m. Yi.] THE ATTITUDE OF PHILOSOPHY, 497 



remodel religion and society artificially, Comte yielded to 

 the inevitable necessity which compels the would-be recon- 

 structor of society to remodel it ideally npon a lower type 

 than that which actually exists. He would have given us a 

 religion without God and a society without freedom of action. 



If we liow pause for a moment, and gather up tlie different 

 threads of the argument, we shall assist the comprehension 

 of our own position, presently to be stated. Let us, then, 

 contemplate in a single view the conclusions deducible from 

 the foregoing series of criticisms. 



We have seen the old statical habit of thought, as repre- 

 sented in the Doctrine of Creation, manifesting itself in 

 rigid orthodoxy, both in religion and in politics. We have 

 observed the way in which modern scientific inquiry, detect- 

 ing numberless absurdities or anomalies in the religious and 

 political orthodoxy inherited from mediaeval times, yet 

 retaining and carrying into its criticisms the statical habit 

 of thought, has assumed an iconoclastic attitude with refer- 

 ence to the existing order of things. We have traced this 

 iconoclastic attitude in the modern history of Atlieism and 

 Jacobinism, and have noted how its tendency is in the 

 direction of social dissolution. We have found that the 

 only possible result of a sudden and violent alteration of the 

 existing order of things must be a retrogradation toward some 

 lower order of things, characteristic of some less advanced 

 type of civilization. And of this fatal necessity we have 

 Leen the most instructive example in the career of the 

 Positive Philosophy. Though it had partially compassed, 

 in an empirical fashion, the notion of development ; though 

 it was fully alive to the barrenness of iconoclastic methods; 

 though it began by regarding itself as the normal product 

 of a long course of speculative evolution ; — nevertheless 

 when, by its ignoring of Deity, Positivism found itself arrayed 

 "Ui sheer opposition to established and time-honoured theories, 

 the resulting retrogradation was hardly less marked than it 



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