a clear recognition of the truth that the special developments of human activity are not successive epochs of history. Littré's distinctive theory affirms that they are so. To me Littré seems entirely wrong, and Comte thoroughly right.

Littré believed his law to have the advantage over Comte's of being not only empirical but rational. Comte, however, held the law of the three states to be rational as well as empirical. He has explicitly and repeatedly argued that it can be reached by deduction no less than by induction, and is not merely a description of the ascertained course of human events, a general statement of historical fact, but a law of which the a priori reason is known, and which is the expression not simply of what has happened, but of what, from the very nature of the human mind, must have happened. In contrasting the law of the three states with a law of four states as an empirical with a rational law, Littré overlooked both the direct claims made by Comte on behalf of the first-mentioned law, and the numerous passages in which he attempted to assign its logical, moral, and social grounds. He may have failed to prove it to be rationally or philosophically necessary; but he certainly took much more trouble in endeavouring to do so than Littré himself took in connection with the alleged law of four states.

It is only necessary further to remark that the law of the three states so restricted as Littré would restrict it cannot possibly be a fundamental law of history. If it be, as he represents it, empirical in character in the humblest sense of the term, and confined to a single sphere of human activity, and to one of the four ages of history, it can only be at the most a law of secondary importance, and the pretensions put forth by Comte in connection with it, and unanimously and enthusiastically endorsed by his disciples, must have been highly extravagant. However, even after all his admissions and restrictions, instead of confessing that what Comtists had hitherto so exultingly proclaimed as the greatest, most fundamental, most distinctive discovery of their master, the so-called central law of social evolution as much as gravitation is of the solar system, had been found to be a very imperfect and incomplete achievement, the recognition of a mere fragment or section

of the truth, Littré showed himself quite unconscious that any such confession was needed.

The mode of thought which found expression in the naturalism of Charles Comte and the positivism of Auguste Comte became the predominant one in France. For nearly half a century it has been more prevalent and powerful than any other. We can see the effects of it everywhere,—in the tone of society, in the conduct of life, in politics, in poetry and other arts, in fiction, and in the aims and efforts of science and speculation. But this is largely owing to its having escaped from the confinement of a particular philosophical school, and dissociated itself from any very definite or much developed doctrine. The positivism which now prevails in France and elsewhere, is indistinguishable from naturalism, experientialism, and materialism; is indefinitely variable in its forms; and is pledged only to the acknowledgment of a few rather vague general principles. It is little more than a mode of thought, a tendency of spirit. Its most obvious characteristic is its distrust of all pretensions to the possession of absolute truth; its aversion to all belief in the supersensuous; its contentment with a reference of phenomena of any kind to antecedent and contiguous phenomena as an adequate elucidation. Positivism thus understood has penetrated into all departments of history, and made its influence strongly felt within them all.

It has undoubtedly contributed to the spread and enlargement of historical study; but it has also, I think, considerably biassed and depraved it. The positivist spirit necessarily looks at all things historically, and treats as history whatever can be so treated; but it also naturally loves to attach itself specially to the consideration of those sections or phases of human history which it can most easily represent as being developments of merely natural history, and from which it can most plausibly conclude that there is no essential and immutable truth in thought, religion, or morality. This largely accounts for the predilection which writers imbued with it have shown for anthropology, ethnology, prehistoric archæology, and the comparative study of religions and of languages, as well as for

a want of scientific impartiality too often apparent in their works. M. Hovelacque, Lefèvre, Letourneau, Topinard, E. Véron, and many others, might be referred to in proof and illustration of the statement. The treatises which they have produced in the departments of historical study mentioned, although in various respects highly useful and meritorious, are far from being uniformly trustworthy, the anti-theological and anti-metaphysical fanaticism of their authors having frequently led them not only to draw their conclusions hastily, but to collect their data uncritically.

The power of the positivist and naturalist tendencies of the age has made itself deplorably conspicuous in France, by giving rise to a school or rather generation of littérateurs whose ambition has been to make even their novels studies in natural history, delineations of individual and social existence, from which all spiritual elements and ethical motives have been carefully eliminated, while bestial passions and physiological or pathological laws are exhibited as the sole springs of human action, the forces which really sway human nature. That it should also have shown itself in the transformation of certain disciplines which had previously been treated as theoretical or practical into historical was what was to be expected. The most striking example, perhaps, of a change of this kind, is that which was mainly effected by Sainte-Beuve in literary criticism.

