CHAP, iv THE APPEAL TO HISTORY 43 



formulas. It will teach him that every institution and 

 method is relative to the social state of those by whom 

 it is practised. But he who is to lead men strongly 

 must draw wisdom from some other and higher source. 

 History can give secondary elements of guidance; 

 primary elements it cannot give. And there will always 

 be the danger which that austerest of libre penseurs Mr. 

 John Morley has emphasised, the danger that the historic 

 method may justify anything in its own time, every- 

 thing in its own place, and may relegate to limbo the dis- 

 tinction between right and wrong. Eight and wrong 

 history illustrates that great polar contrast, but cannot 

 fully teach it ; yet after all is not that the beginning of 

 wisdom ? And is it not very nearly the end of wisdom 

 too? 



A last word must be added upon Comte's own use 

 of the appeal to history, out of which so much of his 

 sociological writing is composed. On the whole, he 

 seems to owe a smaller definite debt to history than to 

 biology. Sometimes he appeals to examples, as in the 

 case quoted, when he refers tyranny to the undue size 

 of the state. Sometimes he appeals to the past stream 

 of tendency, as in his great generalisation of the three 

 stages. Sometimes again he cuts right across the stream 

 of manifest tendency ; he surely does this in demand- 

 ing that the large and organic modern state should be 

 divided up into fragments; and in general no charge 

 would seem to be more clearly made out than that 

 Comte scarcely tries to show us his polity for the future 

 growing out of the life of the past. Sometimes he 

 appeals to a historical phenomenon, like the division of 

 the spiritual and secular powers, which has struck his 

 fancy. In such a case history is like a great magazine 

 of wares, and Comte is like a purchaser strolling through 



