122 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



more of them than he himself was conscious of, as the result of 

 his conversations with his friends, chiefly George Eliot and George 

 Lewes, who were at one time enthusiastic followers of the French 

 philosopher. They certainly had many opportunities of imparting 

 to Spencer, willy-nilly, the gist of Comte's ideas. 



However different the great Frenchman and the great English- 

 man were, they had very much in common. First of all their en- 

 cyclopedic ideal, then their heroic faith and tenacity amidst 

 untoward circumstances, their intolerance and dogmatism, their 

 independence, their lack of those softening qualities which make 

 men lovable. They attached a paramount importance to the study 

 of sociology and positive polity, but they saw clearly that no real 

 advance can be made which is not preceded by a moral transfor- 

 mation. They both asserted themselves in a similar way. Auguste 

 Comte wrote the first sketch of his "Course of Positive Philos- 

 ophy" in 1826, and the course itself was the labor of the next 

 sixteen years ; Spencer launched his manifesto in 1 860, and work- 

 ing far more slowly, it took him more than double this time to pro- 

 duce the whole of his own synthesis. 



Although both saw the importance of historical methods, they 

 still have in common an extraordinary lack of historical sense. I 

 am thinking of Comte, the philosopher — not of the prophet of his 

 latter days, who, jumping to the other extreme, made of history 

 a sort of religion. Before that, he does not seem to have grasped 

 any more clearly than Spencer that genuine synthetic knowledge 

 must comprehend the whole past of knowledge as well as its latest 

 stages. Knowledge indeed is not something fixed and rigid, neither 

 is it perfect; it is an ever-progressing organism whose meaning 

 can only be understood by one who knows its origin and its 

 inner life. Comte saw well enough that the history of intellectual 

 development is the key to social evolution, but he did not see 

 that it is also a master-key to synthetic knowledge. Spencer 

 generously spent considerable sums for the elaboration of his 

 "Descriptive Sociology/' wherein the chronological sequence of 

 events is faithfully abided by; yet what one might call his his- 



