3. Polytheism he has treated of with fulness, regarding it as the most prolonged of the theological phases. Its rise he attributes to the gradual concentration of fetichism, and to the growth of self-consciousness and will. On the one hand, man necessarily comes in the course of his observation of objects to perceive that they have permanent attributes and relations, and is thus enabled to group them into genera. On the other hand, he also comes to feel his distinctness from nature, to oppose his will to the action of external things, to struggle with the world in order to subdue and utilise it, and to seek auxiliaries in this struggle. In other words, he is led both to consider the qualities common to several objects as independent of each of them, and to separate the Divine from objects, or to refer phenomena to invisible supernatural Wills. Thus fetiches give place to gods who are generalisations personified, matter being thenceforth looked on as inert, objects as passive. In this process of transition the working of the metaphysical spirit already shows itself at once modifying and undermining theology. While Comte deems polytheism inferior to fetichism as a religion, he fully recognises it to have been much more favourable to intellectual culture. He points out with remarkable insight and ingenuity how it contributed to the rise and development of science, art, and industry; and how it was related to the military spirit, priestly influence, slavery, political organisation, &c. All the general portion of his treatment of polytheism-what he calls his "abstract appreciation" of itis admirable. His "concrete appreciation" of it is the special treatment of what he describes as its three chief forms: the Egyptian, which is conservative and theocratic; the Greek, which is progressive and intellectual; and the Roman, which is also progressive but predominantly military and social. It is also rich in excellent observations and truly philosophical views, but it likewise contains many errors, mostly due to inadequate study of the facts. While its merits, however, are rare and conspicuous, of exceptional value, and of essential significance, its defects are, in general, merely blemishes, more disfiguring than destructive, which may be overlooked or eliminated. When attempting to account for the transition from polytheism to monotheism, Comte falls into some of his worst mistakes.

Nothing need here be said to show how baseless are such hypotheses as that the Jews were a monotheistic colony from Egypt or Chaldea; that Christ was "no extraordinary type of moral perfection," but simply "one of the many adventurers who were constantly making efforts to inaugurate monotheism, and aspiring, like their Greek forerunners, to the honours of personal apotheosis;" and that Paul, "perceiving the useful purpose to which the dawning success of Christ might be turned, voluntarily subordinated himself to Him," and became the true founder of Catholicism.

4. We thus reach the age of Catholic monotheism. Comte shows slight esteem for its monotheistic doctrine, but high admiration of its social spirit and institutions. The claim has been put in for him that he was the first worthily to appreciate the middle age. It is a claim, I need scarcely say, which cannot be seriously maintained. He himself expressly ascribes the honour to those to whom it was more due, the chiefs of the theological school, whose reaction, however, in this as in other respects was but a sign of a general change in the current of European thought, which began in Germany, and only reached France after having passed through England. But although the claim be absurd, and although it be strange that, after Thierry's celebrated account of the rise and spread in France of correct views as to the middle ages, it should have been made, yet Comte is entitled to the honour of having estimated their character and significance on the whole well, and even in some respects better than any of his predecessors. The medieval Church, feudalism, and scholasticism, are appreciated in their general relations and influences with comprehensiveness and truthfulness; and, in fact, all the great systems of speculation and religion belonging to Western Europe down to the Reformation are judged of, so far as they can be regarded merely as historical phenomena, with a fairness and insight surprising in a man whose own views as to speculation and religion were so peculiar. I wish this, however, to be understood as merely a general judgment, and as not inconsistent with the conviction. that there are great errors even in his analysis of medieval society. The good accomplished by the Catholic Church in the middle ages cannot be justly ascribed to the extent which he

has done merely to the merits of its organisation and the wisdom of its priesthood. The Christian truth contained in its doctrine must be allowed to have done far more than simply "lent itself to the situation." What Comte admired in the medieval world was its order and discipline; whatever in it tended to establish and preserve the unity of its faith, to discourage doubt, and to repress intellectual and spiritual independence. It owed its greatness in his eyes to its having made faith the first of duties and shown no tolerance to dissenters. In this respect his view of it was as one-sided and reactionary as that of De Maistre; and, in addition, logically most inconsistent, and morally most equivocal, seeing that he had himself no belief in the truth of the doctrine for the support of which he deemed that falsehood and persecution had been laudable.

