himself. Tecum habita et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex. Now the peculiarity of Comte's position is that he admits the principle on which this Agnostic view is based, and yet at and yet at the same time rejects the conclusions which are usually and naturally drawn from it. He accepts the situation 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 contends that there is a great gulf fixed between the absolute reality of things and our consciousness of them. Nevertheless, he holds that, in a sense, we may still aspire to that encyclopædic 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 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 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 supported 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 referred 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 knowledge. 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 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 Philosophie 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 Littré, 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 religion of Humanity which is not also a religion of God. And this means that it is logically impossible to go beyond the merely individualistic point of view with which Comte started, except on the assumption that the intelligence of man is, or 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 Synthèse 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 Earthhymn in the "Prometheus Unbound." "Supposing 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. |