446 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tempt to browbeat the Commonwealth of Massachusetts into a more 

 pious observance of the day than that eminent official thought would 

 be likely to be made in the absence of such pressure. The efforts of 

 those who w T ish to inoculate the constitution with a particularly pure 

 theological virus tend in the same direction, and would make the 

 father of Positivism smile were he alive. 



The revolutionary doctrine, according to Comte's nomenclature, 

 is that which proclaims liberty in its widest sense an unlimited 

 right of free inquiry, and an unlimited freedom for the people of po- 

 litical action. As Comte well points out, this school offers to society 

 no definite guidance whatever simply proclaims that all principles 

 are to be examined and all experiments tried. That, after a certain 

 amount of examination and experimentation, some set of principles 

 might emerge, which society could accept as final, the revolutionary 

 leaders are careful not to hint, lest they should be suspected of hav- 

 ing some such set of principles in their mind, and so being at heart 

 doctrinaires and perhaps even partisans of order. No, the revolu- 

 tionary ideal is the negation of all trammels, change for the sake of 

 change, a constant bubbling of the social caldron, so that no unit 

 may remain long at the top, or long at the bottom, or long anywhere. 

 But society can not live on change ; and, in the absence of any definite 

 doctrines of their own, the revolutionary school, when they are at the 

 head of affairs, are compelled to make use of the principles and habi- 

 tudes they find established, and even to fall back on rags and tatters 

 belonging by right to their reactionary opponents. Thus the free- 

 thinkers who now control the government in France are dogmatically 

 teaching theism in the public schools. They want to give some kind 

 of support to ideas of duty ; and, having no coherent views of their 

 own on the subject, they adopt, as a temporary make-shift, a theory 

 and a synthesis which some of them would individually reject, and 

 which none of them probably would care to be called on to expound. 



The "stationary" school is that which erects into a doctrine a per- 

 manent principle of political action the necessity of balancing reac- 

 tion against revolution ; holding out to society no prospect beyond 

 that of an eternal seesaw of opposite tendencies. Disdaining all Uto- 

 pias, it yet proposes to itself, as Comte observes, the very wildest of 

 Utopias that, namely, of securing social well-being by playing off the 

 instinct of order against the instinct of progress. Having no princi- 

 ples of its own, it subsists wholly upon contradictory borrowings from 

 the two antagonist doctrines. While it acknowledges that neither the 

 one nor the other is fit to preside over social and political action, it 

 thinks that, if both can be applied at once, all will go well. What has 

 chiefly given vitality to this school, according to Comte, has been the 

 example of England which, however, has been, he asserts, an emi- 

 nently misleading one ; the stability of the English polity having been 

 due to altogether exceptional circumstances, which are not and can 



