THE ATTITUDE OF PHILOSOPHY 



substitute a new religion for Christianity and a 

 new kind of civilization for the existing civiliza- 

 tion. Thus in spite of his keen historic appre- 

 ciation of the excellence of Christianity, and in 

 spite of his sympathetic critical attitude, was 

 Comte logically forced into a position quite as 

 untenable as that held by the atheists and Ja- 

 cobins. And now let us observe how, even as 

 with these iconoclasts, the social state which 

 Comte expected to substitute within forty years 

 for the existing social state was in all essential 

 respects a retrogradation toward a more primi- 

 tive structure of society. The posltivist Utopia 

 is not indeed a return to pristine savagery, like 

 the Utopia of Rousseau and his followers, but it 

 is a reversion toward a spiritual despotism, such 

 as was realized in ancient Egypt, and such as 

 might perhaps have been realized in mediaeval 

 Europe, had not the policy of the Emperors 

 opposed a salutary check to the policy of the 

 Popes. In the chapter on the Evolution of 

 Society, we found it to be the chief characteris- 

 tic distinguishing social progress from the lower 

 orders of organic evolution, that individuals, 

 regarded as units of the community, are contin- 

 ually acquiring greater and greater freedom of 

 action, consistently with the stability of the com- 

 munity. Now Comte's ideal state of society Is a 

 state in which the units of the community possess 

 no more individual freedom than the cells which 



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