COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



treatment of atheism. Comte had no patience 

 with atheists, because of the chiefly negative 

 and destructive character of the atheistic philo- 

 sophy dominant in the eighteenth century. But 

 when he lets us into his philosophic reasons for 

 rejecting atheism, we find him complaining of 

 the atheists, not because of their denial of Deity, 

 nor because their doctrine contravenes the rela- 

 tivity of knowledge, but because they indulge 

 in " metaphysical attempts to explain the origin 

 of life upon the earth's surface." ( ! ) On read- 

 ing such passages, it becomes sufficiently evi- 

 dent that Comte did not really understand why 

 metaphysical inquiries are illegitimate, but re- 

 jected them very much as the general reader 

 might reject them, because they muddled his 

 mind ; and we may acknowledge the justice of 

 Professor Huxley's sarcasm, that " metaphy- 

 sics " is with Comte a " general term of abuse for 

 anything that he does not like." Certain it is 

 that Comte never understood the true import 

 of the doctrine of relativity, as it is stated in our 

 fourth chapter, — that there exists an Unknow- 

 able Reality, of which all phenomena, as pre- 

 sented in consciousness, are the knowable mani- 

 festations. As I have already observed, his most 

 illustrious follower, M. Littre, unreservedly 

 stigmatizes as " metaphysical " this very doctrine 

 of the Unknowable, upon which the Cosmic 

 Philosophy bases its rejection of metaphy- 

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