682 , PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



Comte disliked the Protestant spirit, which he identified 

 in Germany with the metaphysical and critical, in Eng- 

 land with the aristocratic as opposed to the monarchical 

 as well as to the democratic tendency. Believing in a 

 general and fixed Order of Nature, the highest product 

 of which was Mankind and its History, he never lost 

 sight of, and latterly reasserted the necessity of, a defi- 

 nite social order and a supreme authority approaching 

 almost to absolutism. He had great admiration for the 

 theocratic system of the Middle Ages, and his recon- 

 structed Order of Society contained an intellectual or 

 scientific in the place of a religious priesthood. He had 

 not the large Protestant view of individual liberty as it 

 lived in the minds of the leading thinkers in Germany. 

 The masses, he considered, could never take part in work- 

 ing out the principles of the highest and ruling order of 

 things; such intellectual activity must be confined to 

 a selected class. The work of the masses would be to 

 apply, for the benefit of society, the truths understood 

 and represented by a small number of thinkers. Thus 

 he had even less appreciation for the metaphysical and 

 critical school of thought than he had for the earlier 

 theological, and in him we find that remarkable com- 

 bination of the hierarchical (or Catholic) with the 

 Positivist (or scientific) spirit which is still to be 

 found among French thinkers of the day. 



"We see then how fundamentally different were the 

 intellectual predispositions and surroundings in which 

 Comte's philosophy grew up. The total absence of a 

 critical foundation, such as German philosophy, since 

 Kant's time, has considered to be indispensable, the 



