446 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



introduction which led to his being accused of megalomania and persecutory 

 paranoia, and after that period he became engrossed in ever stranger social 

 Utopias; he founded a new religion, "a Catholicism without Christianity," 

 as Huxley called it, with catechism, a calendar of saints, comprising great 

 men to whom prayers should be addressed — beginning with Moses and end- 

 ing with Bichat and Gall — and a ritual of divine service. His scientifically 

 educated friends deserted him, and only a small group of a less intelligent type 

 gathered round him at his death, in 1857. 



The influences that Comte exercised upon the conception of life held by 

 subsequent generations is not easy to estimate. All that in modern times has 

 gone under the name of positivism, monism, utilitarianism, and various 

 other isms has either directly or, at any rate, intermediately been influenced 

 by his doctrines. In conscious opposition to the ideal unity, in which roman- 

 ticism saw the connexion of existence, he took evolution to be the connecting 

 force in life. He certainly did not view biological evolution in the same light 

 as modern biology — if he had, he would not have rejected Lamarck — but 

 he observed with all the keener vision the evolution that is taking place in 

 human culture. He was thus able to do justice to the various stages of his- 

 tory — a thing which the period of enlightenment of the eighteenth century 

 was unable to do — while, on the other hand, he could point to a goal in 

 the future towards which to strive. And this belief in the evolution of man- 

 kind was, as we shall find later on, a precondition before the theory of evolu- 

 tion in nature could gain a hearing; Comte therefore paved the way for the 

 doctrine of the origin of species more than most others did. And though his 

 own biological concept was deficient, it has nevertheless had its influence; 

 we have already pointed out traces of it in Haeckel, and these could probably 

 be supplemented; even in later times there has been a corresponding tendency 

 reminiscent of such characteristics as a preference for comparative investi- 

 gation and a dislike for experiment. Comte's name has, in fact, a definite 

 place in the history of biology. 



English -positivism 

 The other representatives of positivism in France — Comte's pupils — de- 

 voted themselves principally to social and general cultural problems and 

 may be passed over here, however deep their influence may have been on the 

 general conception of life, both inside and outside their own country. The 

 same is to a certain extent true of the precursors of the same realistic trend 

 of thought in England. That country was indeed the cradle of eighteenth- 

 century enlightenment, and the ideas of the era of enlightenment never quite 

 died out there, even in the days of romanticism. These ideas took rather 

 the form of strivings after practical social reforms, as in Jeremy Bentham 

 and James Mill, who are named as the founders of utilitarianism, a general 

 philosophy of life with a social aim, based upon the highest possible happiness 



