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wretched superstition at his silly non-natural honor 

 and her silly non-natural virtue a reaction had set in, 

 exulting in poetry, in the splendor of nature, the noble- 

 ness of man, and the purity of woman, from which re- 

 action again we have, almost within the last decennium, 

 been revulsively, as it were, called back, shall we say 

 by some " bolder" spirits the Buckles, the Mills, &c. ? 

 to the old illumination or enlightenment of a hundred 

 years ago, in regard to the weakness and stupidity of 

 man's pretensions over the animality and materiality 

 that limit him. Of this revulsion, then, as said, a main 

 feature, especially in England, has been prostration 

 before the vast bulk of Comte ; and so it was that Mr. 

 Huxley's protest in this reference, considering the phi- 

 losophy he professed, had that in it to surprise at first. 

 But if there was surprise, there was also pleasure ; for 

 Mr. Huxley's estimate of Comte is undoubtedly the 

 right one. " So far as I am concerned," he says, " the 

 most reverend prelate" (the Archbishop of York) 

 " might dialectically hew M. Comte in pieces as a mod- 

 ern Agag, and I should not attempt to stay his hand ; 

 for, so far as my study of what specially characterizes 

 the Positive philosophy has led me, I find therein little 

 or nothing of any scientific value, and a great deal 

 which is as thoroughly antagonistic to the very essence 

 of science as anything in ultramontane Catholicism." 

 "It was enough," he says again, "to make David Hume 

 turn in his grave, that here, almost within earshot of 

 his house, an instructed audience should have listened 

 without a murmur while his most characteristic doc- 

 trines were attributed to a French writer of fifty years' 

 later date, in whose dreary and verbose pages we miss 

 alike the vigor of thought and the exquisite clearness 



