Comte could not but have learned from Saint-Simon a law of two states substantially the same as that which has become so closely associated with his own name; one to which he only added a term which few even of his disciples seem to think on a parity with the other two, and which others of them appear not unwilling altogether to extrude. Comte may have been quite sincere in affirming the whole conception to have been his own; but the affirmation itself was certainly not true, and only showed how little either his memory or judgment could, after the rupture of 1822, be trusted as to his obligations to his former friend and master.

With the age of Bacon and Descartes, according to SaintSimon, the day of positive science began to dawn out of the night of theological conjecture. And first astronomy, with the help of mathematics, next physics, and then chemistry, came under the beams of the light; the reason of this order being that the facts of astronomy are the simplest, and those of chemistry the most complicated. Physiology, more concrete and complex still than chemistry, is as yet partly conjectural and partly positive, although on the eve of becoming completely positive. When it has done so, philosophy itself will attain to positivity. "For the special sciences are the elements of general science; general science, that is to say, philosophy, could not but be conjectural so long as the special sciences were so; was necessarily partly conjectural and partly positive when one portion of the special sciences had become special while another was still conjectural, and will be quite positive when all the special sciences are positive, which will happen when physiology and psychology are based on observed and tested facts, as there is no phenomenon which is not astronomical, chemical, physiological, or psychological. We know, therefore, at what epoch the philosophy taught in the schools will become positive." It is only when the sciences have all become positive that society can. be rationally organised; for religion, general politics, morality, and education, are only applications of principles which must be furnished by science. Such is Saint-Simon's view of philosophy or general science, and of the place occupied therein by the science of history. This view was derived from Dr Burdin, and is substantially the same, as I have said, with that of M.

Comte. As it is most explicitly stated in the 'Mémoire sur la Science de l'Homme,' written five years before the commencement of Comte's intercourse with Saint-Simon, there is no room for doubt that the former received it from the latter. It is quite in vain to say, as M. Littré does, that that work ought to be regarded as non-existent, seeing that although written in 1813 and sent to certain persons whose names are known, it was not published till 1859; for, first, the list to which M. Littré refers contains only the names of twenty-eight distinguished public men, leaving Saint-Simon, as sixty copies of his book were printed, thirty-two to dispose of among his personal friends and disciples at a time when these were very few; and further, the work is incontestable evidence that Saint-Simon possessed certain ideas in 1813, which it is simply impossible to believe he would not communicate to any person who was on such terms of intimacy with him as Comte was some years later It will be obvious from what has been said that Saint-Simon was aware of the closeness of the connection between the science of history and physical science. Indeed he conceived of it as far closer than he was warranted to do. He regarded the science of history as a physical science; in other words, refused to recognise the distinctions which exist between the physical and moral worlds, or at least that any of these distinctions necessitate essentially different explanations of physical and moral phenomena. He had consequently to attempt to bring physical law over into the moral world, and into history a province of the moral world. His attempt was a very curious one, and he himself came to acknowledge that it was unsuccessful. Fancying that the unity of the system of nature and the unity of science implied that there was one all-pervasive law from which every other law and fact in existence might be derived, he was led by obvious and superficial considerations to believe gravitation that law, and to maintain that it accounted for chemical and biological, and even mental and historical, phenomena; that gravitation was, in fact, the law of the universe, of the solar system, of the earth, of man, of society, or, generally, of the whole and all its parts; and that if other laws had the appearance of independence, it was only because they had not yet been reduced under or deduced from it.

