amount of change effected. A human nature in itself utterly empty and passive must be built up through the senses from without. It may be the subject of history, but it cannot be also its chief factor. Here lay Charles Comte's radical error. He failed to perceive that the intelligence, the imagination, the passions, the conscience, and the will of man are more direct and powerful historical agencies than climate or soil. The human soul itself is the main and distinctive source of history. History is essentially the work and manifestation of human nature. A true science of history can only be attained through the investigation of history as a psychological phenomenon,—a product of mind, influenced but not generated by the physical medium in which it appears.1

Auguste Comte was born at Montpellier in 1798. Although both his parents were Legitimists and Catholics, he had become at fourteen years of age a republican and an unbeliever. He was educated at the Lyceum of Montpellier (1807-14), and at the Polytechnic School of Paris (1814-16), from which he was expelled on account of insubordination. As a student he was diligent but intractable; he excelled especially in mathematics, but gave proofs of a generally powerful intellect, and devoted much time to private reading and reflection. While at the Polytechnic School he perused the works of most of the leading philosophical writers of the eighteenth century. Shortly after his expulsion from it he began his literary career.2 From 1817

1 The fourth volume of the 'Traité' is one of the best studies on slavery and its effects ever published.

2 The earliest essay of Comte which has been published, 'Mes réflexions,' is of date June 1816. It is, for the most part, a parallel between "the tyrants of the Terror and the tyrants of the Restoration," in which "eleven points of resemblance" are insisted upon. It displays an intense hatred of Louis XVIII. It gives expression also to that aversion to Napoleon which Comte retained to the end of his life, and which led him to recommend, in the fourth volume of the 'System of Positive Polity,' that the ashes of the Conqueror should be sent back to St Helena, his column in the Place Vendôme cast down, and “ a noble statue of Charlemagne, the incomparable founder of the Western Republic" substituted for it. This essay first appeared in Renouvier's 'Crit. phil.' for June 1882. The Appendix to the fourth volume of the 'System' contains a series of essays originally published at various dates between 1819 and 1828, including that of 1822, in which Comte first stated what he regarded as his great discovery of the law of the Three States. These essays are very interesting, exhibit the best qualities of their author's mind, and form the best introduction

to 1824 he was closely associated with Saint-Simon. In 1826 he began to expound his philosophy in a course of lectures, which was interrupted for a lengthened period by insanity. The first volume of his 'Cours de philosophie positive' appeared in 1830, and the last (sixth) in 1842. This is far the most important of his works; and is even, perhaps, notwithstanding many imperfections, the most important work which had appeared up to the time of its publication in one great department of philosophy-philosophy as the theory of the sciences, or, as Comte calls it, positive philosophy. And whatever else philosophy may or should be, it is clearly bound to be what Comte, in his great work, represents it with so much ability and general truthfulness as being-namely, science, yet not merely a special science, but the science which has the processes and results of all the special sciences for its data: the general or universal science which has so risen above the special and particular in science as to be able to contemplate the sciences as parts of a system which reflects and elucidates a world of which the variety is not more wonderful than the unity. With the completion of his 'Cours' Comte worthily closed the first period or phase of his philosophical career. He had, as he thought, elaborated a strictly scientific philosophy, based on the co-ordination and generalisation of all the sciences, and established and evolved in a truly rational manner. He held that he had transformed science into philosophy by a selfconsistent and comprehensive logical process which advances from the general to the special, from the universe to man; and this so as to show the falsity and futility of all theological and metaphysical philosophy, and to provide an indispensable and solid basis for a definitive doctrine of social organisation, such

to his other writings. They were collected and republished by him in order to prove that his "political system, far from being opposed to his philosophy, is so completely its outcome, that the latter was created as the basis of the former." He had published others which have not yet been identified; and which he did not wish to be brought to light, for the reason given in the following naïve and suggestive words: "Those alone are preserved which reveal any characteristic aspirations, all such being set aside as betray the unfortunate personal influence that overshadowed my earliest efforts. . I disavow any other edition, and I have destroyed the unpublished materials."-See Special Preface to General Appendix. My quotations from the 'System' are from the English translation, which is an almost perfect rendering of the original.

as he had from the beginning of his connection with SaintSimon had in view. But he had still to work out this doctrine. To do so was the task to which he devoted the second part of his life that in which the following works were produced: 'Discours sur l'ensemble du positivisme,' 1848, 'Système de politique positive,' 1851-54, Catéchisme positiviste,' 1852, and 'Synthèse subjective,' 1856. The 'Système' embodies nearly the whole thinking of Comte's life during the second period. It was deemed by its author his chief work, and is generally so regarded by orthodox Comtists-a judgment in which I cannot at all concur. The general results which had been reached in the 'Cours' are retained in the 'Système,' and the end to which the former was designed to be a preparation is in the latter directly sought to be realised; but the points of view taken up in the two works are opposed, the methods followed are different, and the general character of the doctrine in passing from the one to the other has been profoundly changed. In the later years of his life Comte was absorbed in the exercise of his functions as "the high priest of humanity," and in endeavouring to gain converts to his system of polity and worship. He died on the 5th September 1857, in Paris, at Rue Monsieur-le-Prince 10-the most sacred spot on earth in the eyes of the religious positivists of all lands.1

