject and object 
 in knowledge, we can no longer contemplate a 
 thinking being as merely one individual among 
 the other individuals of the world. We are 
 forced to recognize that the consciousness of self 
 lifts him to a universal or central point of view, 
 
 \ 
 
132 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 — a point of view which is central, not merely 
 in relation to his own feelings and states, bnt 
 central also in relation to the objective world. 
 The being who knows himself as an individual 
 is, for that very reason, not merely individual ; 
 he can know a reality, which is not merely that 
 of his own subjective states or sensations, and 
 he can identify himself with an end, which is not 
 merely his own expected pleasure. The possi- 
 bility of an intellectual life for us, indeed, lies 
 just in this, that we can regard — nay, that to 
 a certain extent we cannot but regard — our own 
 individuality from an " objective " point of view, 
 — a point of view in which it has no more 
 importance than other individualities ; or in 
 which, at least, all its importance is derived from 
 its relation to the whole of which it is a part. 
 And the poet who said, — 
 
 " Unless above himself he can 
 Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man ! " 
 
 had truly discerned that moral life also is 
 dependent on the transformation of man's in- 
 dividuality by this universal consciousness with 
 which it is linked and bound up. 
 
The Subjectivity of Man. 133 
 
 Now this view of self-consciousness, as objective Nor yet is it 
 
 idealism. 
 
 in spite of its subjectivity, universal in spite of its 
 individuality, necessarily leads to a conception of 
 man, not merely as one of the many existences 
 in the manifold universe, but as the. existence in 
 which all the others are summed up, and through 
 which they are to be explained. On one side of 
 his being, indeed, we must regard him as a "part 
 of this partial world,"* and, in this point of 
 view, we can understand his life only in relation 
 to the other things and beings which limit him 
 on every side. Nay, as he is the most complex 
 and dependent of existences, we can only rise to 
 a satisfactory knowledge of him, after we have 
 laid a basis for this knowledge, in the study 
 of the simpler phenomena of the organic and 
 inorganic world. But, on the other hand, the 
 possibility of all this objective science — of the 
 knowledge by man of that which is not man — lies 
 in this, that he is not merely part of the whole, — 
 not merely the most complex existence in the 
 world, — but that the universal principle, the prin- 
 ciple which gives unity to the world, manifests 
 itself in him. It is because, as has been said, 
 * Cf. Green's Introduction to Hume's Works, § 152. 
 
134 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 " Nature becomes conscious of itself in man," 
 that man in his turn can read the open secret 
 \ of Nature. In spelling out the meaning of 
 nature and history, he is taking the true way, 
 and indeed the only way, to the knowledge of 
 himself; but this knowledge would be to him 
 impossible, if the self-consciousness that makes 
 him man were not also the principle of unity 
 in the objective world. Comte himself has an 
 obscure perception of this truth when he says 
 vthat, " strictly speaking there is no phenomenon 
 within our experience which is not in the truest 
 sense human ; and that, not merely because it is 
 
 man that takes cognizance of it, but also because, 
 
 .... 
 from a purely objective point of view, man sums 
 
 up in himself all the laws of the world, as the 
 ancients truly felt." * If Comte had only brought 
 together the subjective and the objective unity — 
 the unity of knowledge, and the unity of exist- 
 ence — both of which he here finds in man, and 
 if he had recognized the necessary relation of 
 the two, he would have reproduced the highest 
 lesson of /German idealism. For that lesson is 
 that the subjective unity, the unity of self- 
 *Pol. PosOvJ.81; Transl. 161. 
 
Microcosm and Macrocosm. 135 
 
 consciousness, which is presupposed in all know- 
 ledge or experience of the world, must at the 
 same time be regarded as the objective principle 
 of its existence. The macrocosm, to use an 
 ancient conception, of which Comte somewhere 
 speaks with approval, can be comprehensible 
 only to the microcosm, which finds in the great- 
 world the means of understanding itself, just l 
 because in another way it has in itself the 
 key for the understanding of the world. Man 
 can know that which is not himself, because 
 from another point of view there is nothing in 
 which he does not, or may not, find himself^ 
 
 It follows from this that the last science, the For idealism 
 
 does not 
 
 science of man, in so far as it is also the ^SSS 
 
 , ., to the 
 
 science of mind, cannot merely be built upon objective. 
 and added to the physical and natural sciences, 
 but must react upon them and transform them. 
 For, though the knowledge of man presupposes 
 the knowledge of nature, yet, on the other hand, 
 the knowledge of nature which we get, when we 
 abstract from it its relation to man, is imperfect 
 and incomplete. The true idea of nature cannot 
 be attained except when it is viewed in relation 
 to that being who is at once its culmination and 
 
136 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 its explanation. Or, to put this in another point 
 of view, the intelligence which appears in man is 
 presupposed in every object of the intelligible 
 world. Self-consciousness is not, therefore, an 
 episodic appearance in a world, which is unpre- 
 pared for it, and which might exist, or be under- 
 stood, without it. It is the revelation of the 
 meaning; of all that went before. What Dr. 
 Tyndall has stated not long since as the modern 
 view of Materialism, that matter contains in 
 itself " the promise and the potency" of life and 
 even of mind, may be willingly accepted as an 
 expression of their own doctrine by Idealists ; 
 for the converse of this proposition is, that mind 
 is the " realization," and therefore the only key 
 to the ultimate nature, of matter. Hence all 
 the sciences which treat of the mathematical, 
 physical, chemical, and vital relations of things, 
 must be regarded as hypothetical and based 
 upon abstraction ; for thought, spirit, mind, is 
 implied in all such relations, nor can a complete 
 or adequate conception of them be attained, 
 until we have regarded the self-consciousness 
 that makes us men as, in this point of view, 
 not only the last, but also the first, not merely 
 
Idealistic Tendencies in Comte. 137 
 
 the end, but also the beginning of nature. In 
 this sense the analytic separation of the sciences 
 from each other and from thought must be modi- 
 fied and corrected in a final synthesis, which will 
 
 indeed be " subjective," in so far as it brings into 
 view the unity of the subject presupposed in 
 all knowledge. But to one who has understood 
 the full meaning of the process, this " subjective 
 synthesis " will also be objective ; and, indeed, 
 it alone will be able to vindicate, while it 
 explains, the limited objectivity of the other 
 sciences. 
 
 No w__it is Comte's merit that he altogether He ends, 
 
 therefore, in 
 
 repudiates that false subjective synthesis, which na < [° i r :ipro ' 
 was the natural result of the principles of Locke 
 and Berkeley. Rejecting the doctrine that what 
 we know immediately is only the states of our own 
 consciousness, he takes his stand at an objective 
 point of view, and arranges the sciences in an 
 objective order, which begins with the inorganic 
 world, and ends with man as the most complex 
 of all existences. On the other hand, it is also 
 his merit that he sees the necessity of that 
 true " subjective synthesis " which arises from 
 the reaction of the last science, the science of 
 
i 
 
 138 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 man, upon those that went before it ; or, in other 
 words, from the perception that man is not 
 merely the end, but also in a sense the begin- 
 ning of nature. But this ultimate correction 
 and re-organization of science from a subjective 
 point of view appears in Comte in a distorted 
 and imperfect form, in a form that leaves " sub- 
 jective " and " objective " synthesis still opposed 
 to each other, or only gives room for an artificial 
 or external reconciliation between them. For 
 Comte (in spite of all he says of relativity) does 
 not clearly recognize the subjectivity implied in 
 our first objective knowledge of the world;* 
 and, hence, when he introduces the subjective 
 side of that knowledge, he seems to be starting 
 from a new and independent point of view, and 
 not simply to be bringing into clear consciousness 
 what was presupposed in the previous movement 
 of thought. In other words, the subjective syn- 
 thesis of Comte does not arise from a perception 
 that the subjectivity of men is universal, and 
 therefore objective. On the contrary, he denies 
 the possibility of discovering any principle of 
 unity in the objective world, and maintains that 
 * Pol. Pos. i. 420. 
 
The Subjective Principle. 139 
 
 the objective sciences, when left to themselves, 
 tend towards the " divagations indefinies " of a 
 wayward and lawless curiosity. Hence the 
 principle of unity, which is necessary to bring 
 order and system into our knowledge, must he 
 imported into these sciences from without. On 
 this view, we can organize knowledge only in 
 reference to a subjective principle supplied by 
 the altruistic affections, — affections which bind 
 men together so as to make all humanity 
 through all space and time into one great 
 organism, and which thus supply a definite end 
 and aim to all the intellectual, as well as to 
 all the active, energies of the individual. This 
 subjective principle, in Comte's view, has been the 
 unconscious stimulus of all the efforts of the 
 social and intellectual leaders of men in the past; 
 it has been the source of all that organized co- 
 operation of families and nations on which 
 man's physical and moral progress has depended. 
 Positivism has only to make it into the direct 
 aim and conscious purpose of human endeavour, 
 and thereby to check that vain and wasteful 
 application of man's limited powers, which has 
 prevailed in the past, especially during the 
 
140 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 revolutionary period of transition, now coming 
 to an end. Hence Comte condemns, not only the 
 metaphysicians, who search into things altogether 
 out of the reach of man, but also the scientific 
 men, who seek to extend the knowledge of their 
 special subjects indefinitely in every direction, 
 suggested by an empty curiosity, without regard 
 to the practical end of all science. The Mathe- 
 matician, who wastes himself in the discovery of 
 forms and methods which have no relation to the 
 requirements of physics; the Biologist, who specu- 
 lates on the origin of species, forgetting how little 
 light such inquiries can throw on the develop- 
 ment of man ; even the Sociologist, who pursues 
 remote investigations into the history of climate 
 and race, " before such studies are made neces- 
 sary by the practical difficulty of extending the 
 civilization of the West, regenerated by Positiv- 
 ism, to the populations that are less advanced 
 in civilization " — are all brought under the 
 Comtist anathema, as guilty of wasting the small 
 powers of man on questions which are not imme- 
 diately necessary or useful. " The public and 
 its teachers should always refuse to recognize 
 investigations which do not tend either to deter- 
 
Knowledge not an End in Itself. 141 
 
 mine more precisely the material and physical 
 laws of man's existence, to throw greater light 
 on the modifications which these laws admit, or 
 at least to render the general method of investi- 
 gation more perfect," " It is necessary that the 
 sciences should in the first instance be studied 
 independently; but this study should in each 
 case be carried only so far as is necessary to 
 enable the intellect to take a solid grasp of the 
 science next above it in the scale, and thus to 
 rise to the systematic study of Humanity, its 
 .inly permanent field."* On this principle, the 
 priests of Positivism are not to be specialists ; nor, 
 indeed, are any of them to devote their lives to 
 scientific investigation alone ; except, it may be, a 
 few distorted and unbalanced natures, in whom an 
 abnormal tendency to intellectual pursuits has 
 stunted the growth of the moral sympathies. To 
 make scientific men renounce the intellectual life 
 as an end in itself, and to direct all their energies 
 to the solution of those problems which seem to 
 have most immediate relation to the improve- 
 ment of man's estate, is one of the main objects 
 which Comte has in view in restoring the spiritual 
 * Pol. Pos. i. 370, 383. 
 
142 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 power. A free development of each science for 
 itself apart from the rest, and a free develop- 
 ment of science as a whole, without reference to 
 action for ends determined by social sympathy, 
 are equally opposed to the Comtian ideal. The 
 world and all objects in it are to be regarded 
 by the Positivist merely as means, which we 
 seek to know not for themselves, but only in 
 order that we may use them for a predetermined 
 end. For, according to Comte, the energies of 
 the intelligence run to waste except when they 
 are directed by an esprit d'ensemble, and the only 
 totality, with reference to which such systematic 
 direction is possible, is the " subjective " totality 
 of humanity, 
 comte I have already indicated to some extent the 
 
 admits a 
 
 principle in grounds on which I would criticize this theory 
 
 man which ° ^ 
 
 indi'viduai! 5 of " subjective synthesis." It implies, for one 
 thing, that there is no natural convergence of 
 the sciences, due to the unity of the parts of 
 the intelligible world with each other and with 
 the intelligence ; but that the synthesis of know- 
 ledge is artificial, and forced upon it from with- 
 out. Man, in Comte's point of view, is not a 
 microcosm, who finds himself again in the macro- 
 
The Social Point of Vieiv. 143 
 
 cosm. He is like a stranger in a foreign country, 
 
 who seeks to arm himself with such fragments 
 
 of knowledge about it as are necessary for his 
 
 protection and his own private ends. Yet this 
 
 statement, without qualification, would not he 
 
 altogether just to Comte ; for, in his view, the 
 
 individual man does find himself in the presence 
 
 of one " object," which is also " subjective," — 
 
 of one Great Being, whom he has not to treat 
 
 as an external means to ends of his own, but 
 
 rather in whom he has to find his own end. 
 
 The synthesis of knowledge, therefore, is not 
 
 subjective so far as Sociology and Morals are 
 
 concerned, whatever it may be in regard to the 
 
 other sciences. The unity, in reference to which 
 
 knowledge is to be organized, is not merely the 
 
 unity of man's nature as an individual, but rather 
 
 as a " collective " being (a bad adjective surely 
 
 to apply to mankind, when they are regarded 
 
 as " members one of another "). Comte thus 
 
 repeats the " homo mensura " in the sense that 
 
 Humanity is for each man the measure of all 
 
 * The distinction made in the Politique Positive be- 
 tween Sociology and Morals, depending as it does on 
 the opposition of the intellect to the heart, will be dis- 
 cussed afterwards. 
 
144 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 things (though things in themselves escape all our 
 measuring). We can transcend ourselves so far 
 as to take the point of view of humanity, though 
 not so far as to take the point of view of the 
 objective unity of the world. Nay, it may even 
 be said that we must so transcend ourselves, for 
 Comte denies that the individual can separate 
 himself from his race, except by a forced and 
 illegitimate abstraction. " Man, as an indivi- 
 dual," he declares, " cannot properly be said 
 to exist except in the too abstract brain of 
 modern metaphysicians ;" and the same principle 
 on its ethical side leads him to condemn the 
 doctrine of absolute personal rights, and to say 
 that " individuals should be regarded not as so 
 many distinct beings, but as organs of the one 
 Great Being." According to these principles it 
 would be impossible for us either to know our- 
 selves as men, or to live a life in accordance 
 with our nature, if we were confined within 
 the limits of a purely individual conscious- 
 ness. Our consciousness of ourselves is essen- 
 tially social, and the individualistic point of 
 view is the result of a false abstraction, which 
 can never be more than a partial abstraction. 
 
Man and Nature. 145 
 
 For, strive as we will, we cannot in thought, 
 any more than in reality, isolate the individual 
 from society, without at the same time taking 
 from him all that characterizes him even as an 
 individual. To speak, therefore, of knowing man, 
 except as a member of the family, of the nation, 
 of the race, is irrational. The science of man 
 would be impossible if we were not able to get 
 beyond our individuality, and to look at it, as 
 well as at all other individualities, from the point 
 of view of humanity. 
 
 To such a conception of the essentially social Yet t s not 
 
 a universal 
 
 nature of man few, at the present day, would principle, 
 object. But a "metaphysician" might wish to 
 carry it a little farther, and to recognize not only 
 the essential relation of man to man, but also the 
 essential relation of man to the universe. If it is 
 a fiction of abstraction to separate the individual 
 from society, is it a less fiction to isolate him from 
 the world in which he lives, and in relation to 
 which all his powers and tendencies have been 
 developed? Can we really apply the idea of 
 i organic unity to the life of man without extending 
 it so as in some sense to include also the environ- 
 ment in which that life develops ? To ask what 
 
 K 
 
146 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 man would have been in a different world is surely 
 as absurd a question as to ask what he would have 
 been had he not lived with his fellow-men. If 
 it be allowed and asserted that the objective 
 or universal point of view is possible, or even 
 necessary, in relation to humanity, there seems 
 to be no good ground for denying that it is 
 possible and necessary in relation to the uni- 
 verse. Once admit that the individual can, 
 and even must, so transcend his own indi- 
 viduality as to regard himself as part of a 
 greater whole and to measure his actions by 
 another standard than his own pleasures and 
 pains, and you are no longer free to reject 
 the possibility of an objective synthesis. If 
 the relativity of man to man makes it impossible 
 to know him except from the point of view of 
 humanity, the relativity of man to the world 
 makes it impossible to know humanity except 
 from the point of view of the unity of the 
 whole. To stop short at the universal of 
 humanity is a mere compromise, which, like 
 many compromises, is less rational than either 
 of the extremes between which it stands. All 
 knowledge implies the universality of thought, 
 
The Universality of Thought. 147 
 
 ■i.e., it implies that man, as a thinking being, 
 can, and indeed must, apprehend the world from 
 a subjective, which is also an objective point, 
 of view. For man's consciousness of himself is 
 at the same time a consciousness of the not-self, 
 and of the unity to which both these correlative 
 elements belong. From the dawning of self-con- 
 sciousness he is thus lifted above his own separate 
 and partial existence as an individual ; he lives a 
 life which is not merely his own life, but the life 
 of the world. He is, and can become more and 
 more completely, the organ of that universal 
 spirit which transcends and includes all things, 
 which 
 
 " Lives through all life, extends to all extent, 
 Spreads undivided, operates unspent." 
 