5. "The theological philosophy and military polity, supreme in antiquity, and modified and enfeebled in the middle age, decline and dissolve in the transitional modern period, in preparation for a new and permanent organic state of society." This traditional modern period is the epoch of that "metaphysical philosophy" which substitutes for deities entities, for personifications abstractions. It is, according to Comte, distinctively a period of negation, criticism, and anarchy. Of its spirit and ideals he shows a cordial dislike. On its chief forces and institutions he seldom looks with an impartial or favourable eye. To the philosophy of the eighteenth century and to Protestantism, for example, he is decidedly unjust, seeing both only on their negative side, and regarding them as stages of a merely critical and destructive movement. There was a great deal more than that to be seen in them. The philosophy of the eighteenth century had serious faults and disastrous consequences; but it also signally promoted principles and ideas of incalculable value. The work which it accomplished was not one of mere negation, or of simple transition, but one which is likely to be as enduring as the future of humanity itself. If Protestantism rejected and discarded much, it was in the interest of truths displaced, disfigured, and almost extinguished by what it renounced; and if it insisted on the rights of reason, it equally insisted

on the claims of legitimate, i.e., reasonable spiritual authority, both divine and human. The reader must not suppose, however, that Comte's treatment of the metaphysical period was exclusively negative and censorious; it was only predominantly so. He has not failed to realise that alongside of the negative movement there was a positive movement, directly tending to and preparing for a definitive and perfect reorganisation; nor did he fail to attempt to indicate its course and results both as an industrial and an intellectual development.

6. In the third or positive stage of history the mind recognises, according to Comte, that it can only know phenomena and their relations of succession and coexistence or laws; that it is vain for it to seek acquaintance with divine volitions, substances, forces, or final causes. His account of this stage is largely also a theory of the future of man. It is to be found in what he regarded as its definitive form in his Positivist Catechism,' 'Positivist Calendar,' and especially in the fourth volume of his 'System of Positive Polity.' I have no wish to enter into an examination of the scheme of faith and discipline, of intellectual and industrial, spiritual and social organisation, expounded in these works. I readily admit that there is a good deal which is true and valuable in it; but, as a whole, it seems to me a most monstrous combination of fetichism, scepticism, and catholicism, of sense and folly, of science and sentimental drivel. It assumed as a fundamental truth that belief in the entire subordination of the individual to society, which, more than any other error, vitiated the political philosophy and political practice of classical antiquity, and from which Christianity emancipated the European mind. It proposed to organise the definitive society of the future according to the medieval pattern; to intrust the government of it to a temporal and spiritual power-a patriciate and a clergy-the former centring in a supreme triumvirate, and the latter in a supreme pontiff,-and the two conjointly regulating the whole lives, bodily and mental, affective and active, private and public, in minute conformity to the creed of Comte; and even, while forbidding belief in the existence of God and of the

1

immortality of the soul, to impose a varied and elaborate worship.1

The great aim of Comte in the latest period of his life—i.e., from 1847 until his death in 1857-was to transform his philosophy into a religion, and to apply his religion to the regulation and systematisation of all the activities and institutions of humanity. The doctrine which he inculcated during this period was largely evolved from that which he taught in his earlier and more sober-minded period; but it was also largely a reaction from it, and irreconcilable with it. Dr Bridges, and many other positivists of the so-called orthodox school, have laboured to make out the unity of Comte's life and doctrine. It seems to me that they have failed. They have satisfactorily proved, indeed, "that the conception of an organised spiritual power was not one of Comte's later speculations, but one of his earliest; that social reconstruction was from the first and to the last the dominant motive of his life; and that the 'Philosophie Positive' was consciously wrought out not as an end in itself, but as the necessary basis for a renovated education, the foundation of a new social order." But this has never been

1 It is when treating of the positivist age and the organisation of the future that Comte expounds what he calls his "fundamental theory of the Great Being" —i.e., Humanity (Pos. Pol., vol. iv. ch. 1). The pretentious way in which he states his conclusions is very characteristic, and their futility is very obvious. "The Great Being" is defined as "the whole constituted by the beings, past, future, and present, which co-operate willingly in perfecting the order of the world; " and more succinctly as "the continuous whole formed by the beings which converge." It is, we are informed, a real and indivisible Being, more distinct and definite than the family or the country, and has laws of its own both internal and external. It does not consist of all human individuals. Its "unworthy parasites in human form " are to be "eliminated"; and it must be judged of by its adult state, which is just "beginning," not by its childhood and adolescence, which we have as yet only before us. Although "every gregarious animal race" answers so far to the definition of "humanity," we are justified in overlooking such races; but we must recognise as integral portions of the Great Being the animals which voluntarily aid man.' Humanity consists chiefly of the dead, who are "the patrons and protectors of the living." "The dead alone can represent humanity; they collectively really constitute humanity; the living, born her children, as a rule become her servants, unless they degenerate into mere parasites." The dead have no objective existence, but they have "a subjective life, which is the true sphere of the soul's superiority." "No amount of superiority, however, can call the subjective life into existence, or give it permanence for this it is dependent on the objective." It is on the ground of such teaching as this that Comte claims to have developed and completed "the preliminary aperçus of Pascal, Leibnitz, and Condorcet."