486 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. hi 



niethod, and afterwards certified only by a perennial appeal 

 to some authority assumed as infallible. It differed eq^ually 

 from the statical view represented by the iconoclasm of the 

 eighteenth century ; for it said, we cannot ignore the past, 

 or treat it with contumely : the men who originated mytho- 

 logical explanations of natural phenomena were neither 

 knaves nor the dupes of knaves, but genuine philosophers 

 who made the best use of such implements of research as 

 lay before them : men's conceptions of the world have been 

 progressively stripped of their anthropomorphic vestments, 

 and the scientific mode of thought, which, manifesting itself 

 here and there in fragmentary generalizations, has all along 

 been determining the progress, must ultimately, organized 

 in a series of grand, all-embracing generalizations, reign 

 supreme : the history of human thought is thus a develop- 

 ment, and each creed or system, no matter how absurd it 

 may at first appear, is a phase of that development ; so that 

 to construct a philosophy or a polity de novo, out of abstract 

 principles, without reference to the concrete facts of past 

 history, is simply to build a castle in the air. 



Thus would Comte have answered on the one hand the 

 Jacobins and on the other hand the Ultramontanes, with 

 both of whom he has, by a strange but not inexplicable fate, 

 been charged with owning fellowship. Thus we arrive at 

 the philosophic explanation of the unparalleled range of his 

 historic sympathies, of the generous recognition which he 

 was excv ready to accord to the crude but needful and ser- 

 viceable beliefs and institutions of earlier ages, and to their 

 representative men of whatever creed. And thus, too, we 

 are enabled to appreciate one of Comte's principal reasons 

 for calling his system of philosophy " Positive." In sharp 

 contrast with the negative philosophy of the atheists and 

 Jacobins, its purpose was not to overthrow old beliefs by an 

 assault from without, but to construct, upon the basis of the 

 Dositive truths already furnished by science, a i.ew system oi 



