COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



been too little studied, and whose true posi- 

 tion in the history of thought Comte was the 

 first to perceive and point out, will perhaps be 

 remembered by future generations as the last 

 heroic champion of a lost cause. Like Don 

 Diego Garcia, whom Cervantes has immortal- 

 ized, this unterrified knight took it upon him- 

 self to defend single-handed the fastnesses of 

 mediaeval theology against the whole invading 

 army of modern scientific conceptions. With 

 that uncompromising fanaticism which charac- 

 terizes men who abandon critical reflection in 

 order to constitute themselves the advocates of 

 a cause, De Maistre undertook to annihilate 

 physical science and the group of philosophic 

 notions to which its discoveries had given rise. 

 According to him, Kant was an ignorant char- 

 latan. Bacon an atheist in hypocritical disguise, 

 and the so-called Baconian philosophy " a spirit- 

 less materialism,'' uncertain and unsteady in its 

 expression, frivolous in tone, and full of falla- 

 cies in every assertion. In place of this " spirit- 

 less materialism " he would give us the full- 

 blown Catholicism of the days of Hildebrand, 

 every subsequent variation from which has, in 

 his opinion, been due, not to disinterested seek- 

 ing after higher truth, but to a madness of neo- 

 logism, a diseased craving after new and strange 

 devices. 



In these interesting opinions — interesting 



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