 It is this that makes him capable of science, 
 or morality, or religion ; for in so far as he 
 speaks his own words, or does his own deeds, 
 or thinks his own thoughts, he speaks and acts 
 and thinks folly and evil ; and it is only in 
 so far as he becomes the instrument of some 
 universal power or interest, that his individual 
 action, or thought, or utterance can have any 
 dignity or value. It shows an imperfect appre- 
 
148 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 hension of this truth to say with Comte that 
 Humanity and not God is the universal power 
 in whose service the individual is to find spiri- 
 tual freedom ; and that, therefore, the ultimate 
 synthesis must be subjective and not objective. 
 For the only philosophical difficulty is to con- 
 ceive how man can transcend his individual 
 subjectivity at all ; and, if that is shown to be 
 for him possible, and even necessary, there is 
 no reason whatever to deny that he can and 
 must rise to the knowledge of God, the absolute 
 or objective unity of the world, 
 comte's Comte, however, is hindered from recognizing 
 
 changing 
 
 relatione? tn ^ s truth by another class of considerations. 
 
 man. In opposition to that external optimistic tele- 
 
 ology, which was so common at the end of last 
 century, and at which the Encyclopedists aimed 
 so many blows, he was led in his Philosophic 
 Positive to dwell upon the fact that, from the 
 point of view of human happiness, the arrange- 
 ments of the universe, astronomical, physical, 
 and biological, are anything but perfect. Poetry, 
 indeed, may be allowed to imagine that the 
 powers of nature are the friends of man ; but 
 Science, according to Comte, must recognize that 
 
A Beneficent Necessity. 140 
 
 the world in which man's lot is cast is far 
 from furnishing the best conceivable sphere for 
 his existence and development ; and that it has 
 only become so favourable to his progress as it 
 at present is, by the long " providential action " 
 of man himself. At this point, however, there 
 is a crossing of opposite lines of thought in 
 Comte's philosophy. For it is one of the 
 leading conceptions of the Politique Positive that 
 the influence of an external limiting fatality, 
 which forces upon man the surrender of his 
 natural self-will, was the necessary condition of 
 the development of all his higher powers of 
 intelligence and heart. Comte is never weary 
 of showing that the growing preponderance of 
 the altruistic affections, which alone can give 
 unity to human life, is dependent upon the 
 existence of those limits which are put upon 
 the desires of man by the external world. 
 " Without this continual ascendant," he declares, 
 " man's feelings would become vague, his intelli- 
 gence wanton, and his activity sterile. If this 
 yoke were taken away, the problem of human 
 life would remain insoluble, since altruism could 
 never conquer egoism. But assisted by the 
 
150 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 supreme fatality, universal love is able habitu- 
 ally to secure that personality should be sub- 
 ordinated to sociality. The sophisms of human 
 pride cannot hinder the positive spirit from 
 recognizing that all revolt springs from egoistic 
 impulses. A forced submission tends indirectly 
 to make altruism prevail by the very fact that 
 it represses egoism. But this moral reaction is 
 supremely efficacious when obedience becomes 
 voluntary, because then sympathy is directly de- 
 veloped, and no jarring emotion any longer hinders 
 us from getting the benefit of our subjection."* 
 From this point of view the external fatality can 
 no longer be called unfriendly, or even indifferent 
 to man ; or rather its immediate appearance as 
 his enemy is the condition of its being, in a 
 higher sense, his friend. Kant, in his short 
 treatise on history (with which Comte was ac- 
 quainted, and which probably had no little 
 influence upon the Politique Positive), applies a 
 similar thought to the struggle and competition of 
 mankind with each other. The very selfish rivalry 
 of men, he contends, is in the long run the means 
 
 *Synthese Subjective, p. 16; cf. Pol. Pos. i., p. 414, 
 seq. and above, p. 36. 
 
Good out of Evil. 151 
 
 of developing a higher sociality than could have 
 existed among a race of beings with whom per- 
 sonal feeling was at first less intense. Egoism 
 itself becomes the means of elevating men above 
 egoism. Thus in both cases, conditions which, 
 in the first instance, seemed to be hostile to 
 the intellectual, and still more to the moral, 
 development of man, become, because of the 
 inner reaction which they call forth in his 
 nature, the best means to that development. 
 " Out of the eater comes forth meat ; out of the 
 strong sweetness." On such a view it seems a 
 fair criticism to make that it looks very like a 
 proof that those things which seem in the first 
 instance to be evils, and which, indeed, taken by 
 themselves, arc evils, are the necessary, though neg- 
 ative, conditions of higher good. But a negative 
 condition is still a condition, and the gods are 
 not envious because they refuse man a lower 
 good in order to make him seek one which is 
 higher. No conclusion unfavourable to Optim- 
 ism, in any high sense of the word, can be 
 founded on the fact that the world is not 
 arranged for the immediate happiness of man, 
 if that immediate happiness would have been 
 
152 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 purchased by his moral degradation ; or even if 
 it would have been less powerful to call forth 
 the higher energies of his nature. If the 
 noblest love is a transmuted and transcended 
 egoism, then even an infinite benevolence would 
 not seek directly to stop the unlovely and selfish 
 struggle which darkens and poisons the life of 
 man on earth. The best kind of optimism — 
 the optimism, if we may so term it, of the 
 deepest and tenderest spirits who have called 
 themselves Christian — has not been based upon 
 a shallow and imperfect view of the misery, 
 still less of the moral evil, of man's life. Bather 
 it has been attained through the clearest per- 
 ception of both. It has been an Optimism that 
 " descended into the grave " of human happiness, 
 and even, if we might so interpret the creed of 
 Christendom, into the " hell " of human guilt, 
 that it might rise again " leading captivity 
 captive." ' And Comte, who in his primary 
 opposition to theology and metaphysics, had 
 rejected all absolute or theological conceptions 
 of the world, is led by the natural development 
 of his thought to find a higher design in the 
 * Cf. Von Hartmann's Selbst-zersetzung des Christenthums. 
 
Optimism Rational — In what Sense? 153 
 
 immediate negation of design, and to extend to 
 the universe that idea of unity which in the 
 first instance he had applied only to humanity. 
 But, as he could never quite forget the nega- 
 tions with which he had started, his recognition 
 of this unity was imperfect, and he was ulti- 
 mately forced to cast upon poetry the office for 
 which science seemed to be inadequate. 
 
 The truth to which these inconsistencies of The irra- 
 tionality of 
 
 Comte point, is, that all criticism of the whole ggJSS?" 
 system of things to which we belong is, from 
 a truly " relative " point of view, irrational. For 
 the critic, and the standard by which he criti- 
 cizes, cannot be separated from that system. 
 To criticize things as particulars is not unreason- 
 able, because we can test the particulars by the 
 universal ; but to criticize the general system of 
 which they and we are parts, and by which our 
 development — and of course among other things, 
 the development of our moral standard — is made 
 possible, is to stand on our own heads and to 
 leap off our own shadow. If, indeed, we could 
 assume an individualistic point of view, if we 
 could isolate ourselves at once from the world 
 which is our only sphere of activity, and from 
 
154 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 the social life of the race which is the source of 
 all our culture, we might then take the pleasures 
 and pains, the feelings that belong to us as 
 sensitive individuals, as a standard by which to 
 criticize the world. But in any other point of 
 view, criticism is possible only as a reference of 
 the individual to the universal, of the part to the 
 whole, of the various elements and phases of the 
 system of things to the idea, which forms the 
 unity of that system and the principle of its 
 development. It has often been pointed out that 
 a logical scepticism cannot be universal, for every 
 intelligible view of things implies an ultimate 
 unity of thought and of existence, of the esse and 
 the intelligi. Doubt must rest on a basis of certi- 
 tude, or it will destroy itself. But it is not less 
 true, though it is less frequently noticed, that 
 all criticism of the world, while it detects 
 evil in particular, implies an ultimate optimism. 
 For, if such criticism pretends to be more than 
 the utterance of the tastes and wishes of an 
 individual, it must claim to be the expression 
 of an objective principle — a principle which, 
 in spite of all appearances to the contrary, is 
 realizing itself in the world. If, as Hegel said, 
 
Subjective Criticism of Life. 155 
 
 the " history of the world is the judgment of the 
 world," then, conversely, every true moral judg- 
 ment is an anticipation of history: it is a discovery 
 of the hidden forces that are already working 
 out their triumph in the world, even by means 
 of that which seems most to oppose them : it is a 
 prophetic sympathy with the "spirit of the years 
 to come," which is " yearning to mix itself with 
 life." It is this objective character which often 
 makes tire words of genius carry with them such 
 weight and power. " He spake as one having 
 authority and not as the scribes," could be truly 
 said only of one, whose speech was like some 
 natural force in its independence of merely indi- 
 vidual and of temporary influences. On the other 
 hand, it is the limited and subjective character 
 of many of the ordinary moral judgments of men 
 — of much of their fault-finding with the condi- 
 tions of existence, the defects of their neighbours, 
 and the errors and evils of the time — which 
 makes us treat such judgments with indifference. 
 We feel that they are in great part the expression 
 of personal likes and dislikes, though clothing 
 themselves in the lion's skin of a moral censor- 
 ship ; and that the only answer which they de- 
 
156 The Social Philosophy oj Comte. 
 
 serve is, that " there is no disputing about tastes." 
 Much of the superficial pessimism of our day is 
 the offspring, not of deep sympathy with the real 
 evils of humanity, but of a weakness of moral 
 fibre, which might tempt us to cut the knot of 
 difficulty with the apparently unfeeling words of 
 St. Paul, " Shall the thing formed say to him who 
 has formed it, Why hast thou made me thus ? " 
 But there is another moral judgment than this, 
 which is not the mere expression of the tastes 
 and wishes of individuals, but of the inner law 
 and the necessity of things, or in other words of 
 the universal spirit of man, which in the long 
 struggle of development is becoming more and 
 more clearly conscious of itself and of the law of 
 the world. It is only as the organ of this spirit 
 that the individual can claim to "judge the world"; 
 nor can he make that claim without taking up 
 the ground of a philosophical optimism, and 
 acknowledging that the " soul of the world is 
 just." For the sentiment or idea of good implied 
 in such judgment, must either be the last result of 
 the development of man in the world — in which 
 case the system of things which conditioned the 
 result cannot be criticized by it ; or it must be 
 
Objective Criticism of Life. 157 
 
 the pure utterance of individual feeling, in which 
 case it has no objective value whatever. To sup- 
 pose with Comte that it is objective, as being 
 something which belongs not to the individual 
 but to the race, yet subjective, as being something 
 that belongs to human nature and not to the na- 
 t ure of things in general, is a hopeless attempt to 
 combine in one two inconsistent points of view — 
 the point of view of the philosophy of Locke, by 
 which the^individual consciousness is conceived as 
 confined to the apprehension of its own states, 
 and the point of view of modern idealism, accord- 
 ing to which the consciousness of the thinking 
 subject, as such, is universal and objective. 
 
 At this point it may be useful to look back summary of 
 
 Comte's iu- 
 
 and to sum up the various contradictions, or let consistencies 
 us rather say, the various forms of the same con- 
 tradiction, which appear and reappear in different 
 parts of the system of Comte. Beginning with 
 the rejection of metaphysics, because it treats 
 universals as real entities, and with the in- 
 dividualistic definition of science as having to 
 determine only the successions and resemblances 
 of phenomena, Comte soon has to point out that 
 in sociology and even in biology we have to 
 
158 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 deal with existences whose parts and successive 
 phases are indefinable, except in and through 
 the whole to which they belong. Beginning 
 with objective science, and thus unconsciously 
 assuming that the subjectivity of thought is 
 not inconsistent with the knowledge of objects as 
 such, he ends by asserting that only a " subjective 
 synthesis " is possible. Yet this subjective syn- 
 thesis is itself objective, for its point of view is 
 determined, not by the sensations and feelings of 
 the individual subject as such, but by the idea of 
 humanity as a corporate unity. Thus the oppos- 
 ition between subject and object reduces itself 
 to a dualism between the world and man. Hence, 
 in place of the worship of God, the absolute 
 unity to which all thought and existence are 
 referred, Comte would substitute the worship of 
 Humanity, " the real author of the benefits for 
 which thanks were formerly given to God." 
 Finally, even this dualistic view of the world is 
 practically withdrawn. For the negative relation 
 of the external fatality to man's immediate wishes, 
 is proved to be instrumental to his ultimate attain- 
 ment of a still higher good. And, as if this were 
 not enough, poetry is called in to give complete- 
 
The Idea of Religion. 159 
 
 ness to the synthetic view of the world, and to 
 reconcile the two independent sentiments which 
 must combine in order to produce a religion, sub- 
 mission and love. For, although Comte at first 
 thinks it sufficient to say that the necessity of 
 nature is mediated to us by Humanity, yet in 
 the end he feels that there will be an essential 
 imperfection in his religious system, if it cannot 
 identify the ultimate fatality to which we must 
 submit with the Great Being whom we are to 
 love and serve. On this point a few additional 
 remarks may be useful. 
 
 Comte defines religion (and we cannot but ac- Defocts of 
 
 knowledge the substantial truth of the definition) gi<>n accord- 
 ing to Iris own 
 
 as the concentration of the three altruistic affec- lde;L " f lt- 
 tions — of Eeverence towards that which is above 
 us, Love towards that which helps and sustains us, 
 and Benevolence towards that which needs our aid. 
 It is impossible to give the highest unity to the 
 inward and outward life of man, except by devo- 
 tion to a Being in relation to whom these three 
 affections are identified. Nor can it be denied that 
 a faith, which has more or less perfectly fulfilled 
 these conditions, has been the mainspring of hu- 
 man life in all those periods of history in which 
 
160 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 man has shown the highest powers of his spirit. 
 " The deepest, nay, the one theme of the world's 
 history," says Goethe, " to which all others are 
 subordinate, is the conflict of faith and unbelief. 
 The epochs in which faith, in whatever form it 
 may be, prevails, are the marked epochs of 
 human history, full of heart-stirring memories, 
 and of substantial gains for all after-times. On 
 the other hand, the epochs in which unbelief, in 
 whatever form it may be, gains its unhappy 
 victories, even when for the moment they put 
 on a semblance of glory and success, inevitably 
 sink into insignificance in the eyes of a posterity 
 which will not waste its thoughts on things 
 barren and unfruitful." The tenderest harmo- 
 nies of affection, the highest achievements of 
 passionate energy, the deepest glances of insight 
 into men and things, the greatest powers of 
 inspired utterance, cannot be reached except 
 by minds which are consciously at one with 
 themselves and with the law of the universe ; and 
 this oneness is what we call a religion. Man can 
 do his best work only when he feels that he is 
 the organ or instrument of a power or spirit 
 which is universal, and therefore irresistible; which 
 
The Religion of Humanity. 161 
 
 embraces and subordinates even that which seems 
 to resist it. Whether such a faith in its widest 
 sense is still possible to man, or whether Christ- 
 ianity is the last vanishing form of it, and we 
 have now to look about for such substitute for it 
 as may still be within our reach, may be a ques- 
 tion. But it can scarcely be questioned, that 
 the Comtist-, worship of Humanity is only such a 
 substitute, and not the thing itself. Religion, as 
 Comte himself maintains, implies a combination of 
 spontaneity in the worshipper with complete sub- 
 mission and self-surrender to the higher power that 
 controls his life — a combination which can be 
 attained only by one who loves the power to 
 which he submits. But man's life is ultimately 
 limited and determined by cosmical and physical 
 conditions, and in these Comte sees only a fatality 
 which cannot possibly be made the object of love. 
 This difficulty, as we have seen, he tries to escape 
 by showing that the ultimate fatality is mediated 
 to us by Humanity, which, in the long process of 
 its history, has been gradually adapting the sphere 
 of our existence to our physical and moral neces- 
 sities. He feels, however, that this is only a 
 partial answer, and that the idea of an indifferent 
 
162 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 outward necessity must be a hindrance to the 
 perfect combination of submission and love. 
 Hence he calls in the aid of poetry to revive the 
 spirit of Fetichism, and to reanimate the dead 
 world by the image of benevolent divine agencies. 
 " The Cultus of Space and of the Earth, complet- 
 ing that of Humanity, makes us see in all that 
 surrounds us the free auxiliaries of Humanity." 
 Comte therefore ends in what some one has called 
 the system of " spiritual book-keeping by double 
 entry," in which imagination is allowed to revive, 
 for practical purposes, the fictions which science 
 has destroyed. In this way poetry has not 
 merely to give sensuous form and life to our creed, 
 by enabling us to see in the part what reason 
 could otherwise find only in the whole ; it has 
 also to supply the defects of a truth which is too 
 hard and painful to satisfy the heart of man. It 
 has to make us forget in our worship the dualism 
 of Nature and Humanity, and to reconcile us to 
 Fate by giving it the semblance of a Providence. 
 It is obvious that poetry is thus made into a kind 
 of deliberate superstition, which stimulates the 
 outflow of religious feeling by hiding from us, for 
 the moment, the realities of our position. But 
 
An Artificial Religion. 103 
 
 the explanation is that Comte was driven by the 
 ultimate development of his own thought to seek 
 for a kind of unity in the universe, which yet he 
 could not admit without recognizing the error of 
 his original presuppositions. There is a certain 
 irony of fate in the process of unconscious 
 dialectic, by which Comte, the enemy of theology, 
 was led to set up that strange "Trinity in Unity," 
 which is the last word of Positivism. 
 
