COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



and he knows that they cannot be destroyed, 

 and ought not to be destroyed, save as they are 

 gradually supplanted by habits of thought that 

 are relatively more accurate and by theories of 

 the world that are relatively more complete. 



In view of these considerations we may 

 the better comprehend the significance — upon 

 which I formerly (Part I., chapter vi.) insisted 

 — of the change in the attitude of philosophy 

 of which Comte's celebrated doctrine of the 

 " Three Stages " was partly the cause and partly 

 the symptom. In spite of his hostility to the 

 Doctrine of Evolution, in most of the forms in 

 which he came into contact with it as techni- 

 cally stated, Comte was nevertheless thoroughly 

 inspired by the comparative method, so far as 

 the study of history was concerned. As far as 

 was possible with his slender scientific resources, 

 he looked at human affairs with the eye of an 

 evolutionist. When he announced it as a law 

 that every human conception must pass through 

 three stages — the theological, the metaphy- 

 sical, and the positive — though his statement 

 was a crude one, it nevertheless clearly showed 

 that a time had come when opinions were no 

 longer to be tried by their conformity to some 

 absolute standard, whether of orthodoxy or of 

 radicalism, but were henceforth to be estimated 

 in their relations to the circumstances which 

 had given rise to them. 

 328 



