COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



is not improbable that his too exclusive inter- 

 course with the devotional writers of the Mid- 

 dle Ages had much influence in generating that 

 mystical tone which characterizes all his later 

 writings. The " Imitation of Christ '* is a no- 

 ble work, which has been a comfort to many 

 generations ; but it is hardly a suitable book: 

 with which to nourish one's habits of scientific 

 thought. By long contemplation of the many 

 admirable features of mediaeval civilization — 

 features to which no previous writer had done 

 such unstinted justice — Comte came at last to 

 forget his relative point of view, and in his horror 

 of revolutionary anarchy he began to imagine 

 that certain points of mediaevalism might be 

 again revived and engrafted upon our modern 

 life. Thus by degrees he framed the concep- 

 tion of a sort of Neo-Catholicism, with power 

 as unlimited and ceremonies as complicated 

 as the old one, but with the science of 1830 

 substituted for evangelical theology, and with 



sons not built after the Platonic pattern. And finally we have 

 ^een Plato, in the Timaios, working out a system oi^ the uni- 

 verse in accordance with his own subjective conceptions, and 

 making a very sorry piece of work of it when compared with 

 contemporary science as displayed in the writings of Hippo- 

 krates and Aristotle ; just as Comte, in his latest years, began 

 to write a Subjective Synthesis, in which scientific truths 

 are fearfully and wonderfully travestied. Historic parallelisms 

 are often very misleading ; but the parallel here indicated is 

 one which I believe the most sedulous examination will justify. 

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