 In Comte's re-construction of religion there rts artificial 
 
 character. 
 
 seems to be something artificial and factitious, 
 something " subjective," in the bad sense. It is a 
 religion made, so to speak, out of malice prepense. 
 " We have derived," he seems to say, " from the 
 experience of our own past and of the past of hu- 
 manity, a clear idea of what a religion should be : 
 and we also know from the same experience that, 
 without a religion, we cannot have that fulness of 
 spiritual life of which we are capable. Go to, let 
 us make a religion, as nearly corresponding to the 
 definition of religion as modern science will permit. 
 ' Gather up the fragments that remain, that noth- 
 ing be lost.' God, the Absolute Being, is hidden 
 from us, but Humanity will serve for a ' relative ' 
 or ' subjective ' kind of God : or rather not Hu- 
 
164 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 inanity, but the selected members of the race, 
 whose services entitle them to our recognition, 
 and whom therefore we incorporate in the ' Great 
 Being.' And as for the inscrutable fatality that 
 bounds all our views, and on which in the last 
 resort the fate of humanity must depend, to it we 
 can but submit, or (since such a separation of 
 submission from love is so far irreligious) we can 
 invoke the powers of imagination to hide it from 
 our eyes. To Humanity, as represented to us by 
 the good and wise of the past, we can present the 
 old offerings of praise and prayer, in a spirit that 
 is perfectly disinterested ; for we have no reason 
 to believe that they exist except in our memory 
 of them, or that the ' Great Being,' in whom they 
 are incorporated, has any gift to bestow upon us 
 in the future except a similar life in the memory 
 of others. For, after all, the ' Great Being,' who 
 alone makes things work together for our good and 
 whom alone we can love, is not absolute or objec- 
 tive ; and of the real Absolute Being or Principle 
 of the Universe, we know nothing, except per- 
 haps that He or It is not what men call good." 
 a relative I n the earlier part of this chapter I have tried 
 
 religion is 
 
 no religion, to show that Comte's view of the limits of know- 
 
Meligion must be Absolute. 1(J5 
 
 ledge cannot be maintained except on principles 
 which would be fatal to the existence of know- 
 ledge altogether ; and, on the other hand, that 
 the possibility of a subjective synthesis, such as 
 he demands and supposes himself to have 
 achieved, wtould involve also the possibility of 
 an objective or absolute synthesis. Here I wish 
 only to point out, that if Comte's general view of 
 things be admitted, religion, according to his 
 own definition of it, is impossible. A " relative " 
 religion is not a religion at all : it is at best a 
 morality, trying to gather to itself some of the 
 emotions which were formerly connected with 
 religious belief. If there is no warrant for the 
 Christian faith which finds God in man, and 
 man in God, which makes us regard the 
 Absolute Being as finding his best name and 
 definition in what we most reverence and love; 
 or, what is the same thing from the other side, 
 makes us see in that growing idea of moral 
 perfection, which is the highest result of human 
 development, the interpretation or revelation of 
 the Absolute ; then we must give up the hope 
 of the renewal of religion, and of that har- 
 monious energy to which religion alone can 
 
166 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 awake the soul of man. In this point of view 
 Mr. Spencer and Comte seem to divide the 
 elements of the truth between them, Mr. 
 Spencer, regarding the Absolute as unknowable, 
 and perceiving that religion implies a relation 
 to the Absolute, reduces religion to the bare 
 feelings of awe and mystery. Comte, also re- 
 garding the Absolute as unknowable, seeks to 
 find an object nearer home for the emotions 
 that hitherto have been directed to God. But 
 the religion of Mr. Spencer, if it ever could 
 become a reality, would be a renewal of the 
 superstitious pantheism of India, the worship 
 of a power without moral or spiritual attributes. 
 And the religion of Comte could scarcely be- 
 come more than a pious aspiration, unless the 
 poetic license of worship were carried to the 
 point of self-deception. Of this Comte seems 
 to be partially aware, when in his latest works 
 he insists so strenuously on the theme that 
 art, rather than science, is the true field for 
 man's intelligence, and that it is a desirable 
 and useful thing to allow our minds to dwell 
 on ideal conceptions, which are beyond the reach 
 of scientific proof, provided these conceptions are 
 
Poetry and Truth. 167 
 
 favourable to the development of altruistic senti- 
 ment. " The logic of religion," he declares, 
 " when freed from scientific empiricism, will not 
 restrain itself any longer to the domain of hy- 
 potheses winch are capable of verification, though 
 these alone were compatible with the Positive 
 preparation for it. It must in the end find 
 its completion in the domain, much wider and 
 not less legitimate, of those conceptions which, 
 without offending the reason, are peculiarly 
 suited to develop the feelings. Better adapted 
 to our moral wants, the institutions of true 
 Poetry are as harmonious as those of sound 
 Philosophy with the intellectual conditions of 
 the relative synthesis. They ought therefore 
 to obtain as great extension and influence in 
 our efforts to systematize our thoughts ; and 
 Positivism permits of their doing so without 
 any danger of confusion between the two dis- 
 tinct methods of thinking, which it openly 
 consecrates, the one to reality and the other 
 to ideality." # Is it possible to express more 
 clearly a desire to combine the advantages of 
 believing, with the advantages of disbelieving, 
 
 * Synthese Subjective, p. 40. 
 
168 The Social Philosophy oj Comte. 
 
 in the accordance of objective reality with our 
 highest feelings and aspirations ? But a worship 
 of fictions, confessed as such, is impossible. Art, 
 indeed, is kindred with Eeligion ; and Art, as 
 Plato said, is " a noble untruth." This, however, 
 means only that Art is untrue to the immediate 
 appearances of things, in order that it may sug- 
 gest the deeper reality that underlies them. But, 
 in Comte's view, the service of imagination is 
 to supply wants of the heart, which cannot be 
 supplied by reality, either in its superficial or 
 in its deeper aspect ; it is to nurture our 
 moral nature on conceptions that are purely 
 fictitious. It is not difficult to prophesy that 
 the schism of the head and the heart thus 
 introduced must end in the sacrifice either of 
 the one or of the other ; either in the dogmatic 
 assertion of the optimism of poetry, or in a 
 violent recoil from it, which will separate, not 
 only man from the world, but also the individual 
 from the race, and which must ultimately reduce 
 Humanity from an object of worship into a 
 purely moral ideal. For religion, as Comte 
 himself rightly saw, cannot exist except where 
 thought and feeling, intelligence and heart, are 
 
The Religious Consciousness. 1G9 
 
 harmonized, in a consciousness of the highest 
 subjective ideal, as being at the same time the 
 ultimate objective reality. What, indeed, is the 
 use of religion, if it does not plant our feet 
 upon the Bock of Ages," but leaves us still 
 on the " sandbank " of the contingent and the 
 temporal ? " All the nations," says Hegel, "have 
 felt that the religious consciousness was that in 
 which they possessed truth, and it is for this 
 reason that they have ever regarded it as that 
 which gives dignity and consecrated joy to their 
 lives. All that awakes doubt and anguish, all 
 sorrow and care, all the limited interests of 
 finitude, the religious spirit leaves behind on 
 the sandbank of time. And as, on the highest 
 top of a mountain, removed from definite view 
 of the earth below, we peacefully overlook all 
 the limitations of the landscape and the world, 
 so, to the spiritual eye of man in this pure 
 region, the hardness of immediate reality dis- 
 solves into a semblance, and its shadows, differ- 
 ences, and lights are softened to eternal peace 
 by the beams of the spiritual sun." If we 
 cannot any longer have this consciousness of 
 things sub specie ceternitatis, — in that highest 
 
of Comte. 
 
 170 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 truth and unity in which all difficulties and 
 dissonances are lost, — -without self-deception, it 
 would be better for us to forswear it alto- 
 gether than to connect our highest feelings 
 with a poetic illusion. 
 schisms in It is a natural question to ask whether 
 
 the school 
 
 and how far the history of Comte's philosophy 
 illustrates any of the difficulties and contradic- 
 tions which we have found in the writings of 
 its author. The first schism in the ranks of 
 those who are commonly called Positivists was 
 that which is connected in France with the 
 name of Littre, perhaps the most distinguished 
 of Comte's disciples ; and in England, with 
 the names of Mill and Lewes — who, however, 
 were never, strictly speaking, his disciples at 
 all. These writers broke away from Comte, 
 whenever Comte decidedly broke away from 
 the individualistic philosophy of the last cen- 
 tury. In their eyes Comte's great achieve- 
 ments were the law of the three stages of 
 mental development and the arrangement of 
 the sciences ; and if they accepted his sociolo- 
 gical speculations — even those which appear in 
 his first great work — it was with many reserves. 
 
Mill and Littre. 171 
 
 Mill regards Comte's continual denunciation of 
 metaphysics as objectionable, so soon as lie 
 finds it to be directed against the individ- 
 ualists * as well as against the scholastic realists ; 
 and he thinks Comte's " inordinate demand for 
 unity and systematization " only an instance of 
 " an original mental twist very common in 
 French writers, and by which Comte was dis- 
 tinguished above them all."t Littre finds little 
 to object to in Comte's first great work, and 
 is not unwilling to admit that the "individual 
 man is an abstraction, and that there is nothing 
 real but humanity ; " but he recoils when Comte 
 begins to speak of the " Great Being," and to 
 change his philosophy into a religion. Both 
 attack the " subjective synthesis " as a new 
 variety of metaphysics, seeing clearly that, as 
 Comte states it, it involves a desertion of the 
 point of view of science ; and neither of them 
 is able to admit any other point of view from 
 which the subjective unity might itself be seen 
 to be objective. 
 
 A less important schism has recently t occurred Mr.congreve 
 
 1 J + and M. Lafitte. 
 
 * Mill's Comte and Positivism, p. 73. 
 t Id. p. 140. X Written in 1879. 
 
1 72 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 within the Positivist Church, or, in other words, 
 among those who accept the system of Comte in 
 its entirety, as a religion no less than as a 
 philosophy. Mr. Congreve, and those who think 
 with him, have broken away from the general 
 body of Positivists under M. Lafitte, who was 
 appointed to be its head, or, at least, its pro- 
 visional head, after the death of Comte. The 
 difference, however, is one only of policy, and 
 not of principle. " There exists no difference," 
 says Mr. Congreve, " in regard to the doctrine, 
 taken as a whole ; it is only as to the manner 
 of presenting that whole that we are, at variance." 
 At the same time this " schism," though, as M. 
 Lafitte says, it is not a "heresy," might 
 easily lead to one, if there be any truth in 
 what has been said above as to the ultimate 
 opposition of poetry and philosophy in the sys- 
 tem of Comte. M. Lafitte contends that the 
 Positivist priesthood should, in the first instance 
 at least, seek to address the heart through the 
 intelligence ; " for it is clear that their direct 
 sentimental (or moral) action would want a 
 basis, and could indeed have no serious result, 
 unless general opinion had previously been 
 
Methods of Religious Teaching. 173 
 
 modified to a certain degree by Positive teaching." 
 On the other hand, Mr. Congreve argues that 
 Positivism rnust triumph in the first instance, 
 like Christianity, by a direct " appeal to the 
 women and the proletaries " ; which means 
 that an effort must be made to influence " the 
 heart," without waiting for the intelligence ; and 
 that, in the words of Comte himself, the "weapon 
 of persuasion is to be used in preference to that 
 of conviction." " What we seek to constitute," 
 says Mr. Congreve, # " is a union of the faithful, 
 a Church in the highest sense of the term, i.e.. 
 a society in which the religious element will 
 preponderate ; will, indeed, be so decisively 
 and boldly emphasized, as to leave no doubt of 
 our intentions; a society which can rally to 
 itself all who feel the need of shelter or sup- 
 port, of the consolation of an active and sym- 
 pathetic faith. It is thus that we conceive 
 ourselves bound to commence the preaching of 
 Humanity, as a principle of union, with the 
 view of gathering together a solid body, made 
 up mainly of the women and the populace, 
 
 * I translate from the French, as I have not seen the 
 English edition of Mr. Congreve's circular. 
 
174 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 which may serve as a foundation for the rest. 
 In this body the order of instructors could find 
 their support (and by an order of instructors 
 I mean naturally a priesthood and priests, and 
 not, what seems to be offered in its place, pro- 
 fessors and a professoriate), as, on the other 
 hand, without the stimulating reaction of such 
 an audience, they would want a solid basis as 
 well as a sphere of activity." It would be an 
 impertinence for any one who is not a member 
 of the Positivist Church to say anything on 
 the personal or semi-private questions, which 
 are necessarily involved in such a division as 
 this between those who are otherwise united. 
 But there can be no intrusion in saying, that 
 if Positivism is ever to become an effective 
 Church, it must find some such direct way 
 of addressing the people as Mr. Congreve sug- 
 gests, without waiting for those who have time 
 to be instructed in the principles of the six 
 or seven sciences of the Positivist system ; and 
 Mr. Dix Hutton* has sufficiently shown that 
 
 * I have to offer to Mr. Dix Hutton my best thanks 
 for his courtesy in furnishing me with copies of the 
 circulars and letters of himself, of Mr. Congreve, and of 
 
The Heart and the Head, 175 
 
 Comte himself would have approved of such 
 a policy. " God hath chosen the weak things 
 of the world to confound the mighty;" and it 
 may be safely said that no great moral or 
 spiritual movement will ever be accomplished, 
 if its leaders wait till they have convinced the 
 mass of the educated classes. The only ques- 
 tion which suggests itself to one who has 
 considered the difficulties of the " subjective, 
 synthesis " is, whether the appeal made to the 
 heart would not necessarily contain elements 
 which afterwards it would be impossible to 
 justify to the head. For if it were so, " the 
 old quarrel of the poets and the philosophers," 
 of faith and reason, would repeat itself again 
 in the Positivist Church, and it would not be 
 less bitter from the fact that that Church was 
 founded expressly with the design of putting 
 an end to the quarrel altogether. 
 
 Can there be a division of the intelligence against Thc heart 
 
 and the 
 
 the heart, which is not more properly described head, 
 as division of the intelligence against itself ? 
 This is a question which is inevitably suggested 
 
 M. Lafitte, on the subject of the division among the 
 Positivists. 
 
170 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 by the whole tenor of Comte's later works. In 
 my final chapter I shall say something upon 
 this question, and shall then try to show how 
 Comte's defective answer to it naturally led 
 to other defects in his view of the history of 
 the past, especially of Christianity, and also 
 in his view of the social ideal of the future. 
 
The Subjective Synthesis. 177 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 oomte's view of the relation of the intellect 
 
 to the heart its effect on his conception 
 
 of history and of the social ideal. 
 
 The necessity for unity in man's intellectual and moral life — 
 Nature of the conflict between the intelligence and the heart- 
 It is really a conflict of intelligent with itself— Criticism oj 
 Comte , s doctrine that the intelligence must he subjected to the 
 heart — Its effect upon his conception of history, especially of 
 the history of Christianity — The two elements in Christianity, 
 their conflict, and reconciliation in its development — The nega- 
 tive tendencies of media-ral Catholicism and the posit ire ten- 
 dencies of the modem era — Comte's imperfect conception of the 
 Reformation and the Revolution — His restoration of the 
 med'mval ideal — His general position as a Philosopher. 
 
