466 Report S.A.A. Advancement of Science. 



and also to clear up cer'ain misapprehensions which have obscured 

 his character as a thinker in some quarters where we should least 

 have expected it. It is not necessary to minimise the difficulties. 

 As to Comte's style, one of his most distinguished followers finds in 

 it a certain multiplicity of phrase, a monotony, and that repetition 

 which is only profDer to oral exposition. (Harrison. Preface to 

 Miss Martineau's translatioii, p. tt.) Nor ran anyone fail to be 

 irritated by Comte's pretensions, as when he announces his accession 

 to the ever-increasing multitude of first discoverers of the fact that 

 law can be applied to the problems of morals and politics 

 (Catechism, p. 55), or proclaims the consummation of human pro- 

 gress in his own system (ib. Preface) ; or. while definitely .substituting 

 Humanity for God, waves his hand to the latter from his own higher 

 altitude in graceful acknowledgment of his " provisional services " 

 (ib. 380). EA'er}'one, says Comte, can see illusions in every faith 

 except his own ; and the contrast between his bitterness in attacking 

 other sxstems. and his easy confidence in his own does not serve to 

 make him attractive. The whole world will be converted to 

 Positivism, he thinks, in three generations (ib. ^2^), and the i)rocess 

 will be specially easy with women and with the proletariate, and with 

 the fetichists of Africa, whose humble thinkers are wiser than^ all the 

 proud doctors of Germany (Pol. HI., 99). In Positivism all the races 

 of the world will be united, learning mutual respect from the recogni- 

 tion that it is only our pride which su]iposes the black race con- 

 demned to an inevitable stagnation (Pol. I.. 392), and that if the 

 white race leads the world in intelligence, the yellow race leads in 

 activity, and the black in feeling, so that, as feeling caight to- rule 

 the mind, the black race ought to rule the world (Pol. II., 462). 

 Universal sanitation and judicious intennarriage will complete the 

 amalgamation of the races (Cat. 328). But it would be unworthy 

 to pay much attention to Comte's egr)istic exul)erances. His histoiry 

 accounts for many of his extravagances, but it also helps us to see 

 in him so much that is admirable that it teaches us to forget the 

 whole of them. 



To l^egin with, despite the contentions of Mill and others, 

 Comte certainly had the virtue of fundamental consistency between 

 his different periods. His political system was at any rate no after- 

 thought. Nothing can be more a.stonishing than to turn from 

 Comte's later works to his first essays in which we find the unmis- 

 takable .seed of all his last work. Comte's writings, so far from 

 being casual, were the necessary evolution of a mind, the elements 

 of which, though some of them may have developed later than others, 

 were all present before he, came of age, and moreover, were developed 

 in a logical and necessary order, not unlike the order observable in 

 the evolution of Plato. It is no' longer necessary- to^ insist u\Km this 

 point. Comte's inconsistency Avas vertical and not horizontal. 



The con.stnictive tendency was strong in him from the first. 

 An idealist, and therefore an opponent of the old regime, he came 

 late enough never to know the confidence which the revolution in- 

 spired at its outset. He was one of the first to see thai all the old 



