ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND COSMISM 



importance. We must not refuse to Comte the 

 meed of acknowledgment which we should have 

 no hesitation in giving to Kant, or Spinoza, or 

 even to Hegel, if occasion were to be offered. 

 Least of all can we acquiesce in Professor Hux- 

 ley's opinion that there is nothing whatever of 

 any value in the philosophy of Comte which is 

 not also to be found in the philosophy of Hume. 

 The point is one of such importance in itself, 

 and is so narrowly implicated with much of the 

 following discussion, that I must devote a few 

 moments to the elucidation of it, before enter- 

 ing upon the special subject of this chapter. 



In spite of his feebleness as a psychologist, 

 and his numerous unphilosophic idiosyncrasies 

 of temperament, Comte was possessed of one 

 mental endowment, most brilliant at any time, 

 and most useful to a thinker living in the first 

 half of the nineteenth century. It is by virtue 

 of this mental endowment that Comte is chiefly 

 distinguished from the thinkers of the eigh- 

 teenth century ; and it was by dint of this that 

 he succeeded in making himself — more con- 

 spicuously than any of those thinkers — the 

 herald, though not the inaugurator, of modern 

 philosophy. I refer to that historic sense, — 

 that almost unique power of investing himself, 

 so to speak, with the mental habits of bygone 

 generations, and of entering into the very spirit 

 which dictated past events and obsolete modes 



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