 In the last chapter I considered the subjective 
 
 synthesis of Comte, or in other words, his attempt 
 
 to systematize human knowledge in relation to 
 
 the moral life of man. For it is his view, as we 
 
 have seen, that science can never yield its highesl 
 
 fruit to man unless it he systematized — i.e., 
 M 
 
178 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 unless its different parts be connected together 
 and put in their true place as parts of one whole. 
 Scattered lights give no illumination ; it is the 
 esprit d'ensemble, the general idea in which our 
 knowledge begins and ends, that ultimately deter- 
 mines the scientific value of each special branch 
 of knowledge. But while synthesis is necessary, 
 it is not necessary, according to Comte, that the 
 synthesis should be objective. The error of 
 mankind in the past has been that they sup- 
 posed themselves able to ascertain the real or 
 objective principle, which gives unity to the 
 world, and able, therefore, to make their system 
 of knowledge an ideal repetition of the system 
 of things without them. Such a system, how- 
 ever, is entirely beyond our reach. The con- 
 ditions of our lot, and the weakness of our 
 intelligence, make it impossible for us to tell 
 what is the real principle of unity in the world, 
 or even whether such a principle exists. The 
 attempts to discover it, made by Theology and 
 Metaphysics, have been nothing more than elab- 
 orate anthropomorphisms, in which men gave 
 to the unknown and unknowable reality a form 
 which was borrowed from their own nature. They 
 
Hoiu to Systematize Knowledge. 179 
 
 saw in the clpuds about them an exaggerated and 
 distorted reflection of themselves, and regarded 
 this Brocken spectre as a controlling power 
 whose activity was the source and explanation 
 of everything. Positivism, on the other hand, 
 arises whenever men come to recognize the 
 nature of this illusion, and to confine their 
 ambition to that which is within the limit of 
 their intelligence. All that we can know is the 
 resemblances and successions of phenomena, and 
 not the things in themselves that are their 
 causes; and if we seek to find a principle of unity 
 fi >r these phenomena, we must find it in ourselves 
 and not in them. We must organize knowledge 
 with reference to our own wants, rather than 
 with reference to the nature of things. We 
 must regard everything as a means to an end, 
 which is determined by some inner principle in 
 ourselves — not as if we supposed that the world 
 and all that is in it were made for us, or found 
 its centre in us — but simply because this is the 
 only point of view from which we can syste- 
 matize knowledge, as it is indeed the only 
 point of view from which we need care to 
 systematize it. 
 
180 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 Necessity of It may be asked why system is necessary at 
 
 unity and 
 
 system. a r^ w ] 1 y we s i 10u i(j no £ De content with a frag- 
 mentary consciousness of the world, without 
 attempting to gather the dispersed lights of 
 science to one central principle. To critics like 
 J. S. Mill Comte's effort after system seems to 
 be the result of an " original mental twist very 
 common in French thinkers/' of " an inordinate 
 desire of unity." " That all perfection consists in 
 unity, Comte apparently considers to be a maxim 
 which no sane man thinks of questioning: it never 
 seems to enter into his conceptions that any one 
 could object ab initio, and ask, why this universal 
 systematizing, systematizing, systematizing. Why 
 is it necessary that all human life should point but 
 to one object, and be converted into a system of 
 means to a single end?"* To this Mr. Bridges 
 answers that unity in Comte's sense is " the first 
 and most obvious condition which all moral and 
 religious renovators, of whatever time and country, 
 have by the very nature of their office set them- 
 selves to fulfil." -j- In other words, all moral and 
 spiritual life depends upon the harmony of the 
 
 * " Comte and Positivism," p. 140. 
 
 + " The Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrine," p. 26. 
 
The Weakness of Douht. 181 
 
 individual with himself and with the world. A 
 divided life is a life of weakness and misery, nor 
 can life be divided intellectually, without being, 
 or ultimately becoming, divided morally. Such 
 unity, indeed, does not exclude — and in a being- 
 like man who is in course of development cannot 
 altogether exclude — difference and even conflict. 
 In the most steadily growing intellectual life 
 there are pauses of difficulty and doubt ; in the 
 most continuous moral progress there are con- 
 flicts with self and others. But such doubts and 
 difficulties will not greatly weaken or disturb us, 
 so long as they are partial, so long as they do 
 not affect the central principles of thought and 
 action, so long as there is still some fixed faith 
 which reaches beyond the disturbance, some cer- 
 titude which is untouched by the doubt. If, 
 however, we once lose the consciousness that 
 there is any such principle, or if we try to rest 
 on a principle which we at the same time feel to 
 be inadequate, our spiritual life, in losing its 
 unity or harmony with itself, must at the same 
 time lose its purity and energy. It must become 
 fitful and uncertain, the sport of accidental influ- 
 ences and tendencies; it must lower its moral 
 
182 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 and intellectual aims. This, in Comte's view, is 
 what we have seen in the past. The decay of 
 the old faiths, and of the objective synthesis 
 based upon them, has emancipated us from many 
 illusions, but it has, as it were, taken the inspira- 
 tion out of our lives. It has made knowledge a 
 thing for specialists who have lost the sense of 
 totality, the sense of the value of their particular 
 studies in relation to the whole ; and it has made 
 action feeble and wayward by depriving men of 
 the conviction that there is any great central aim 
 to be achieved by it. And these results would 
 have been still more obvious, were it not that 
 men are so slow in realizing what is involved 
 in the change of their beliefs ; were it not that 
 the habits and sympathies developed by a creed 
 continue to exist long after the creed itself has 
 disappeared. In the long run, however, the 
 change of man's intellectual attitude in relation 
 to the world must bring with it a change of 
 his whole life. Ceasing to have faith in the 
 creed which once reconciled him to the world 
 and bound him to his fellows, he must be 
 thrown back upon his own mere individuality, 
 unless he can find another creed of equal or 
 
The Weakness of Individualism. 183 
 
 greater power to inspire and direct his life. 
 And mere individualism is nothing but anarchy. 
 This, indeed, was not seen by those who first 
 expressed the individualistic principle ; on the 
 contrary, they seemed to themselves to find 
 in the assertion of individual right, not only 
 an instrument for destroying the old faith and 
 the old social order, but also the principle of 
 a better faith, and the means of reconstructing a 
 better order of life. But to us who have outlived 
 the period when it could be supposed that the 
 destruction of old, involves in itself the con- 
 struction of new, forms of life and thought, it 
 cannot but be obvious that the principles of 
 private judgment and individual liberty are noth- 
 ing more than negations. For, as the real 
 problem of our intellectual life is how to rise 
 to a judgment which is more than private judg- 
 ment, so the real problem of our practical life 
 is how to realize a liberty that is more than 
 individual license. Hence it is that Comte 
 speaks of the last three centuries as a period 
 of the insurrection of the intellect against 
 the heart, an expression by which he means 
 to indicate at once the gain and the loss of 
 
184 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 the revolutionary movement : its gain, in so far 
 as it emancipated the intelligence from super- 
 stitious illusions : and its loss, in so far as it 
 destroyed the faith which was the bond of social 
 union, without substituting any other faith in 
 its room. At the same time, this expression 
 points to a peculiarity of Comte's Psychology, 
 which affects his whole view of the history, 
 and especially of the religious history, of man ; 
 and which it is therefore necessary to subject 
 to a careful examination. 
 Possibility I s ^ possible for the intellect to be in insur- 
 
 of conflict . ... - , 
 
 between rection against the heart { In the sense already 
 
 inteliectand 
 
 heart. indicated this is possible. It is possible, in short, 
 that the moral and intellectual spirit of a belief 
 may still control the life of one who, so far as his 
 explicit consciousness is concerned, has renounced 
 it. Eooted as the individual is in a wider life 
 than his own, it is often but a small part of him- 
 self, that he can bring to distinct consciousness. 
 Further, so little are most men accustomed to 
 self-analysis, that they are seldom aware what it 
 is that constitutes the inspiring power of their 
 beliefs. Generally, at least in the first instance, 
 they take their creed in gross, without distinguish- 
 
The Heart against the Head. 185 
 
 ing between essential and unessential elements. 
 They confuse, in one general consecration of re- 
 verence, the primary principles, which give it its 
 real spiritual value, and the local and temporary 
 accidents of the form in which it was first pre- 
 sented to them ; and they are as ready to accept 
 battle a Vovtrance for some useless outwork as for 
 the citadel itself. And, for the same reason, they 
 are ready to think that the citadel is lost when 
 the outwork is taken ; to suppose, e.g., that the 
 spiritual nature of man is a fiction, if he was not 
 directly made by God out of the dust of the earth, 
 or that the Christian view of life has ceased to be 
 true, if a doubt can be thrown on the possibility 
 of proving miracles. Yet, however little the indi- 
 vidual may be able to separate the particulars 
 which are assailed from the universal with which 
 they are accidentally connected, his whole nature 
 must rebel against the sacrifice which logical con- 
 sistency seems in such a case to demand from 
 him. It is a painful experience when the first 
 1 ireak is made in the implicit unity of early faith, 
 and it is painful just in proportion to the depth 
 of the spiritual consciousness which that faith has 
 produced in the individual. Unable to separate 
 
186 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 
 
 that which he is obliged to doubt from that in 
 which lies the principle of his moral, and even of 
 his intellectual, life, he is " in a strait betwixt 
 two " ; and no course seems to be open to him 
 which does not involve the surrender, either of his 
 intellectual honesty, or of that higher conscious- 
 ness which alone " makes life worth living." Such 
 a crisis is commonly described as a division be- 
 tween the heart and the head, because in it the 
 articulate or conscious logic is generally on the side 
 of disbelief, while the resisting conviction takes the 
 form of a feeling, an impulse, an intuition, which 
 the individual has for himself, but which 
 he is unable to communicate in the same 
 force to another. And, as such feelings and 
 intuitions of the individual are necessarily 
 subject to continual variation of intensity and 
 clearness, so the struggle between doubt and 
 faith may be long and difficult, the objections, 
 which at one time seem as nothing, at another 
 time appearing to be almost irresistible. Not 
 seldom the result is a broken life, in which youth 
 is given to revolt, and the rest of existence to a 
 faith which vainly strives to be implicit. There 
 is, indeed, no final and satisfactory issue from 
 
The Heart Wiser than the Head 187 
 
 such an endless internal debate and conflict, until 
 the " heart " has learned to speak the language of 
 the " head," — i.e., until the permanent principles, 
 which underlay and gave strength to faith, have 
 been brought into the light of distinct conscious- 
 ness, and until it has been discovered how to 
 separate them from the accidents, with which at 
 first they were necessarily identified. The hard 
 labour of distinguishing, in the traditions of the 
 past, between the germinative principles, out of 
 which the future must spring, and those external 
 forms and adjuncts, which every day is making 
 more incredible, must be undertaken by any one 
 who would restore the broken unity of man's life. 
 We begin our existence under the shadow and in- 
 fluence of a faith which is given to us, as it were. 
 in our sleep ; but in no age, and in this age less 
 than any other, can man possess spiritual life as 
 a gift from the past without reconquering it for 
 himself. 
 
 In this sense, then, we can understand how i !c:l i nature 
 
 of the 
 
 Cointe might speak of an insurrection of the in- opposition, 
 telligence against the heart, which must be quelled 
 ere the normal state of humanity could be re- 
 stored ; for this would be only another way of 
 
188 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 saying that, in the modern conflict of faith and 
 reason, the substantial truth, or at least the most 
 important truth, had, up to Comte's own time, been 
 on the side of the former. In this view, the deep 
 unwillingness of those nourished in the Christian 
 or Catholic faith to yield to the logical battery of 
 the Encyclopaedists was not merely the result of an 
 obscurantist hatred of light ; it was also in great 
 part due to a more or less definite sense of the 
 moral, if not the intellectual, weakness of the 
 principles which the Encyclopaedists maintained. 
 For,, while the insurrection was justified in so far 
 as it asserted the claims of the special sciences, it 
 was to be condemned in so far as it involved the 
 denial of all synthesis whatever, and also in so far 
 as it was blind to the elements of truth in the 
 imperfect synthesis of the past. It thus tended 
 to destroy the spirit of totality and the sense of 
 duty (/ 'esprit d'ensemble et le sentiment clu devoir).*' 
 It practically denied the existence of any universal 
 principle which could connect the different parts 
 of knowledge with each other, of any general aim 
 which could give unity to the life of man. Its 
 analytic spirit was fatal, not only to the fictions 
 *Pol. Pos. iii. 499 : Trans. 419. 
 
Can Heart contradict Head? 189 
 
 of theology, but also to that growing consciousness 
 of the solidarity of men of which theology had 
 been the accidental embodiment. The reluctance 
 of religious men to admit the claims of what ap- 
 peared to be, and, indeed, to a certain extent was, 
 light, was thus due to a more or less distinct per- 
 ception that their own creed, amid all its partial 
 errors, contained a central truth more important 
 than all the partial truths of science. In clinging 
 to the past they were preserving the germ of the 
 future, and the final victory of science could not 
 come until this germ had been disengaged from 
 the husk of superstition under which it was hid- 
 den. Till that was done, the logic of the heart 
 in clinging to its superstitions was better than the 
 logic of the head in rebelling against them. In 
 other words, the implicit reason of faith was wiser 
 than the explicit reason of science. 
 
 But this is not all that Comte means. For him Feeling apart 
 
 from intelli- 
 
 the appeal to the heart is not merely the appeal to g^g^Se 
 feelings and intuitions, which are the result of 
 the past development of human intelligence, ami 
 especially of the long discipline by which the 
 ( Jhristian Church has moulded the modern spirit ; 
 it is an appeal to the altruistic affections, as ori- 
 
190 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 ginal or " innate " tendencies in man which are 
 altogether independent of his intelligence. It is 
 not that the reason of man often speaks through 
 his feelings, but that feeling and reason have in 
 themselves different, and even it may be opposite 
 voices. In this sense, the attempt has often 
 been made in modern times to stop the invasions 
 of critical reflection by setting up the heart as 
 an independent authority. From the Lutheran 
 theologian who said, " Pectus theologum facit" 
 down to the poet of In Mcmoriam, appeals have 
 constantly been made to the feelings to resist 
 the intrusion of doubt : — 
 
 " If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, 
 
 I heard a voice, ' believe no more ' . . . 
 
 A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part, 
 And like a man in wrath, the heart 
 
 Stood up and answered, ' I have felt ' : " 
 
 Such appeals, however, cannot be regarded as other- 
 wise than provisional and self-defensive. " The 
 heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger 
 doth not intermeddle with its joy ; " but just for 
 that reason it has no general content or indepen- 
 dent authority of its own. Whether the phrase 
 "I feel it" mean little or much, depends upon the 
 
The Heart by itself says Nothiny. 191 
 
 individual who utters it. It may bo the con- 
 centrated expression of a long life of culture and 
 discipline, or it may he the loud but empty voice 
 of untrained passion and prejudice. The "un- 
 proved assertions of the wise and experienced," 
 as Aristotle tells us, have great value, especially 
 in ethical matters ; but it is not because they 
 are unproved assertions, but because we know 
 that the speakers are wise and experienced. 
 To appeal to the heart in general, without 
 saying " whose heart," either means nothing, 
 or it means an appeal to the natural man, 
 i.e., to man as he is before he has been sophisti- 
 cated by culture and experience. But of the 
 natural man, in this sense, nothing can be said. 
 The farther we go back in the history of the 
 individual or the race the more imperfect does 
 their utterance of themselves become ; and 
 when we reach the beginning, we find that 
 there is no manifestation or utterance at all. 
 The natural man of Eousseau was simply an 
 ideal creation, inspired with that intense and 
 even morbid consciousness of self and that fixed 
 resolve to submit to no external law, which were 
 characteristic of Eousseau himself, and which in 
 
192 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 him were the last product and quintessence of 
 the individualism of the eighteenth century. 
 The simplicity of this ideal figure is not the 
 first simplicity of nature, but the simplicity of a 
 spirit which has returned upon itself and asserted 
 itself against the world; a kind of simplicity 
 which never existed, at least in the same form, 
 before the great Protestant revolt. The unhis- 
 torical character of this idea becomes doubly 
 evident when we find that, as time goes on, 
 and the spirit of the age alters, the qualities 
 of the natural man are also changed. To St. 
 Simon and Fourier, as to Rousseau, man is good 
 by nature, and it is bad institutions or bad ex- 
 ternal influences which are the source of all the 
 ills that flesh is heir to. But while to the 
 latter the natural man is a solitary, whose chief 
 good lies in the preservation of his independence; 
 to the former he is essentially social, and what 
 is wanted for his perfection and happiness is 
 only to contrive an outward organization in which 
 his social sympathies shall have free play. 
 Comte, as we might expect, rises above these 
 imperfect theories, in so far as he refuses to 
 attribute all the evils of humanity to its external 
 
The Natural Man. 193 
 
 circumstances ; but he does not free himself from 
 the essential error which was common to them all, 
 the error of seeking for the explanation of the 
 higher life of humanity in the feelings of the 
 natural man — feelings which are prior to, and 
 independent of, the exercise of his reason, and 
 which supply all the possible motives for that 
 exercise. There are, in his view, two sets of 
 " innate " feelings or desires, between which 
 man's life is divided — the egoistic and the altru- 
 istic tendencies, each separate from the others 
 as well as from the intelligence, and having its 
 "organ" in a separate part of the brain. The 
 egoistic feeling's at first exist in man in far 
 greater strength than the altruistic; but by the 
 reaction of circumstances, and the influence of 
 men upon each other, the latter have in the 
 past gradually attained to greater power; and 
 it is the ideal of the future to make their victor)' 
 complete. Meanwhile, the intelligence is neces- 
 sarily the instrument of desire, and its highest 
 good is to be the instrument of altruistic as 
 opposed to egoistic desire. For it has at best 
 only a choice of masters, and the emancipation 
 
 of the intelligence from the heart could mean 
 
 N 
 
passion. 
 
