38 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART i 



us the politics of the past, while present day politics 

 are, to the statesman of wide views, history in the 

 making. All manner of experiments in living, some 

 of them successful and others unsuccessful, are recorded 

 in the book of history. We moderns, with so immense 

 a volume to study, ought to be safeguarded against 

 many errors ; and we ought to find ourselves in possession 

 of many pieces of practical wisdom, not as discoverers 

 but as heirs. 



Now Comte sometimes falls back upon the teaching 

 of history in this simple and obvious sense. For 

 example, he demands that the modern nation state 

 should be broken up, under the positivist regime of the 

 future, into fragments not much greater than the city 

 states of antiquity. He allots to each a population 

 of from one to three millions, the population of a 

 great city, or of a canton or province of moderate 

 dimensions. And he gives as his reason the teaching of 

 experience, which is said to show that tyranny invariably 

 sets in when larger aggregates are massed together in 

 me political organisation. The assertion perhaps may 

 ! startle us, but, true or false, it is an appeal to history, 

 ! and an appeal to history in the obvious sense, in which 

 history is regarded as a collection of examples or of 

 experiments in living. 



Oftener, however, Comte treats history in a different 

 fashion. He would agree with J. S. Mill, 1 that, in 

 contrast with the physical sciences, history discloses a 

 law, not of repetition, but of continuous progressive 

 development. Mill is careful to guard himself against 

 making any assumption in this definition as to the 

 moral value of one stage in history when compared with 

 another. Progress in the moral sense he does not 

 1 In his Logic; and elsewhere. 



