BH. VI.] TRE ATTITUDE OF PEILOSOFHT, 493 



be given to Comte. In twelve years the Emperor Napoleon 

 was to resign in favour of a Comtist triumvirate. In thirty- 

 three years the religion of Humanity was to be definitely esta- 

 blished. As Mr. Mill says, " a man may be deemed happy, 

 but scarcely modest, who had such boundless confidence in 

 his own powers of foresight, and expected to complete a 

 triumph of his own ideas on the reconstitution of society 

 within the possible limits of his life-time. If he could live 

 (he said) to the age of Fontenelle, or of Hobbes, or even 

 of Voltaire, he should see all this realized, or as good as 

 realized." 



But what we have here to note is not especially the 

 personal conceit of the project, or the marks of insanity 

 clearly indicated in these inordinate expectations ; what we 

 have to note is the mode of genesis of this wild scheme. 

 Extravagant beyond all comparison as Comte's proposals for 

 remodelling religion and society undoubtedly were, they can 

 nevertheless be easily traced, in their general outlines, back 

 to the two errors which I have above signalized as the 

 fundamental errors of Positivism. The first error — the 

 ignoring of Deity — necessitated a complete rupture with 

 Christian forms of religion ; and the second error — the 

 belief that society can be reorganized by a change in 

 formulas of belief — led naturally to the attempt to sub- 

 stitute a new religion for Christianity and a new kind of 

 civilization for the existing civilization. Thus in spite of 

 bis keen historic appreciation of the excellence of Chris- 

 tianity, and in spite of his sympathetic critical attitude, 

 was Comte logically forced into a position quite as unte- 

 .lable as that held by the atheists and Jacobins. And now 

 let us observe how, even as with these iconoclasts, the 

 eocial state which Comte expected to substitute within 

 forty years for the existing social state, was in all essential 

 respects a retrogradation toward a more primitive structure 

 of society. The positivist Utopia is not indeed a return to 