 194 . The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 only its becoming a slave of personal vanity.* 
 Comte's appeal, therefore, is still to the natural 
 man, or rather to one element in him, which, 
 however, as he acknowledges, is never so weak 
 as it is in man's earliest or most natural state. 
 Hume's view The psychology implied in this theory is sub- 
 
 of the rela- 
 tion of rea- stantially that which found its fullest expression 
 
 son and « *- 
 
 in Hume's "Treatise on Human Nature." Hume, 
 with that tendency to bring things to a distinct 
 issue which is his best characteristic, declares 
 boldly that " reason is and ought to be the slave 
 of the passions, and can never pretend to any other 
 office than to serve and obey them." The pas- 
 sions or desires are tendencies of a definite char- 
 acter which exist in man from the first ; the 
 awaking intelligence cannot add to their number, 
 or essentially change their nature. It can only 
 take account of what they are, and calculate how 
 best to satisfy them. "We speak not strictly 
 and philosophically when we talk of the combat 
 of reason and passion," for while reason determines 
 what is true and what is false, it sets nothing 
 before us as an end to be pursued and avoided. 
 It does not constitute, and it cannot transform, 
 *Pol. Pos. i. 421. 
 
The Subordination of Reason. 195 
 
 the desires, which are given altogether apart from 
 it : nor is the will anything but the strongest 
 desire. When we say that reason controls the 
 passions what we mean is simply that a strong 
 but calm tendency of our nature, which has 
 reference to some remote object, overcomes a 
 violent impulse towards a present delight ; but 
 for intelligence to contend with passion is, strictly 
 speaking, an impossibility. 
 
 The modifications which Comte makes in this comte's 
 
 modification 
 
 view of motive are comparatively trilling. He vj L . w imK 
 does not, indeed, like Hume, call reason the 
 slave of the passions ; rather he says that 
 " T esprit doit etrc le ministre du cosur, ma/is jamais 
 son eselave;" but this change of language does 
 not involve any important modification of Hume's 
 theory. The intelligence may give the heart 
 much information about the means whereby it 
 may attain its ends, but the ends have to be 
 determined solely by the heart itself. In Comte's 
 language the intellect is a " slave," when theology 
 makes it acknowledge the existence of fictitious 
 supernatural beings whose natures are in accord- 
 ance with our desires, our hopes or our fears ; it 
 is a " master," when it pursues its inquiries into 
 
196 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 the phenomena of the objective world, at the bid- 
 ding of an errant curiosity, without reference to 
 the well-being of man ; it is in its true place as a 
 " servant " when it studies the objective world 
 freely, but only with reference to the end fixed 
 for it by the affections. " Z'univcrs doit etre 
 vtvxl%6 non pour hii-mSme, mats pour Vhomme, 
 ou plutot pour VhumaniU ';" and this, Comte 
 thinks, will not be done if the intelligence be 
 left to itself, but only if it be made subordinate 
 to the heart. To say, therefore, that the intelli- 
 gence is not to be a slave but a servant, implies 
 merely that it is to be left free to collect infor- 
 mation about the means of satisfying the desires, 
 without having its judgment anticipated by the 
 imagination or the heart ; but that, on the other 
 hand, it must be kept strictly to its position as an 
 instrument to an end out of itself. For if it 
 once emancipates itself from the yoke of feeling, 
 it soon becomes altogether lawless, and disperses 
 its efforts in every direction in the satisfaction of 
 a vain curiosity. The intelligence, as the schol- 
 astic theologians said, is in itself, or when left 
 to itself, a source of anarchy and confusion ; it 
 must be, not indeed the serva, but the ancilla fidei 
 
Tendencies of the Intellect 197 
 
 otherwise it will defeat its own ends. The intel- 
 lectual life, as such, is an unsocial, even a selfish 
 existence ; for, as reason is guided by no definite 
 objective aim derived from itself, it must rind its 
 real motive in the satisfaction of personal vanity 
 and self-conceit, whenever it is not subjected to 
 the yoke of the altruistic affections. 
 
 This theory (which, as we shall see, underlies f£g23* 
 
 the intellect 
 
 Comte's whole conception of history) suggests purely dis- 
 
 ] iersive ? 
 
 two questions. It leads us to ask, in the first 
 place, whether the tendencies of the intellectual 
 life are thus dispersive and opposed to the social 
 tendencies : and, secondly, whether the social 
 tendencies in the form which they take with 
 man, are not necessarily determined to be what 
 they are by his intelligence. The former ques- 
 tion really resolves itself into another: Is the 
 intelligence of man a mere formal power of 
 apprehending what is presented to it from with- 
 out, so that, when it is left to itself, it can only 
 lose its way amid the infinite multiplicity of 
 individual objects in the external world; or does it 
 carry within it any synthetic principle, any idea 
 of the whole, by which it can reduce to unity and 
 order the difference and confusion of phenomena? 
 
198 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 Against Comte's assertion that the natural ten- 
 dency of the intelligence is to lose itself in 
 difference without end, we might quote the 
 well-known saying of Bacon, that the tendency 
 of the " intellectus sibi permissus " is rather to- 
 wards a premature synthesis. "Intellectus hu- 
 manus ex proprictate sua facile svpponit major em 
 ordinem et cequalitatem in rebus quam invenit." 
 Surely, if we may speak of tendencies of the in- 
 tellectual life as separated from the life of feeling, 
 the tendency to unity and the universal belongs 
 to it quite as much as the tendency to difference 
 and the particular ; just as in the life of feeling 
 the tendency to isolation and self-assertion 
 against others is combined with the tendency 
 to society and union with others. From the 
 first moment of intellectual life the world is to 
 us a unity ; subjectively a unity, as all its varied 
 phenomena are gathered up in the consciousness 
 of one self, and objectively a unity, as every object 
 and event is conceived as definitely placed hi rela- 
 tion to the other objects and events in one space 
 and one time. The development of knowledge is, 
 no doubt, the continual detection of new differences 
 and distinctions in things, but the phenomena 
 
Analysis and Synthesis. 199 
 
 which are distinguished from other phenomena 
 are at the same time put in relation to them. 
 Nor can the intelligence find complete satisfac- 
 tion until this relation is discovered to be neces- 
 sary, and thus difference passes into unity again. 
 Individual minds, indeed, may be more of the 
 Aristotelian, or more of the Platonist, order, may 
 tend more to divide what at first is presented as 
 unity, or to unite what at first is presented as 
 difference. But it is absurd to talk of either 
 tendency as belonging, more than the other, to 
 i he intelligence in itself: seeing that it is as 
 much beyond the powers of thought to conceive 
 of an undifferentiated unity, as to conceive of 
 a chaos of differences without some kind of relation. 
 In this regard, indeed, we may bring Comte as 
 a witness against himself; for, while he declares 
 that the sciences which deal with the inorganic 
 world are mainly analytic in their tendencies, 
 he at the same time maintains that the sciences 
 of Biology, and, still more, of Sociology and 
 Morals, are synthetic, since they deal with 
 objects in which the whole is not a mere aggre- 
 gation or resultant of the parts, but in which 
 rather the parts can be understood only in and 
 
200 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 through the whole. Hence it would seem that 
 the dispersive tendencies of science are confined 
 to the lower steps of the scientific scale ; and that 
 the final science admits and necessitates a syn- 
 thesis, which is not merely subjective, but also 
 objective. For Comte does not hold that we 
 are to regard other men merely as means, or to 
 seek to understand them only so far as is neces- 
 sary for the gratification of some desire in 
 ourselves as individuals. We are, on the 
 contrary, to seek to know man in and for him- 
 self ; and when we do so know him, we find 
 that he is essentially social, and that the indi- 
 vidual, as such, is a mere " fiction of the meta- 
 physicians." Here again, therefore, we find 
 that Comte's system ends in a compromise be- 
 tween opposite tendencies of thought. As his 
 subjective synthesis after all was found to be ob- 
 jective, at least so far as mankind were concerned, 
 so in like manner his opposition of the intellect to 
 the heart turns out to be only partial ; for when 
 the intelligence is directed to psychology and 
 sociology, it gives us an idea of humanity, ac- 
 cording to which all men are " members one of 
 another." The warfare of the heart and the 
 
Is Altruism innate / 201 
 
 intelligence thus resolves itself into another ex- 
 pression of that dualism between the world and 
 man, which we have already considered. 
 
 The second question — whether the altruistic Are not the 
 
 social affee- 
 
 affections of man do not imply, or are not neces- n ^"* n,y' r " 
 
 i-iiii c i • reason? 
 
 sarily connected with, the development ot his 
 reason or self-consciousness — is even more im- 
 portant. Comte, like Hume, took all the desires, 
 higher and lower, as tendencies given apart from 
 the reason, which can only devise the means of 
 satisfying them, and is, therefore, necessarily their 
 servant. Reason itself on this view does not 
 essentially affect the character of those tendencies 
 which it obeys. " Cupiditas est appetitus cum 
 ejusdem conscientia" says Spinoza, and immediately 
 he goes on to speak as if the "conscientia" made no 
 change in the character of the " appetitus." But 
 if we think of appetites or desires — some of them 
 tending to the good of the individual, others to 
 the good of the species — as existing in an animal 
 which is not conscious of a self, these appetites 
 will neither be selfish nor unselfish in the sense 
 in which we apply these terms to man. Where 
 there is no ego there can be no alter ego, and 
 therefore neither egoism nor altruism. The con- 
 
202 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 sciousness of the self as a permanent unity to which 
 all the different tendencies are referred, and the 
 consequent rise of a new desire for the good or 
 happiness, as distinct from the desires of particular 
 objects, are essential to egoism. The consciousness 
 of an alter ego, i.e., of a community with others 
 which makes their interests our own, and hence 
 the consequent rise of a love for them, — which 
 is not disinterested merely as the animal appetites 
 are disinterested, because they tend directly to 
 their objects without any thought of self, but dis- 
 interested in the sense that the thought of self is 
 conquered or transcended, — is essential to altruism. 
 Each of these tendencies may coincide in its matter, 
 or rather in its first matter, with the appetites ; 
 viewed from the outside, they may seem to be 
 nothing higher than hunger or thirst, and sexual or 
 parental impulse; but their form is different. In 
 becoming combined with self-consciousness, they 
 are changed as by a chemical solvent, which 
 dissolves and renews them ; nay, as by a 
 new principle of life, whose first transformation 
 of them is nothing but the beginning of a series 
 of transformations both of their matter and their 
 form ; so that, in the end, the simple direct ten- 
 
Reason as a Social Principle. 203 
 
 dency to an object — the uneasiness which sought 
 its cure without reflection either upon itself or 
 upon anything else — is transmuted, on the one 
 side, into a gigantic ambition and greed, which 
 would make the whole world tributary to the 
 lust of the individual, and, on the other side, into 
 a love of humanity in which self-love is altogether 
 transcended or absorbed. Neither of these, how- 
 ever, nor any lower form of either is in such 
 wise external to reason, that we can talk of them 
 as determining it to an end which is not its own. 
 Both are simply the expression in feeling of that 
 essential opposition of the self to the not-self, and 
 at the same time that essential unity of the self 
 with the not-self, which are the two opposite, 
 but complementary, aspects of the life of reason. 
 And the progressive triumph of altruism over 
 egoism, which constitutes the moral significance 
 of history, is only the result of the fact that an 
 individual, who is also a conscious self, cannot 
 find his happiness in his own individual life, but 
 only in the life of the whole to which he belongs. 
 A selfish life is for such a being a contradiction. 
 It is a life in which he is at war with himself as 
 well as with others, for it is the life of a being who, 
 
204 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 though essentially social, tries to find satisfaction 
 in a personal or individual good. His " intelli- 
 gence " and his " heart " equally condemn such a 
 life ; it is not only a crime but a blunder. For a 
 spiritual being, as such, is one who can save his 
 life only by losing it in a wider life, one who must 
 die to himself in order that he may live. In the 
 progress of man's spirit, therefore, there is no 
 necessary or possible schism between the two 
 parts of his being ; but, on the contrary, the 
 development of the one implies the develop- 
 ment of the other. It is the more comprehensive 
 idea, as well as the higher social purpose, which 
 always triumphs ; and if what is called intellec- 
 tual culture sometimes seems to have the worse 
 in the struggle for existence, it is because it is a 
 superficial or formal culture, which does not really 
 represent the most comprehensive idea. 
 Bearing of This leads us to observe that the opposition of 
 
 this opposi- 
 tion on the heart to the intelligence is Comte's key to 
 
 Conites ° J 
 
 history. the whole history of the past, especially in rela- 
 tion to religion. Theology is to him a system 
 growing out of a natural, though partially errone- 
 ous, hypothesis, an hypothesis which in its first 
 appearance was well suited to excite the nascent 
 
False Synthesis of Theology. 205 
 
 intelligence and satisfy the primary affections 
 of man, but which, in its further develop- 
 ment, tended to secure moral and social ends 
 at the expense of truth, and became more 
 and more irrational as it became mure and 
 more useful. Fetichism, the first religion, was 
 the spontaneous result of man's primitive ten- 
 dency to exaggerate the likeness of all things to 
 himself. It is " less distant from Positivity " 
 than any other sort of theology,* for its only error 
 is that it supposes the existence of life wher- 
 ever it finds activity, an error which can " easily 
 be brought to the test of verification " and cor- 
 rected. " We can show it to be an error, and so 
 get rid of it." But Polytheism, seeking for 
 greater generality, refers phenomena, not directly, 
 to beings who are identified with them, but in- 
 directly, to " wills belonging to beings purely 
 imaginary," whose " existence can no more be 
 decisively disproved than it can be demonstrated." 
 Further, Polytheism extends to the order of 
 man's life that kind of explanation which Fetich- 
 ism necessarily confined to nature, because the 
 latter sought to explain everything by man, and 
 * Pol. Pns. iii. |). 85 : Trans, p. 71. 
 
206 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 never thought of man himself as requiring ex- 
 planation. But this, while it has the advantage 
 of bringing human life within the domain of 
 speculation, at the same time reduces theology 
 into a palpable instance of reasoning in a circle. 
 For " humanity cannot legitimately be included 
 in the synthesis of causes, from the very fact that 
 its type is found in man." * Last of all comes 
 Monotheism, concentrating still further the theo- 
 logical explanation of the universe, but rendering 
 it still more incoherent and irrational, for " the 
 conception of a single God involves a type of 
 absolute perfection complete in each of the three 
 aspects of human nature, affection, thought, and 
 action. Now, such a conception unavoidably 
 contradicts itself, for either this all-powerful 
 Being must be inferior to ourselves, morally or 
 intellectually, or else the world which he created 
 must be free from those radical imperfections 
 which, in spite of Monotheistic sophistry, have 
 been always but too evident. And even were 
 this second alternative admissible, there would 
 remain a yet deeper inconsistency. Man's moral 
 and mental faculties have for their object to sub- 
 # Pol. Pos. iii. p. 261 : Trans, p. 218. 
 
Social Uses of Theology. 207 
 
 serve practical necessities, but an omnipotent 
 Being can have no occasion either for wisdom or 
 for goodness." * 
 
 What reconciles mankind, and especially the Monotheism 
 
 the great 
 
 men of light and leading, to these intellectually un- instrument 
 satisfactory conceptions of God, is their practical amty " 
 value in extending and strengthening the social 
 bond. Polytheism was superior to Fetichism, 
 because it lent itself to the formation of that 
 wider community, which we call the State, 
 whereas Fetichism tended rather to confine 
 the sympathies of men to the narrower limits 
 of the family. And Monotheism was the neces- 
 sary basis of that still wider society which binds 
 men to each other simply as men, and apart from 
 any special ties of blood or language. This at 
 least was the case so long as the truth of the 
 unity of humanity had not yet assumed a scien- 
 tific form, and therefore still needed an external 
 support. But when the sciences of sociology and 
 morals arise, this external scaffolding ceases to be 
 necessary, and must even become injurious, as, 
 indeed, Theology at the best is ill-adapted to the 
 social end it has been made to subserve. 
 * Ibid. iii. p. 4.31 : Trans, p. .365. 
 
