COSMISM AND POSITIVISM 



outset Comte intended to crown his work of 

 reorganizing philosophy by constructing a polity 

 which should be competent to reorganize so- 

 ciety. The belief that society can be regener- 

 ated by philosophy is a belief which underlies all 

 his speculations from first to last. His aims 

 were as practical as those of Saint-Simon and 

 Fourier, the difference being chiefly that these 

 unscientific dreamers built their Utopias upon 

 abstract theories of human nature, while Comte 

 sought to found his polity upon the scientific 

 study of the actual tendencies of humanity as 

 determined by its past history. In a future 

 chapter I shall have occasion to show that 

 this whole attempt of Comte's was based upon 

 a profound misconception of the true state 

 of the case. For the present we need only 

 observe that with Comte the construction of a 

 Philosophy meant ultimately the construction 

 of a Sociology, to which all his elaborate sys- 

 tematization of scientific methods was intended 

 to be ancillary. Why must we study observa- 

 tion in astronomy, experiment in physics and 

 chemistry, comparison in biology ? In order, 

 says Comte, to acquire the needful mental train- 

 ing for sound theorizing in sociology. To him 

 the various physical sciences were not sources 

 from which grand generalizations were to be 

 derived, embracing the remotest and most sub- 

 tle phenomena of the 'Universe ; they were 

 109 