Comte's philosophy of nature and of history originated in the interaction within his mind of the chief intellectual and

1 As to the life, system, and influence of Comte, in addition to his own works already mentioned, his letters to Valat, and his 'Testament,' the following writings may be indicated as among those most worthy of being consulted: Littré, 'Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive,' and 'Fragments de philo. sophie positive'; Robinet, 'Notice sur l'œuvre et sur la vie d' A. Comte'; 'Revue Occidentale,' 1878-92; C. de Blignières, 'Exposition de la philosophie positive'; Ch. Pellarin, 'Essai critique sur la philosophie positive'; Poëy, 'Le positivisme'; Lewes, 'Philosophy of the Sciences'; J. S. Mill, 'Auguste Comte and Positivism'; E. Caird, 'The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte'; and Hermann Gruber, S. J., 'August Comte, der Begründer des Positivismus,' and 'Der Positivismus vom Tode August Comte's bis auf unsere Tage' (1857-1891). Among the host of pamphlets, lectures, and essays on Comtism which have appeared in this country, those of Bridges, Congreve, Harrison, Huxley, Martineau, Spencer, Tulloch, Whewell, &c., are too well known to require to be more exactly specified. Similar publications have been at least as numerous in France, and not rare in Germany, Italy, and America.

social movements in the France of his age. It was a sort of synthesis, instructive even in its inconsistency because reflecting the incoherence and self-contradiction of a disorganised and transitional epoch. It can only be understood aright when viewed in relation to the movements and tendencies to which it owed its being and form.

Comte was thoroughly French, the direct and immediate influences which moulded his life and doctrine being almost exclusively French. He was very slightly affected by German thought. He was to the end of his life virtually ignorant of German philosophy. In 1843 he consulted Mr Mill as to the advisability of making some general acquaintance with German philosophical doctrines, but, on being dissuaded, abandoned the idea.1 It is true that in 1824 his friend M. d'Eichtal sent him from Berlin a translation which he had made for him of Kant's short essay, "Idea of a Universal History," and that Comte expressed in reply the warmest admiration of it; but in 1824 he had already discovered his sociological laws, and his political convictions were definitively formed. There are no traces in his writings of acquaintance with either the metaphysical or ethical works of Kant. It is quite certain that his classification of the sciences was not suggested, as J. D. Morell and others have supposed, by acquaintance with Schelling's successive "potences" of the Absolute. He once pronounced Hegel "un homme de mérite," but it was when he hoped he might be made use of to spread positivism in Germany; and he has assigned him a place in the 'Positivist Calendar,' but as the coequal of Sophie Germain. Any coincidences which have been pointed out between the views of Comte and Hegel are of such a nature as would not, although multiplied fifty-fold, prove in the least that the former had borrowed from the latter. They relate to views of which Hegel was neither the author nor the sole proprietor, which he only shared with hundreds of other thinkers, and which were current in the catholic and socalistic medium in which Comte lived. Why label as "Hegelian" what were commonplaces among the adherents of socialism and the theological reaction? Why suppose Comte to have derived from a distance opinions

1 Littré, 'Auguste Comte,' pp. 446, 447.

which were floating in the intellectual atmosphere around him, and to be had for the inbreathing?1

The generation which lived under the First Empire knew no other philosophy than that which had become prevalent before the Revolution. Comte came under the influence of this philosophy in early youth; at the Polytechnic School he read the works of most of its leading representatives. He accepted its cardinal principle that "thought depends on sense, or, more broadly, on the environment;" he became imbued with its aversion to metaphysics and theology, and with its ardent faith in physical science; and he set himself to build up all the materials of knowledge into one grand and solid edifice, resting on the foundation which it had laid. Considered simply as a philosophy, the positivism of Comte is essentially a continuation of the empirical philosophy of the eighteenth century, any superority over earlier forms of that philosophy being mainly due to the remarkable development of the several sciences which have been combined by it into a single theoretical system. It is otherwise with positivism as a social doctrine. Social and religious reactions generally precede philosophical reactions. In France the social and religious reaction was in full force before the philosophical reaction made itself felt. Comte yielded to it. Hence two contrary and contending currents of thought met and mingled in his mind, and made of his intellectual life an inherent and permanent contradiction. He was intensely hostile to what he regarded as the anarchical and revolutionary tendencies of the eighteenth century. He hated individualism, laisser faire, and such "'rights of man" as private judgment, human equality, and sovereignty of the people. His sympathies were more with the reaction than with the Revolution. He speaks of the

1 Comte owed more to Scottish than to German writers. Hume he acknowledges to have been his "chief philosophical precursor"; and he often so refers to him as to show that he had studied both his 'Essays' and his 'History.' He avows his indebtedness to Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations'; and, writing in 1825, says of the 'Philosophical Essay on the History of Astronomy': "This work, too little known on the Continent, and generally insufficiently appreciated, is more positive in its character than the other productions of Scottish philosophy, those of Hume excepted. Remarkable in its day, it may even yet be studied with great advantage."-Pos. Pol., iv. 591. He has given both Robertson and Ferguson a place in the 'Positivist Calendar.'