208 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 Though i, in This last point deserves special attention. 
 
 mJociaf According to Comte, Theology, and above all, 
 Monotheistic Theology, is a system the direct in- 
 fluence of which is altogether unfavourable to the 
 social tendencies, although indirectly, by the course 
 of history, and through the wise modifications to 
 which it has been subjected by the leaders and 
 teachers of mankind, it has become the main 
 instrument in developing altruism. The increas- 
 ing generality of theological belief, indeed, was a 
 necessary condition of the establishment of social 
 unity ; but, by directing the eyes of men not to 
 themselves but to supernatural beings, by making 
 the issues of life turn on the favour or disfavour 
 of such beings rather than on the social action 
 and reaction of men upon each other, and by 
 reducing this world into a secondary position, 
 and subordinating its concerns to those of an- 
 other world, Theology tended to dissolve rather 
 than to knit closer the bonds of society. The 
 relation of the individual to God isolated him 
 from his fellows. Especially was this the case 
 with the Christian form of Monotheism, with its 
 tremendous future rewards and penalties, and the 
 direct relation which it established between the 
 
Egoistic Tendency of Theology. 209 
 
 soul of the individual and the infinite Being. 
 " The immediate effect of putting- personal salva- 
 tion in the foremost place was to create an 
 unparalleled selfishness, a selfishness rendering 
 all social influences nugatory, and thus tending 
 to dissolve public life." * " The Christian type 
 of life was never fully realized except by the 
 hermits of the Thebaid," who, " by narrowing 
 their wants to the lowest standard, were able to 
 concentrate their thoughts without remorse or 
 distraction on the attainment of salvation." f 
 AVhat else, indeed, but egoism could be awakened 
 by the worship of a God who is himself the 
 supreme type of egoism ? For " the desires of 
 an omnipotent Being, being gratified as soon as 
 formed, can consist in nothing but pure caprices. 
 There can be no appreciable motive either from 
 within or from without. And above all, these 
 pure caprices must of necessity be purely per- 
 sonal; so that the metaphysical formula, To lire 
 in self for self, would be alike applicable to the 
 two extreme grades of the vital scale. The type 
 of divinity thus approximates to the lowest stage 
 
 * Pol. Pos. iii. p. 41 1 : Trans, p. 348. 
 tlbid. iii. p. 454: Trans, p. 383. 
 
210 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 of animality, the only shape in which life is 
 purely individual, because it is reduced to the 
 one function of nutrition." * The natural result 
 of such a religion was, therefore, to discourage 
 the altruistic affections : as, indeed, Monotheism 
 has systematically denied that such affections 
 form part of the nature of man. 
 How its mi- The alchemy which, according to Comte, turned 
 
 social char- 
 acter was this poison into wholesome food, was found in the 
 
 neutralized. - 1 
 
 altruistic affections of the teachers of mankind, 
 which led them to limit and modify the doctrine 
 they taught, so as to subserve man's moral im- 
 provement. This, however, would not have been 
 sufficient, if these teachers had not at an early 
 period ceased to be a theocracy, or, in other 
 words, if the practical government of mankind 
 had not been wrested from their hand by the 
 military classes. By this change, which con- 
 tained in itself the germ of the separation 
 of the Church from the State, of theory 
 from practice, of counsel from command, the 
 priests, prophets, or philosophers, who were 
 the intellectual leaders of men, were reduced to 
 that position of subordination in which alone 
 * Ibid. iii. p. 446 : Trans, p. 376. 
 
Theology subdued to Altruism. 211 
 
 (hey can concentrate their attention upon their 
 proper work. For the influences of the intellect, 
 like those of the affections, must be indirect if 
 they are to be pure. "No power, especially if it 
 be theological, cares to modify the will, unless if- 
 finds itself powerless to control action." But 
 when the theoretic class were subordinated to the 
 practical class, they became the natural allies of 
 the women, and, like them, had to substitute 
 counsel for command. At first, indeed, their 
 •subjection was too absolute* for the military 
 aristocracies of Greece and Rome did not leave 
 to the priesthood sufficient independence, or at 
 least sufficient authority, to permit even of 
 counsel. But with the rise of Catholic Mono- 
 theism, supported as it was by a new revelation 
 based upon the idea of an incarnation of God, the 
 separation of Church and State was definitely 
 established, and the intellectual life was put in 
 its proper relation to the life of action. 
 
 The consequence is that the theological priest- IIow vhvW 
 hood have continually sought to counteract the thebm°£w 
 
 humanised. 
 
 natural influences of their doctrine by mak- 
 ing additions which were inconsistent with its 
 " absolute " principle, but which rendered it bet- 
 
212 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 ter fitted for the purpose of binding men together. 
 This was especially the case under Monotheism, 
 where, as we have seen, such counteraction was 
 most necessary. From this source arose a series 
 of supplementary doctrines, generally tending to 
 connect God with man, and men with each other. 
 St. Paul, " the real founder of Catholicism," took 
 the first step in reducing Monotheism into a shape 
 in which it could act as an " organic " doctrine : 
 and his successors followed steadily in the same 
 path. If the omnipotence of God raised Him 
 above all human sympathy, and tended to destroy 
 human sympathy in his worshippers, the doctrines 
 of the Trinity and the Incarnation again brought 
 God near to men, and taught them to reverence 
 in themselves a humanity which was raised into 
 unity with God. In the Feast of the Eucharist all 
 men celebrated and enjoyed their unity with this 
 exalted and deified humanity. The same infiuence, 
 in its further development, led to the adoration 
 of the saints, and above all of the Virgin Mother, 
 in whom ■ Christian devotion really worshipped 
 Humanity, in its simplest and tenderest affections. 
 Finally, if benevolent sympathies were denied to 
 nature, St. Paul found a place for them by attri- 
 
Nature and Grace. -1\'.\ 
 
 buting them to grace, "which Thomas a Kempia 
 admirably defines as the equivalent of love — 
 gratw sive dilectio — divine inspiration being sub- 
 stituted for human impulse."* And the struggle 
 between egoism and altruism was expressed in the 
 doctrines of the Fall and Redemption of mankiiid.f 
 Thus the social passion which, according to the 
 theory, could not lie derived from human nature, 
 was conceived to flow from a divine, influence, 
 and became ennobled, at least as a means of sal- 
 vation, in the eyes of those who would otherwise 
 have suppressed it. At the same time, as Comte 
 also contends, these additions or corrections of the 
 original doctrine were inconsistent or imperfect in 
 themselves, and inadequate to the social purpose 
 for which they were destined ; and they naturally 
 disappeared whenever, by the emancipation of the 
 intelligence, the immense egoism, which Mono- 
 theism consecrated in God and favoured in man, 
 was let loose from the bonds in which the Church 
 had confined it. Protestantism was the first in- 
 dication of this change; for Protestantism is hut 
 an organized anarchy, and the only elements of 
 
 * Pol. Pos. Hi. ]). 447 : Trans, p. 378. 
 t Ibid. iii. p. 40!) : Trans. 346. 
 
214 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 order in it are derived from an instinctive conserva- 
 tism, clinging to the fragments of a past doctrinal 
 system which, in principle, has been abandoned- 
 It contains no organic elements of its own — no 
 positive contribution to the progressive life of 
 humanity ; it is simply the first imperfect result 
 of that metaphysical individualism which, in its- 
 ultimate form, freed from all the limits of the 
 Catholic system, expressed itself theoretically in 
 Rousseau and Voltaire, and practically in the 
 French Revolution. The hope of mankind, how- 
 ever, lies in the new synthesis of Positivism, 
 which alone can give due value to the innate 
 altruistic sympathies of man ; for it alone can 
 place on a permanent scientific basis that social 
 order which the mediaeval Church attempted in 
 vain to found on the essentially egoistic and 
 anarchic doctrine of Monotheism. 
 opposition The fundamental conception, then, which under- 
 
 of elements 
 
 gtonsofthe ^ es Comte's view of progress is, that every past 
 religion, with the partial exception of Fetichism, 
 has been an amalgam of two radically inconsist- 
 ent elements, of which only one was due to the 
 theological principle itself; while the other was- 
 due, partly to the practical instinct of its priests, 
 
Two Elements in Christianity. 215 
 
 which led them to modify the logical results of 
 that principle in conformity with the social wants 
 of man; and partly also to their subordinate 
 position, which obliged them to use the spiritual 
 means of conviction and persuasion instead of the 
 ruder weapons of material force. To criticize 
 this theory fully would be to re-write Comte's 
 history of religion. It will be sufficient here to 
 point out that his view of modern history begins 
 in a false interpretation of Christianity, and ends 
 in an equally false interpretation of the Protest- 
 ant Reformation. 
 
 Christianity from its origin has two aspects or Did this dis- 
 cord exist in 
 elements ; and if we compare it with earlier re- Christianity n 
 
 ligions, we may call these its Pantheistic and its 
 Monotheistic elements. But these elements are 
 not, as Comte asserts, joined together by a mere 
 external necessity. They are necessarily con- 
 nected in the inner logic of the system ; nor can 
 we regard one of them as more or less essential 
 than the other. In the simplest words of the 
 Gospels we find already expressed a sense of re- 
 conciliation with God, and therefore with the 
 world and self, which is alien to pure Mono- 
 theism, though there is some faint anticipation of 
 
216 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 it in the later books of the Old Testament. For 
 a spiritual Monotheism, while it awakens a con- 
 sciousness of the holiness of God, and the sinful- 
 ness of the creature, tends to make fear prevail 
 over love, and the sense of separation over the 
 sense of union. The idea of the unity of the 
 Divine and the Human — an original unity which 
 yet has to be realized by self-sacrifice — and the 
 corresponding idea that the individual or natural 
 life must be lost in order to save it, were pre- 
 sented for the first time, as in one great living 
 picture, in the life and death of Christ. And 
 what was thus directly presented to the heart 
 and the imagination in an individual, was uni- 
 versalized in the writings of St. Paul and St. 
 John ; in other words, it was there liberated from 
 its peculiar national setting, and used as a key to 
 the general moral history of man. The Messiah 
 of the Jews was exalted into the Divine Logos, 
 and the Cross became the symbol of an atone- 
 ment and reconciliation between God and man, 
 which has been made "before the foundation of the 
 world," yet which has to be made again in every 
 human life. The work of the first three centuries 
 was to give to this idea such logical expression as 
 
Separation of Church and State. 217 
 
 was then possible, in the doctrines of the Incarna- 
 tion and the Trinity. It is true that this idea of 
 the unity of man with God was not immediately 
 carried out to any of the consequences which 
 might seem to be contained in it, Tt remained 
 for a time a religion, and a religion only; it did 
 not show itself to be the principle of a new social 
 <>r political order of life. Rather it accepted the 
 <>ld order represented by the Roman Empire, and 
 even consecrated it as "ordained of God," only 
 demanding for itself that it should be allowed to 
 purify the inner life of men. Such a separation 
 of the things of Caesar and the things of God was 
 i hen inevitable; for it is impossible that a new 
 principle can ever lie received simply and without 
 alloy into minds, which are at the same time 
 occupying themselves with its utmost practical 
 or even its utmost theoretical consequences. In 
 Ibis sense there is much truth in what Comte says 
 about the value of the separation of the spiritual 
 from the temporal authority. The power of directly 
 realizing a new religious principle, just because it 
 draws away attention from the principle itself to 
 1 he details of its practical application, is likely to 
 prevent that application being either a complete or 
 
218 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 even a true expression of the principle. Practical 
 inferences from such a principle cannot safely 
 be drawn by mere logical deduction ; they will 
 be drawn with certainty and effect only by those 
 whose whole spiritual life the principle has 
 remoulded. The decided withdrawal of the 
 Christian Church from the sphere of " practical 
 politics " was, therefore, not merely a necessity 
 forced upon it from without ; it was a con- 
 dition which its best members gladly accepted, 
 because without it the inner transformation of 
 man's life by the new doctrine would have been 
 impossible. If Christianity had raised a servile 
 insurrection it never could have put an end to 
 slavery. 
 Growtii of But while this withdrawal was necessary, it 
 
 dualism in 
 
 the middle contained a great danger ; for the inner life 
 
 ages. o o ' 
 
 cannot be separated from the outer life without 
 becoming narrowed and distorted. Confined to 
 the sphere of religion and private morality, the 
 doctrine of unity and reconciliation necessarily 
 became itself the source of a new dualism. What 
 had been at first merely neglect of the world 
 was gradually changed into hostility to worldly 
 interests ; and the germs of a positive morality, 
 
Medicsval Asceticism. 219 
 
 reconciling the flesh and the spirit, which appear 
 in the New Testament, were neglected and over- 
 shadowed in the growth of asceticism. Chris- 
 tianity, even in its first expression, had a negative 
 side towards the natural life of man ; while it 
 lifted man to God, it yet taught that humanity 
 " cannot be quickened except it die." But the 
 mediaeval Church, while it constantly taught that 
 humanity must die to all its natural impulses, 
 had almost forgotten to hope that it could he 
 quickened. Its highest morality — the morality 
 of the three vows — was the negation of all social 
 obligations; its science was the interpretation of a 
 fixed dogma received on authority; its religion 
 tended to become an external service, an opus 
 operatum, a preparation for another world, rather 
 than a principle of action in this. Its highest 
 act of worship, the Eucharist, in which w T as 
 celebrated the revealed unity of men with each 
 other and with God, was reserved in its fulness 
 for the clergy, and even with them was finally 
 reduced to an external act by the doctrine of tran- 
 substantiation, in which poetry " became logic," 
 and in becoming logic, ceased to be truth. 
 
 ._ „. . , , . . . Unity of the 
 
 JNow, Comte, seeing the working <>i this two elements 
 
 in Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
s 
 
 220 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 negative tendency in mediaeval Catholicism, and 
 regarding it as the natural work of Monotheism, 
 is obliged to treat all the positive side of Chris- 
 tianity as an external addition suggested by the 
 practical wisdom of the clergy. St. Paul is 
 supposed by him to have invented (and Comte'! 
 language would even suggest that he consciously 
 invented*) the doctrine of grace, in order to 
 reconsecrate those social affections which Mono- 
 theism, in its condemnation of nature, had either 
 denied to exist, or, what is nearer the truth, had 
 treated as having no moral value. But this only 
 shows how imperfectly Comte had grasped the 
 Pauline conception of the moral change which 
 religion produces. The idea that the immediate 
 untamed and undisciplined will of the natural man 
 is not a principle of morality, and that therefore 
 man must die to live, must rise above himself to be 
 himself, is one which has in it nothing discord- 
 ant with the claims of social feeling. It is the 
 commonplace of every powerful writer on prac- 
 tical ethics, from the Gospels to Thomas a 
 Kempis, and from Luther to Goethe. 
 
 * Pol. Pos. iii. p. 409 : Trans, p. 346. 
 
Self-realization through Self-sacrifice. 221 
 
 " Unci .so lang du das nicht hast, 
 Dieses : Stirb und Werde, 
 Bist du nur ein trliber ( !ast 
 Auf der dunkeln Erde,." 
 
 St. Paul adds that this death to self is possible 
 only to him in whom another than his own 
 natural will lives; "so then it is not 1 that 
 live, but Christ that liveth in me." Conite 
 would accept the words of St. Paul with the. 
 substitution of Humanity for Christ. But either 
 substitution involves the negation of the natural 
 tendencies, whether individual or social, in their 
 immediate natural form ; and Conite himself, 
 when he placed not only the sexual but even 
 the maternal impulse among those that are 
 merely " personal or egoistic," virtually ac- 
 knowledged that the natural or instructive basis 
 of the altruistic affections is not in itself moral.* 
 But because he begins with a psychology which 
 treats the egoistic and altruistic desires, and 
 again the intellect and the heart, as distinct 
 and independent entities, he is unable to do 
 justice to an account of moral experience which 
 involves that they are essentially related elements 
 
 * Ibid. i. p. 72(5 : Trans, p. .*>G2. 
 
