THE ATTITUDE OF PHILOSOPHY 



to construct an ideal Polity, including a new 

 religion and new social institutions, was — save 

 as a warning for future thinkers — just so much 

 labour thrown away. After all his profound 

 and elaborate survey of human history, Comte 

 strangely forgot that the sum total of beliefs 

 and institutions in the twentieth century will be 

 the legitimate offspring of the sum total of be- 

 liefs and institutions in the nineteenth, but can 

 in no case be the offspring of an individual in- 

 tellect, even were that intellect ten times more 

 powerful than Comte's. No individual will has 

 ever succeeded in remodelling society in con- 

 formity to a prescribed ideal. Perhaps no sin- 

 gle man, if we except the Founder of Chris- 

 tianity, has ever made his individual character 

 and genius count for so much in the subsequent 

 direction of human events as Julius Caesar. But 

 Caesar never reconstructed society, and, though 

 not instructed in the Doctrine of Evolution, 

 would have felt such a task to be simply an 

 impossibility. The secret of Caesar's greatness, 

 and of his success, lay in the wondrous com- 

 mon sense with which he perceived the true sig- 

 nificance of contemporary events, and in the un- 

 flinching perseverance with which he wrought 

 out the political system for which society was 

 already yearning, and which the circumstances 

 of the times rendered indispensable to the main- 

 tenance of civilization. This has been the se- 



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