The social atmosphere seems to have been full of ideas of this kind when he wrote. His rival Fourier was at the same time insisting with much greater emphasis that the central social law was what he called the law of passional attraction, which he believed to be a rigorous deduction from Newton's law; and M. Azais, with copious speech and too facile pen, was explaining everything in the material, mental, and social worlds by expansion. Of course, all these attempts at universal explanation must be regarded as utter failures. No explanation of the kind aimed at has yet been reached even for the physical world, and there seem to be no good reasons for supposing that any such explanation ever will be reached. Far less likely is it, however, that the mind will ever attain to a unity so absolute that it will account at once for all the phenomena of matter and of spirit, which have so little in common and so much in contrast. To establish that the law which regulates the motions of material masses is likewise that which reigns in the reason, conscience, affections, and will of man, and which determines their evolution in history, must be regarded as a task far surpassing in difficulty any achieved by Newton; and it may safely be said that neither Saint-Simon, nor Fourier, nor Azais has given us anything designed to that end which has even the semblance of long - sustained reasoning and profound truth. They had, indeed, no better reason for their transference of physical law into the spiritual world than the existence of those analogies between the physical and the spiritual the recognition of which is the source of metaphorical language. To talk of the gravitation or attraction, or expansion of the thoughts or feelings of the individual, or of the successive or coexistent states of society, is purely such language; and the whole argumentation of those who maintain spiritual fact and law to be reducible to material fact is a process in which they cheat their minds by understanding figurative speech literally. Serious as Saint-Simon's error was, it is not, as M. Littré maintained, conclusive against his claims to be ranked among positivists. It has nothing to do with that claim, but is simply a case of false explanation of phenomena. It differs from Comte's own reduction of psychology under biology only in degree; it is a greater error, but the same sort of error.

As

it does not proceed on the assumption that the mind can know anything beyond phenomena and their laws, it cannot be pronounced, on the mere ground of falsity, inconsistent with positive philosophy. It must be further remarked that SaintSimon does not appear to have promulgated the idea in any of his works written subsequently to 1814, and that he stated to M. Olinde Rodrigues that he had found reason to abandon it.

In the judgment of Saint-Simon, Vicq-d'Azir, Cabanis, Bichat, and Condorcet were those among his immediate predecessors who had advanced most the science of man; and Condorcet he regarded as the person who had done most for that part of the science of man which is conversant with history. He took, in fact, precisely the same view of the speculations in Condorcet's 'Esquisse' and of the relation of his own speculations to them which we find subsequently taken and expressed by Comte in both of his great works; that is to say, while censuring the exaggerations, the prejudices, the manifold errors of omission and commission with which the book abounds, he accepted its leading principles, that man must be studied as a species no less than as an individual; that generations are so bound to generations that the species is progressive and perfectible; that human development is subject to law and passes through a series of phases; and that from the past the future may be so far foreseen, as true and fundamental, as requiring only development and a more careful application. He professed to do no more than to build on the foundation constituted by these principles.

The idea which Condorcet merely incidentally expresses, that "the progress of society is subject to the same general laws observable in the individual development of our faculties, being the result of that very development considered at once in a great number of individuals," seems to me the central principle of the Saint-Simonian philosophy of history. "General intelligence and individual intelligence are developed according to the same law. These two phenomena differ only as regards the size of the scales on which they have been constructed." This being his guiding thought, Saint-Simon naturally compares, as so many others have done, the periods of human life to the stadia of history. A fondness for building,

digging, using tools, seems to him distinctive of childhood in the individual, and of the Egyptians in the race; a love of music, painting, and poetry, of youth from puberty to twentyfive, and of the Greeks; military ambition, of most men from that age till they are forty-five, and of the Romans among nations; while at forty-five the active forces of the individual begin to diminish, but his intellectual forces, imagination excepted, to increase, or at least to be better employed-and to this age corresponds the era of humanity inaugurated by the Saracens, to whom we are indebted for algebra, chemistry, physiology, &c. The race is now about the middle of its allotted course, or at that epoch when the human mind is in fullest possession both of imagination and reason. Our predecessors had, relatively to reason, too much imagination, and our descendants will have too little. A year of individual life probably answers to about two centuries in that of the species. It was thus that our author worked out a parallelism which is too fanciful to require criticism. But his principle led him to other thoughts which, whether true or not, are at least suggestive.

One of these is the doctrine of an ever-recurring alternation of organic and critical periods in history. It is constantly implied, and often partially stated by Saint-Simon; but its clearest expression is due to Bazard, who in this as in several other instances, has expounded his master's thought better than he succeeded in doing himself. The doctrine is to this effect. The human spirit manifests its rational activity in analysis. and synthesis, in ascending from particulars to generals, and in descending from generals to particulars. These are the two directions either of which it may, and one of which it must, take when it reasons; an upward and downward, an a posteriori and a priori direction. The general process inclusive of both, Saint-Simon proposed should be designated by the rather extraordinary name of the Descartes. The twofold procedure of reason is not confined to the individual mind, but regulates the development of the race as a whole. Societies, like individuals, employ sometimes analysis and sometimes synthesis; and this determines whether the epoch which they pass through will be critical or organic. All history may be divided