999 
 
 The Social Philosophy of Gorate. 
 
 in one whole, or necessarily connected stages of 
 its development. 
 Their opposi- In the form in which it was first presented, the 
 
 tion in its 
 
 development, teaching of Christianity was undoubtedly ambigu- 
 ous, as, indeed, every doctrine in its first and 
 simplest form must be. In that form we cannot, 
 without limitations, call it either social or anti- 
 social ; it is anti-social and ascetic, because of its 
 negative relations to the previous forms of life and 
 culture ; it is social and positive, in so far as in 
 its primary doctrine of the unity of the divine 
 and human — of divinity manifested in man and 
 humanity made perfect through suffering — it 
 contains the promise and the necessity of a 
 development by which nature and spirit shall 
 be reconciled. The progressive tendency of 
 Christendom was based on the fact that from 
 the earliest times the followers of Christ were 
 placed in the dilemma, either of denying their 
 primary doctrine of reconciliation between God 
 and man and going back to pure Monotheism, or 
 of advancing to the reconciliation of all those other 
 antagonisms of spirit and nature, the world and 
 the Church, which arose out of the circumstances 
 of its first publication. And modern history is 
 
Development of Christianity. -2-23 
 
 more than anything else the history of the long 
 process whereby this logical necessity manifested 
 itself in fact. The negative spirit of the Middle 
 Age, its asceticism, its dualism, its formalism, its 
 tendency to transform the moral opposition of 
 natural and spiritual into an external opposition 
 between two separate worlds, present and future, 
 and thus to substitute " other- wordliness " for 
 worldliness, instead of substituting unwoiidliness 
 for both — all these characteristics were the natural 
 results of the fact that the idea of Christianity, 
 in its first abstract form, could not include, and 
 therefore necessarily became opposed to, the forms 
 of social life and organization with which it came 
 into contact. But while the early Christians 
 looked for the realization of the kingdom of 
 Heaven in some immediate earthly future, and 
 the Middle Age postponed it to another life, 
 Christ had already taught the truth, which 
 alone can turn either of these hopes into some- 
 thing more than the expression of an egoistic 
 desire — the truth that " the kingdom of God 
 is within us." The reaction of the social neces- 
 sities of mediaeval society on the doctrine — which 
 Comte quite correctly describes as leading to the 
 
224 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 gradual elevation of humanity and of human 
 interests— found its main support in the prin- 
 ciples of the doctrine itself, so soon as its lessons 
 had been absorbed into the mind of the people. 
 And the irresistible force of the movement, 
 whereby at a later period the intelligence was 
 emancipated from authority, and the claims 
 of the family and the State were asserted 
 against the Church, lay above all in this, that 
 Christianity itself was felt to involve the 
 consecration of human life in all its interests 
 and relations. Luther's appeal to the New 
 Testament and to the earliest ages of Chris- 
 tianity was in some ways unhistorical, but it 
 expressed a truth. Protestantism was not a 
 return to the Christianity of the first century; it 
 was an assertion of the relation of the individual 
 to God, which was itself made possible only by 
 the long work of Latin Catholicism. But the 
 development of a doctrine, if it has in it any 
 germ of truth which is capable of development, 
 involves a continual recurrence to its first, and 
 therefore its most general, expression. The ele- 
 ments successively developed in the Catholic 
 and the Protestant, the Latin and the Germanic 
 
Self-realisation through Self-sacrifice. 225 
 
 forms of Christianity, were both present in the 
 original germ, and the exaggerated prominence 
 given in the former to the negative side of 
 Christianity could not but lead, in the develop- 
 ment of thought, to a similarly exaggerated 
 manifestation of its positive side. But it is 
 nearly as absurd to say, as Comte does, that 
 the true logical outcome of Christianity is to 
 be found in the " life of the hermits of the 
 Thebaid," as it would be to say that its true 
 logical outfcome is to be found in those vehement 
 assertions of nature — naked and unashamed — as 
 its own sufficient warrant, which poured almost 
 with the force of inspiration from the lips of 
 Diderot. Both extremes are equally removed 
 from that special moral temper and tone of 
 feeling which we call distinctively Christian — the 
 former by its want of sympathy and tenderness, 
 no less than the latter by its want of purity 
 and self-command. Eeassertion of nature through 
 its negation, or to put it more simply, the puri- 
 fication of the natural desires by the renunciation 
 of their immediate gratification, is the idea that 
 is more or less definitely present in all phases 
 of the history of Christianity; and, though sway- 
 
226 The Social Philosophy of C orate. 
 
 ing from one side to the other, the religious 
 life of modern times has never ceased to present 
 both aspects. Even a St. Augustine recoiled 
 from the Manichseism by which nature was 
 regarded, not simply as fallen from its original 
 idea, but as essentially impure. And, on the 
 other hand, even Eousseau's Savoyard vicar, who 
 freed himself from the negative or ascetic element 
 as completely as is possible for any one still 
 retaining any tincture of Christianity or even of 
 religion, and who insists so strongly on the 
 text that " the natural is the moral," is yet 
 forced to recognize that nature has two voices, 
 and that the raison commune has to overcome 
 and transform the natural inclinations of the 
 individual. In the life of its Founder, the 
 Christian Church has always had before it 
 an individual type of that harmony of the 
 spiritual and natural life, which it is its ideal 
 to realize in all the wider social relations 
 of man ; nor, till that ideal is reached, can it 
 be said that the Christian idea is exhausted, 
 or that the place is vacant for a new reli- 
 gion, — great as may be the changes of form 
 and expression through which Christianity must 
 
Egoism and Altruism. 227 
 
 pass under the changed conditions of modern 
 life. 
 
 Thai (unite was not able to discern this, arose, comte'sown 
 
 dualism. 
 
 as we have seen, from the fact that he held to 
 a kind of Manichseism of his own. To him the 
 egoistic and the altruistic desires were two kinds 
 of innate tendencies, both of which exist in man 
 from the first, though with a great preponder- 
 ance on tin- side of egoism.* Moral improvement 
 
 * Comte insists with great force on the danger of taking 
 an organism as the mere sum of its parts, or its life as 
 merely the resultant of their external action and reaction 
 upon each other: but in his psychological analysis, lie 
 often seems to forget this principle. If he recognizes 
 that, as we rise in the scale of animal life, there is a con- 
 tinually advancing differentiation of the simple unity we 
 find in the lowest organisms, he does not always remember 
 that this implies and necessitates a correspondent integra- 
 tion. Hence in the end the unity which he establishes 
 between the different elements, e.g., between the intellect 
 and the heart, or between the egoistic and the social ini- 
 ] raises, is external and artificial. In his Psychology the fact 
 that it is / who think, / who feel, / who desire finds no 
 sufficient place, and, therefore, in his Ethics he can reach no 
 ideal except that of an external harmony of the different 
 faculties and tendencies. Where the primary unity below 
 the difference and conflict of the parts is not recognized, 
 it becomes impossible to see beyond their antagonism to 
 its reconciliation in -Ap'ital unity. 
 
 See especially Comte's sketch of Psychology in the third 
 chapter of the Introduction Fonclamentnle. Pol. Pos. i. 
 685, seq. 
 
228 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 simply consists in altering the original propor- 
 tions in favour of altruism, and moral perfection 
 would be the complete extinction of egoism (which 
 with Comte would naturally mean the extinction 
 of all the desires classified as personal). Hence 
 there is a somewhat ascetic tendency in some of 
 the ideas of the Politique Positive — i.e., asceticism 
 sometimes appears in it, not simply as a tran- 
 sitionary process through which certain natural 
 desires are to be purified, but as an attempt, so far 
 as possible, to extinguish them. A deeper analy- 
 sis would have shown that the desires in them- 
 selves, as mere natural impulses, are neither egoistic 
 nor altruistic, neither bad nor good ; and that if, 
 as they appear in the self-conscious life of men, 
 they are necessarily infected with egoism, yet 
 that the ego is not absolutely opposed to the alter 
 ego, but rather implies it. A spiritual or self- 
 conscious being is one who can realize his own 
 individual good only as he realizes the good of 
 others : but, in seeking to realize such a good, it 
 is not needful that he should renounce any 
 natural desire as impure; for there is no natural 
 desire which may not become the expression oi 
 the better self, which is ego and alter ego in one. 
 
Is Christianity Other-worldliness ? 22U 
 
 But Comte, unable from the limitations of his 
 psychology to see the true relation of the negative 
 and the positive side of ethics, is obliged to treat 
 the ascetic tendency of Christianity as involving 
 a denial of the existence in man of innate social 
 sympathies ; and on the other hand, to regard the 
 efforts of the Christian Church to cultivate such 
 sympathies, as the result of an external accom- 
 modation. His idea of Christianity practically 
 coincides with the definition of virtue given by 
 Paley; it is " doing good to man, in obedience to 
 the will of Cod, with a view to eternal happi- 
 ness." On this view the Christian life is the 
 pursuit of a selfish end by means in themselves 
 unselfish, or it is selfishness turned to unselfish 
 iiction in view of the pleasures and pains of another 
 world ; and so soon as doubt is cast upon these 
 supernatural rewards and punishments, the false 
 ^diow of benevolence must disappear and leave 
 bare selfishness in its place. Hence Comte is just 
 neither to Catholicism nor to Protestantism; for, 
 while he maintains the former to be only in- 
 directly social, he regards the latter as the first 
 step in a scepticism which, taking away the fears 
 and hopes of another world, must at the same 
 
230 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 
 
 time take away all restraint upon selfishness. 
 And, just because he is unable fully to under- 
 stand either the negative spirit of the earlier, or 
 the positive spirit of the later, phase of modern 
 life, he has an imperfect appreciation of that 
 social ideal to which both are tending, and which 
 must combine in itself the true elements of both. 
 Yet we cannot say that he is equally unfair to 
 Catholicism and to Protestantism. It is the 
 temptation of writers on social subjects to be least 
 just to the tendencies of the time which precedes 
 their own, and against the errors of which they 
 have immediately to contend. Hence we are not 
 surprised to find that Comte does more justice 
 to Catholicism than to Protestantism, or to that 
 Individualism which grew out of Protestantism. 
 The Eeformation and what is called in German 
 the Avfkldrvng he regards solely on their de- 
 structive side, as successive stages in the modern 
 movement of revolt, while he fails to appreciate 
 the constructive elements involved in each of 
 them. Hence also, in his attitude towards this 
 threat movement, he all but identifies himself with 
 Catholic writers like De Maistre ; and his own 
 scheme of the future is essentially reactionary. 
 
Two Aspect* of Protestantism. 231 
 
 The restoration of the spiritual power to its 
 mediaeval position was for Conite a natural pro- 
 posal, because he could see in the Protestant 
 revolt nothing more than an insurrectionary 
 movement, which might clear the way for a 
 new social construction, but which in itself was 
 the negation of all government whatever. 
 
 But what was Protestantism ? To the Pro- The defects 
 
 of Protes- 
 
 testant it seemed to be simply a return to the tautis m. 
 original purity of the Christian faith; to the 
 Catholic, it seemed to be a fatal revolt against 
 the only organization by which Christianity could 
 lie realized. Really it partook of both char- 
 acters. It involved a dangerous misconception of 
 the social conditions, under which alone the re- 
 ligious life can be realized and developed; but it 
 involved also a deeper and truer apprehension of 
 that religion, which first recognized the latent 
 (^ivinity, or universal capacity, of every spiritual 
 being as such, and, which, therefore, seemed to 
 impose upon every individual man the right or 
 rather the duty of living by the witness of his 
 own spirit. Comte saw only the former of these 
 two aspects of it. Hence he regarded the French 
 Revolution as a practical refutation of the individ- 
 
232 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 ualism which grew out of the Protestant move- 
 ment, and not, as it was in truth, a critical 
 event, which forced men to distinguish and 
 separate its true from its false elements. He 
 drew from it, indeed, a true lesson — the lesson 
 that the individual as such has no moral or 
 religious life of his own, and that it is only 
 in proportion as he transcends his own individu- 
 ality and lives in the life of humanity, that 
 his spiritual life can have any depth or riches 
 in it. "We are afraid to put men to live 
 and trade each on his own private stock 
 of reason, because we suspect that the stock in 
 each man is small, and that the individuals 
 would do better to avail themselves of the 
 general bank and capital of nations and of ages." 
 The truth expressed in these words was seen as 
 clearly by Comte as by Burke. And because 
 lie saw it, Comte regarded the Protestant In- 
 dividualism, which throws individuals back upon 
 themselves, as tending merely to empty their 
 minds of all real interests, and to deliver 
 them over to their own caprices. Private 
 judgment and popular government were to him 
 only pretentious names for intellectual and 
 
ido of 
 
 itant- 
 
 Caiholidsm an Imperfect Christian it;/. 233 
 
 political anarchy : and his remedy for the 
 moral diseases of modern times was the restor- 
 ation of that division of the spiritual and 
 temporal authorities, which existed in the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
 There is, however, another aspect of the The good 
 
 ' £ side' 
 
 Protestantism and of the apparently anarchical gg 
 doctrines derived from it, to which Comte pays 
 no attention. Catholicism, as we have seen. 
 had developed one aspect of Christianity, until, 
 by its exclusive prominence, the principle of 
 Christianity itself was on the point of being 
 lost. It had changed the division between laity 
 and clergy, world and Church, from a relative to 
 an absolute division; it had presented Christian 
 doctrine, not as something which the spirit of 
 the individual may ultimately verify for itself, 
 but as something which it must submissively 
 accept without any verification. It had made 
 Christian worship into an opus operatum, a 
 work done by the priest for the people, instead 
 (if a means through which the feelings of the 
 people could be at once drawn out and ex- 
 pressed. Now, it is as opposed to these tend- 
 encies that the Protestant movement had its 
 
234 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 highest value. Each of the so-called an- 
 archic doctrines, against which Comte protests, 
 has a good as well as a bad meaning. If, e.g., 
 it is nothing less than intellectual anarchy 
 for every individual to claim to judge for 
 himself, on subjects for which he has not 
 the requisite training or discipline, it is a 
 slavery scarcely less corrupting in its effect 
 than anarchy, when he is made to regard 
 the difference between himself and his teachers 
 as a permanent and absolute one. In the 
 former case, he has no sufficient feeling of his 
 want to make him duly submissive to teach- 
 ing ; in the latter, he has no sufficient conscious- 
 ness of his capacity to be taught, to permit a 
 due reaction of his thought upon the matter 
 received from his teachers. Again, the doctrine 
 of the sovereignty of the people is the negation 
 of all government and social order, if it be 
 taken to mean that the uninstructed many should 
 govern themselves by their own insight, and 
 that the instructed few should simply be their 
 servants and their instruments. But where the 
 people are not recognized as the ultimate source 
 of power, where their consent is not in any 
 
The Truth in Protestantism. 235 
 
 regular way made necessary to the proceedings ol 
 their governors, they are by that very fact kept 
 in a perpetual tutelage, and cannot possibly feel 
 that the life of the state is their own life. Now, 
 the most important effect of the Protestant move- 
 ment was just this, that it awakened in the 
 individual the consciousness of his universal 
 nature, or, in other words, the consciousness that 
 there is no external power or sovereignty, divine 
 or human, to which he has absolutely and per- 
 manently to submit, but that every outward 
 claim of authority must ultimately be justified by 
 the inner witness of his own spirit. The freedom 
 of man consists in this, that his obedience to the 
 State, to the Church, even to God, is the obedi- 
 ence of his natural to his spiritual self. The 
 essential truth of the Reformation lay in its 
 republication of the doctrine that the voice of God 
 speaks not only without but also within us, ami 
 indeed that " it is only by the God within that 
 we can comprehend the God without." And the 
 nations, which had learned that lesson in religion, 
 soon hastened to apply it to the social and 
 political order of life. It is undoubtedly a 
 lesson which is liable to misa] (prehension, as 
 
236 The Social Philosophy of Oomte. 
 
 may be seen, not only from the tendency of 
 many Protestant sects to put the inner life in 
 opposition to the outer, and so to deprive the 
 former of all wider contents and interests ; but 
 also from the ultimate substitution, by Rousseau 
 and others, of the assertion of the natural, for 
 the assertion of the spiritual, man. By such 
 writers the mere capacity of man for a higher 
 life is treated as if it were the higher life itself : 
 and it is forgotten that the capacity is nothing 
 unless it be realized, and that its realization 
 requires the surrender of individual liberty and 
 private judgment to the guidance and teaching of 
 those, in whom that realization has already taken 
 place. But it is not the less true that the con- 
 sciousness of the capacity, and consequently 
 of the duty, of becoming not merely a slave 
 or instrument, but an organ, of the intellectual 
 and moral life of mankind, is the essential basis 
 of modern life. " Henceforth, I call ye not ser- 
 vants, for the servant knoweth not what his lord 
 doeth ; but I have called you friends," is a word 
 of Christ which scarcely began to be verified till 
 the Reformation. And while its verification can- 
 not mean the negation of that division of labour 
 
Comte and Democracy. 237 
 
 upon which society rests, — cannot mean that 
 each one should know and judge, any more than 
 that each one should do, everything for himself, 
 it at least means that every power and autho- 
 rity should henceforth be, in the true sense of the 
 word, a spiritual power, and should, therefore, 
 rest for its main support upon the opinion of 
 those who obey it. It is because he has not 
 appreciated this truth that Comte so decidedly 
 breaks with the democratic spirit of modern 
 times, and seeks to set up an aristocracy 
 in the State and a monarchy in the Church. 
 Yet the spirit of the age is, after all, too strong 
 for him, and while he refuses to the governed 
 any regular and legitimate way of reacting upon 
 the powers that govern them, he recognizes that 
 the vbltima ratio, the final remedy for misgovern- 
 nient, lies in their irregular and illegitimate 
 action. As regards the State, he declares that 
 " the right of insurrection is the ultimate resource 
 with which no society should allow itself to dis- 
 pense." * And as regards the Church he says 
 that if " the High Priest of Humanity, sup- 
 ported by the body of the clergy, should go 
 * Of. Pol. Pos. i. 128 seq. 
 
238 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 
 
 wrong, then the only remedy left would be the 
 refusal of co-operation, a remedy which can never 
 fail, as the priesthood rests solely on conscience 
 and opinion, and succumbs, therefore, to their 
 adverse sentence." The civil government, in fact, 
 can bring the spiritual power to a dead-lock, by 
 " suspending its stipend, for in cases of serious 
 error popular subscriptions would not replace it, 
 unless on the supposition of a fanaticism scarcely 
 compatible with the Positive faith, where there 
 is enthusiasm for the doctrines, rather than for 
 the teachers."* Comte also desiderates a strong 
 reactive influence of public opinion from the 
 proletariate, by which the officers, both of Church 
 and State, may be kept faithful to their work. 
 But if this is desirable, why should the pro- 
 letariate have no regular means of making their 
 will felt ? An " organic " theory of the con- 
 stitution of society must surely provide every 
 real force with a legitimate form of expression ; 
 if a social theory embodies the idea of revolution 
 in it, it is self-condemned, 
 comte's par- Comte's social ideal is in many respects a close 
 
 tial revival 
 
 if the medi- reproduction of the mediaeval system, with its 
 
 Hval svstem. J- « 7 
 
 seval system. 
 
