COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



of thinking, — which makes the fifth volume 

 of Comte's great work one of the most valu- 

 able and suggestive treatises ever written con- 

 cerning the concrete phenomena of history. 

 Many thinkers before Comte had conceived 

 the idea of a philosophy of history : such were 

 Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Tur- 

 got, and Condorcet ; but none of these great 

 men possessed in so high a degree the historic 

 sense necessary for the realization of such a 

 project. It is the influence of this historic sense 

 of Comte, more or less consciously felt, which 

 lends a great part of their value to many of the 

 most striking historical treatises of our time, — 

 to the colossal works of Grote and Mommsen, 

 as well as to the monographs of Mr. Bryce, 

 Dr. Bridges, M. Taine, M. Renan, and the 

 author of " Ecce Homo." It was the lack of 

 such a historic sense, and the adherence to the 

 old disposition to examine past events through 

 the refracting medium of recently acquired 

 habits of thought, > which constituted Mr. 

 Buckle's chief source of failure as a philosophic 

 historian.^ 



^ [Compare Fiske*s youthful essay on Buckle in Darwin- 

 ism and Other Essays. It is doubtful whether Fiske would 

 have rated Comte' s influence as the "herald'* of historic 

 thinking, the unique possessor, in his time, of the historic sense, 

 if he had.more fully considered the relation of German Roman- 

 ticism, and of Hegel, to the early history of this tendency.] 

 244 