Charles August Sainte-Beuve (1804-69) must be acknowledged to have been among the most eminent of the literary critics of the present century, even if we restrict the signification of literary criticism to appreciation of the phenomena or products of literature; for incessant and comprehensive study, and the varied and careful culture of a pliant and penetrating judgment and delicate æsthetic sensibilities, had given him a vast and exquisite familiarity with the achievements of art through the instrumentality of language. He was, however, even more an historian than a critic; occupied himself more with authors than their books. Each literary work seemed to him to be a product of mind only capable of being understood by a study of the character, genius, temperament, bodily constitution, education, ancestry, race, country, and intellectual, moral, and social

surroundings of the individual who produced it. Such is the positivist method as it was applied to criticism by a man of fine taste and rare talent, and applied in the freest and most genial way, without any systematic exclusiveness or dogmatic narrowness. It may, perhaps, be justly held that the method was at times unfavourable even to Sainte-Beuve's work as a critic; and that, in that capacity, he would not infrequently have been more profitably occupied in the direct study of the writings under his examination than in the collection of biographical and historical data, with the hope of being thereby able to throw a fuller light on them than that which they possessed in themselves. But it cannot be doubted that, owing to his predilection for the method, we have in his 'Portraits Littéraires,' 'Causeries du Lundi,' and 'Nouveaux Causeries,' taken collectively, one of the richest contributions made to history, and especially to literary history, by any single individual in this age. His 'Histoire of Port-Royal' (6 vols.) is not merely a complete account of the famous Jansenist community immortalised by the genius and piety of the Arnaulds, of Saint-Cyran, Pascal, De Sacy, and their friends, but the most brilliant and instructive representation yet given of the religious life of France in the days of Louis XIV.

The late M. Renan (1823-92) entertained a very poor opinion of A. Comte and his philosophy. He was of too tolerant a temperament and too familiar with doubts and difficulties to have any sympathy with a nature so arrogant and dogmatic. He was too learned to be able to overlook Comte's ignorance of historical and other facts which he pretended to reduce under rigid laws. He had too delicate a perception of the fitnesses of things not to be shocked by the want of common-sense and ordinary foresight shown in many of the doctrines and prophecies of the founder of "the religion of humanity." A writer of the lightest and deftest touch, master of a style so simple and graceful that it never ceases to charm and enliven the reader, he naturally regarded the strong and original but lumbering and overloaded sentences of Comte as "bad French." He rejected "the law of the three states," and, so far as I know, all Comte's other laws, as generalisations faulty in excess; and he thought

that such truths as he had expressed, Descartes, Voltaire, D'Alembert, and others, had uttered before him in more appropriate language.

Yet M. Renan may, without any substantial injustice, be numbered among positivists. He discarded theology and metaphysics as entirely as Comte. Only positive science, he held, could supply men with the truths without which life would be insupportable and science impossible. He believed in the ideal but not in the supernatural; in God and Providence, but as "categories of thought." What may be called his pantheism is neither more nor less inconsistent with positivism than was Comte's ascription of self-activity to matter, and of divinity to humanity; it was a belief that there is a latent living reason in everything, and that in the course of millions of years the universe may evolve an absolute consciousness, and so bring forth God, although there is at present no trace either in nature or history of any will higher than the human.

History has been Renan's favourite department of study; and in historical study he has sought to employ the method of the natural sciences. He early saw, and set forth with admirable clearness of view and statement, the fact that nature has had a history as well as humanity, and that evolution is a conception of fundamental significance both in the physical and human sphere. At the same time he rejected fatalism and necessitarianism, accepting the belief in freedom as sufficiently attested by consciousness. Nor can he be charged with having identified the physical and the spiritual, or having unduly subordinated the latter to the former, as so many positivists and naturalists have done. On the contrary, it is one of his chief merits to have clearly seen that history must be explained from within, not from without. No one has more fully recognised that it cannot be justly considered to have been understood until it has yielded a psychology of humanity-i.e., led to a scientific knowledge of the formation and growth of consciousness, or of the development of mind, on earth. His predilection for the study of languages and of religions was intimately connected with his interest in human nature and his sense of the importance of a psychology of humanity. Languages and religions are the clearest and most truthful mirrors of the mind and heart of