 * Pol. Pos. iv. 337 : Trans. 2.94. 
 
Church and State. 239 
 
 regime dispcrsif of feudalism in the world, and 
 its Papal concentration of authority in the church. 
 For him, the establishment of the national State 
 is as great an error in secular politics, as is the 
 increasing division of labour in the spiritual 
 kingdom of science. Still more strongly, if pos- 
 sible, does he reprobate that mingling of the 
 functions of Church and State, that interference 
 of the secular authority with spiritual matters, 
 such as the education of the people and 
 its religious life, which has been the natural 
 consequence of the failure of the mediaeval 
 Church to maintain its old authority. Notwith- 
 standing his worship of Humanity, the idea of a 
 " parliament of man, a federation of the world," 
 by which all the powers of mankind should be 
 united for the attainment of the highest material 
 and spiritual good, lias no attraction for him. To 
 reduce the State to the dimensions of a commune, 
 and to confine it to the care of purely material 
 interests, is his first political proposal. France, 
 England, and Spain (and we may now add Ger- 
 many and Italy) are, in his view, "factitious 
 aggregates without solid justification," and they 
 will only become "free and durable Slates," when 
 
240 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 
 
 they are broken up into fragments, each with a 
 population of two or three millions, and a ter- 
 ritory not exceeding that of Belgium or Tuscany. 
 The " West " will thus be divided into severity 
 republics, and the earth into five hundred ; and 
 the main work of the patriciate will be to direct 
 and regulate the industrial life of the community : 
 each member of the banker triumvirate, who are to 
 be at the head of the State, having one of the great 
 industrial departments under his special super- 
 intendence. On the other hand the unity of 
 humanity is to be represented solely by the 
 spiritual power, in whose hands is to be left 
 the whole work of advancing science, teaching 
 the people, and exercising a moral censorship 
 over all Governments and individuals. And 
 while this spiritual power is, for practical pur- 
 poses, to be strictly organized on the model of 
 the mediaeval Church, it is also, like that Church, 
 to remain, for scientific purposes, inorganic. In 
 other words, it is to admit no division of labour 
 in science, but every scientific man, like a 
 mediaeval doctor, is to profess all science, adding 
 to this the priestly office, which, with Comte, 
 includes both the cure of souls and of bodies. 
 
Church and State. 241 
 
 To criticize the details of this scheme seems separation 
 
 of spiritual, 
 
 to be unnecessary after what has been already a ,"^^ ul u " 
 said. It is not to be denied that the division 
 of Church and State in the Middle Ages was a 
 most important and even a necessary condition of 
 progress. Christianity could never have been 
 impressed upon the minds of men, if the concrete 
 application of its principles had been too rapid. 
 The essential condition of such application was 
 that men should not concern themselves too pre- 
 maturely with it. For the consequences of a 
 moral and religious principle cannot be reached 
 by direct logical deduction ; it is like a living 
 germ, in which, by no analysis or dissection, you 
 can discover the lineaments of the future plant. 
 To find out what it really is, or involves, you must 
 plant it in the minds of men, and let it grow. 
 Hence the mediaeval Church was strong in its 
 weakness, and it was its very victories over the 
 temporal power that were its greatest danger, li 
 became corrupt and lost its hold upon the minds 
 of men, just when it seemed to have established 
 its right to an absolute supremacy. Comte, 
 following De Maistre, attaches great importance 
 to the position of the Popes as arbiters between 
 Q 
 
242 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 the Sovereigns and nations of mediaeval Europe. 
 But he forgets that in claiming and maintaining 
 this position, the Popes were distinctly ceasing to 
 be a spiritual power, if it be the function of a 
 spiritual power to inculcate principles rather 
 than to use them to solve practical difficulties. A 
 power interfering in this way with the immediate 
 struggle of interests could not but be invaded by 
 the passions they excite, and it was the more 
 certain to be corrupted by these passions, because 
 it conceived them to be evil, and pretended alto- 
 gether to renounce them. The authority acquired 
 by the Church in the Middle Ages might have its 
 value, as an anticipation of the peaceful federation 
 of the nations under one supreme Government, 
 but it was undoubtedly the first step towards the 
 erasing of the distinction between the temporal 
 and the spiritual power. 
 Their neces- The truth* seems to be that the distinction of 
 
 sary conflict, , , . . -. . , 
 
 whensepar- secular and spiritual powers, except m the sense 
 already indicated, is essentially irrational, and 
 that the attempt to realize it in practice must 
 involve, as it did involve in the Middle Ages, a 
 continual internecine struggle. To set up two 
 regularly constituted powers face to face with 
 
 ated. 
 
The Secular and Spiritual Powers. 24o 
 
 each other, one claiming man's allegiance in the 
 name of his spiritual, and the other in the name 
 of his temporal, interests, is to organize anarchy. 
 So long as man's body and soul are insepar- 
 able, it will be impossible to divide the world 
 between Caesar and God ; for in one point of 
 view all is Csesar's, and in another all is God's. 
 In the Middle Ages the conflict of two despot- 
 isms was necessary to the growth of freedom.; 
 but, when government ceases to be despotic, the 
 need for such division of power passes away. 
 The relative separation between the speculative 
 ami the practical classes — between the scientific 
 and moral teachers of mankind, who have to dis- 
 cover and inculcate principles, and the statesmen 
 or administrators, who have to determine what 
 improvements it is possible at a definite time 
 to make in the organization of man's social and 
 political life — is a division of labour which can 
 surely be secured without breaking up the unity 
 of the social body. It is not desirable that the 
 philosopher, or priest, or man of science, should 
 be king, (and we may even acknowledge that, if 
 he were a king, he would probably be a very bad 
 one): on the other hand, it is desirable that he 
 
244 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 
 
 should have his due influence, as the teacher of 
 those general truths out of which all practical 
 improvement must ultimately spring. But the 
 natural difference of the tastes and capacities of 
 men should, in a well-organized State, be suffi- 
 cient to secure due influence to those who are 
 the natural representatives of man's spiritual 
 interests (whether they be religious, philosophic, 
 or scientific), without tempting them, from their 
 proper task of discovering and teaching the truth, 
 to the less appropriate work of determining how 
 much of it comes within " the sphere of practical 
 politics." Comte, indeed, by organizing them as 
 an independent power apart from, and outside of, 
 the State, would make such a perversion ex- 
 tremely probable. A hierarchy of priests under 
 a despotic Pope would soon cease to be, in any 
 sense, a spiritual power ; it would degenerate just 
 as the Papacy degenerated in the fourteenth 
 century ; and this would be only the more certain 
 if, by the Comtist denunciation of specialism, the 
 priests were prohibited, in their own peculiar 
 sphere of scientific research, from any division of 
 labour according to capacity. Por by this prohi- 
 bition their attention would be diverted from 
 
The Church against the State. 245 
 
 inquiries about the truth of their doctrines to 
 their immediate practical application ; not to 
 mention that, in the case of all but a few com- 
 prehensive minds, the natural result would be an 
 omniscient superficiality, which would be the 
 enemy of all real culture. Deprived of its natural 
 object as ° scientific order, the Comtist Priesthood 
 would inevitably throw itself, with all its energy, 
 into the task of directly influencing the practical 
 life of men ; and, if Comte's political ideas were 
 carried out, it would find itself in the presence 
 of a number of communal States, none of 
 them large enough to offer any effective resist- 
 ance. Positivism must indeed alter human 
 nature, if such a priesthood would not seek to 
 make itself despotic, especially if it could wield 
 such a formidable weapon as the Positivist ex- 
 communication is supposed to be.* 
 
 The truth is that Comte commits the same comte's 
 
 social ideal 
 
 error which misled Montesquieu when he sup- 1 1 °g a l n e ^ ly 
 posed that the great security of a free State lay 
 in the separation of the legislative, executive, 
 and judicial powers, — i.e., in treating the dif- 
 ferent organs through which the common life 
 * Pol. Pos. iv. p. 292. 
 
246 The Social Philosophy of Gomte. 
 
 expresses itself as if they were independent 
 organisms. He forgot that if such a balance 
 of power was realized, the effect must either be 
 an equilibrium in which all movement would 
 cease, or a struggle in which the unity of the 
 State would be in danger of being lost. The 
 true security against the dangers involved, on the 
 one hand, in the direct application of theory to 
 practice, and, on the other hand, in the too 
 great separation of practice from theory, must 
 lie, not in giving them independent positions as 
 spiritual and temporal powers, but in subordi- 
 nating them to the organic unity of the whole 
 society, whether it be communal, national, or 
 universal. And organic unity, though it does 
 not mean any special form of government, means 
 at least two things : in the first place, that each 
 great class or interest should have for itself a 
 definite organ, and should therefore be able to act 
 on the whole body in a regular and constitutional 
 manner, so as to show all its force without revolu- 
 tionary violence ; and, in the second place, that 
 no class or interest should have such an inde- 
 pendent position, as to exclude every legal or con- 
 stitutional method of bringing it into due subor- 
 
Comte and Kant. 247 
 
 ,/dination to the common good. But Comte, losing 
 
 ] his balance in his jealousy of the individualistic 
 
 and democratic movement of modern society, has 
 
 built up a social ideal, which fails in both these 
 
 points of views, and which, indeed, is a revival 
 
 of the inorganic structure of mediaeval society. 
 
 It would not be fair to conclude these chapters, comte's posi- 
 tion as a 
 which have necessarily been devoted in great part philosopher. 
 
 to criticism and controversy, without expressing 
 a sense of the power and insight which are shown 
 in the works of Comte, especially in the Politique 
 Positive. Controversy itself, it must be remem- 
 1 >ered, is a kind of homage ; for, as Hegel says, 
 " It is only a great man that condemns us to the ' 
 task of explaining him." But if we can some- 
 times look down upon such men, it becomes us 
 to remember that we stand upon their shoulders. 
 ( .'< >inte seems to me to occupy, as a writer, a posi- 
 tion in some degree analogous to that of Kant. 
 He stands, or rather moves, between the old 
 world and the new, and is broken into incon- 
 sistency by the effort of transition. Like Kant, 
 he is embarrassed to the end by the ideas with 
 which he started, and of which he can never free 
 himself so as to make a new beginning. Comte, 
 
24-8 The Social Philosophy of Comte. 
 
 indeed, had only a small portion of that power 
 of speculative analysis which characterized his 
 great predecessor, but he had much of his 
 tenacity of thought, his power of continuous 
 construction; he had the same conviction of 
 the all-importance of morals, and the same 
 determination to make all theoretic studies 
 subordinate to the solution of the moral prob- 
 lem. Also, partly because he lived at a later 
 time, and in the midst of a society which was 
 in the throes of a social revolution, and partly 
 because of the keenness and strength of his own 
 social sympathies, he gives us a kind of insight 
 into the diseases and wants of modern society, 
 which we could not expect from Kant, and which 
 throws new light upon the ethical speculations of 
 Kant's idealistic successors. To believe that his 
 system, as a whole, is inconsistent with itself, 
 that his theory of historical progress is insuffici- 
 ent, and that his social ideal is imperfect, need 
 not prevent us from recognizing that there are 
 many valuable elements in his historical and 
 social theories, and that no one who would study 
 such subjects can afford to neglect them. A 
 mind of such power cannot treat any subject 
 
His Position as a Pliilosopher. 24!) 
 
 without throwing much light upon it, which is 
 independent of his special system of thought, and, 
 above all, without doing much to show what are 
 the really important difficulties in it which need 
 to be solved. And, especially in such subjects, to 
 discover the right question is to be half-way to the 
 answer. Further, as Comte himself somewhere 
 says, it is an immense advantage in studying any 
 complex subject to have before us a distinct and 
 systematic attempt to explain it ; for it is only 
 by criticism upon criticism that we can expect to 
 reach the truth, in which its different sides and 
 aspects are brought to a unity. 
 
 END. 
 
 GLASGOW: ROBERT MACLEH08B, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY. 
 
New Edition in Preparation. 
 A CRITICAL ACCOUNT OF THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF KANT: with an Historical 
 Introduction. 
 
 By Edward Caird, M.A., LL.U., 
 
 Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, and late Fellow and Tutor 
 of Merton College, Oxford. 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 
 
 Third Thousand. Demy Svo. 10s. 6d. 
 By John Caird, D.D., 
 
 Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow, and one of Her Majesty s 
 Chaplains for Scotland. 
 
 "A book rich in the results of speculative study, broad in its intellectual 
 grasp, and happy in its original suggestiveness. To Dr. Caird we are 
 indebted for a subtle and masterly representation of Hegel's philosophy in its 
 solution of the problem cf religion. 
 
 " In addition to the literary skill which places his propositions in their 
 brightest light, and an earnestness of purpose which at times rises into 
 genuine eloquence, he possesses two qualifications which specially tit him for 
 his work : a spirit of reverence which places him in sympathy with mystical 
 and intentional minds ; and an intellectual vigour which enables him to stand 
 side by side with the ablest thinkers, to view the utmost border of their 
 extended range of vision, and, while he treats them with chivalrous fairness, 
 to grapple with their arguments." — Edinburgh Review. 
 
 " It is the business of the reviewer to give some notion of the book which 
 he reviews, either by a condensation of its contents or by collecting the cream 
 in the shape of short selected passages ; but this cannot be done with a book 
 like the one before us, of which the argument does not admit of condensation, 
 and which is all cream. . . . The most valuable book of its kind that has 
 appeared." — Mr. T. H. Green in The Academy. 
 
 " It is remarkable also for its marvellous power of exposition and graceful 
 subtlety of thought. Hegelianism has never appeared so attractive as it 
 appears in the clear and fluent pages of Principal Caird." — Spectator. 
 
 Demy 8vo. Cloth. Price 12s. 6d. 
 
 KANT AND HIS ENGLISH CRITICS— a 
 
 Comparison of Critical and Empirical Philosophy. 
 
 By John Watson, M.A., LL.U., 
 
 Professor of Moral Philosophy in Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. 
 
 " Decidedly the best exposition of Kant which we have seen in Knglish. 
 We cannot too strongly commend it." — Saturday Review. 
 
 "This book is written with clearness and precision, and the author is 
 thoroughly impregnated with the doctrine which he expounds, and makes it 
 as plain as it can be made without becoming other than it is." — Professor T. 
 H. Green, in The Academy. 
 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE & SONS, 
 Publishers to the University, Glasgow. 
 
 london and new york: macmillan and co. 
 
PROFESSOR NICHOL'S WORKS. 
 
 TABLES OF EUROPEAN HISTORY, 
 LITERATURE, AND ART, from a.d. 
 200 to 1882, and of American History, Liter- 
 ature, and Art. 
 
 By John Nichol, M.A., Balliol, Oxon., LL.D., 
 
 Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Glasgow. 
 
 Third Edition, revised and greatly enlarged. Royal 8vo. Printed 
 in Five Colours, ys. 6d. 
 
 " The Tables are clear, and form an admirable companion to the student of 
 history, or indeed to anyone who desires to revise his recollection of facts." — 
 Times. 
 
 " In a word, the great leading facts of European history for nearly seven- 
 teen hundred years are here compressed with wonderful clearness into a 
 single slim volume. The book is a triumph of systematization ; it embodies 
 the result of great research, and will be found an admirable guide to the 
 student, as well as useful for purposes of rapid reference." — Scotsman. 
 
 "About as convenient a book of reference as could be found." — Spectator. 
 
 "To the devotees of literature and history Prof. Nichol's Tables will be 
 simply invaluable." — Leeds Mercury. 
 
 "These Tables, set out as they are with all the advantages of clear arrange- 
 ment, and of excellent typography, are likely to be most useful." — Pall Mail 
 Gazette. 
 
 TABLES OF ANCIENT LITERATURE AND 
 HISTORY, from B.C. 1500 to a.d. 200. 
 
 4 to. Cloth. 4-r. 6d. 
 
 " They constitute a most successful attempt to give interest to the chro- 
 nology of literature, by setting before the eye the relation between the litera- 
 ture and the practical life of mankind." — Obseiver. 
 
 THE DEATH OF THEMISTOCLES and other 
 Poems. 
 
 Extra f cap. 8vo. ys. 6d. 
 
 " Dignified, careful, conscientious work throughout." — Saturday Review. 
 
 "A hymn more solemnly beautiful than ' Donna Vera ' was never chanted 
 to Pallas herself by the most inspired of her ancient votaries." — Glasgow 
 Herald. 
 
 "Professor Nichol is a master of the English epic metre." — Scotsman. 
 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE & SONS, 
 Publishers to the University, Glasgow. 
 
 london and new york: macmillan and co 
 
 AUG 319^0 
 
L'BRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 020 196 872 
 
 liillillilllliis IllliiilillilliliSf 1 
 illiilfllllllil!:; ig Ij ' ] 
 
 1 
 ! 
 
 1 
 1 
 
 I 
 
 ! 1