ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND COSMISM 



Now I say it was by dint of this rare historic 

 sense that Comte succeeded in taking a step 

 which was not only an important advance, but 

 in many respects a veritable revolution in phi- 

 losophy. It was Comte who first brought into 

 prominence the idea of a philosophy of history 

 which should also be the history of philosophy. 

 The thinkers of the eighteenth century, with 

 Hume at their head, had studied systems of 

 philosophy, much as anatomists before Cuvier 

 had studied animal and vegetal organisms, as 

 detached independent existences, without re- 

 gard to their past or future. But to Comte 

 is due the grand and luminous conception of 

 a historic development of thought, from the 

 earliest to the latest ages of human speculative 

 activity.^ Just as Cuvier proclaimed it irrational 

 to study existing organisms without constant 

 reference to extinct organisms, Comte pro- 

 nounced it irrational to coordinate existing 

 opinions, save in their relations to past opin- 

 ions. He grasped, as it had not before been 

 grasped, the truth that each body of doctrines 

 has its root in some ancestral body of doctrines ; 

 that throughout the whole of man's speculative 



* [This debt to Comte, as to the initiator of the conception 

 of the "historic development of thought,'* is precisely what 

 one may doubt when one recalls Hegel's Histon of Phiksophy. 

 And Fiske would, probably, upon consideration, have modi- 

 fied this passage.] 



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