462 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



past and present, there is to be " a domestic altar," at which, in kneel- 

 ing attitude, adoration is to be paid to " our own personal patrons, our 

 guardian angels, or household gods : " * these being persons living or 

 dead. And as exemplified by M. Comte's worship of Clotilde de 

 Vaux, the praying to a beloved person or wife may be continued for 

 years ; recalling the customs of multitudinous peoples who invoke 

 departed members of their families, as instance the Balonda, among 

 whom if the " spot where a favorite wife has died," ... "is revisited, 

 it is to pray to her." f 



Now omitting for the present all thought about the worthiness of 

 these objects of worship, and considering only the general nature of the 

 system, there arises the question — How happens it that while in other 

 respects M. Comte delineates human evolution as progressive, he, in 

 this respect, delineates it as retrogressive ? Beyond all question civili- 

 zation has been a gradual divergence from primitive savagery. Ac- 

 cording to his own account, the advance in social organization, in knowl- 

 edge, in science, in art, presents a certain general continuity. Even 

 in speculative thought, M. Comte's formula of the three stages, the 

 theological, the metaphysical, and the positive, tacitly asserts move- 

 ments in the same direction toward a final theory. How happens it, 

 then, that with an advancing change in other things, there is to occur 

 a retreating change in one thing ? — along with progression in all else, 

 retrogression in religion ? 



This retrogressive character of the Comtean religion is shown in 

 sundry other ways — being, indeed, sometimes distinctly admitted or 

 avowed. Thus we are told that " the domain of the priesthood must 

 be reconstituted in its integrity ; medicine must again become a part 

 of it," J as from savage life upward it was until modern times. Again, 

 education has been slowly emancipating itself from ecclesiasticism ; 

 but in M. Comte's scheme, after the sacrament of initiation, the child 

 passes " from its unsystematic training under the eye of its mother to 

 the systematic education given by the priesthood ; " * just as, after a 

 parallel ceremony, the child does among the Congo people, || and as it 

 did among the ancient Mexicans.^ And knowingly or unknowing- 

 ly, M. Comte followed the lead of the Egyptians who had a formal 

 judging of the dead by the living : honorable burial was allowed 

 by them only in the absence of accusations against the deceased 

 proved before judges ; and by M. Comte it is provided that after 

 a prescribed interval, the priesthood shall decide whether the remains 

 shall be transferred from their probationary resting-place to "the 

 sacred wood" reserved for the "sanctified." Most remarkable of 

 all, however, is the reversion to an early type of religious belief 



♦ "Positive Polity," vol. iv, pp. 100, 101. f Livingstone, " South Africa," p. 314. 



X " Catechism," p. 60. « " Catechism," p. 129. 



II Bastian (A.), " Africanische Reisen," p. 85. 



^ Torquemada (Juan de), " Monarquia Indiana," book ix, chaps, xi to xiii. 



