COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



mankind would be instantly arrested. It is in- 

 teresting to observe that Comte entertained an 

 intention not wholly dissimilar to this. Dis- 

 gusted with the insatiable curiosity which leads 

 scientific thinkers to pry into the secrets of na- 

 ture in all directions at once, often spending 

 years upon subjects which to self-complacent 

 ignorance or Philistinism seem entirely trivial, 

 Comte enacted that " some one problem should 

 always be selected, the solution of which would 

 be more important than any other to the inter- 

 ests of humanity, and upon this the entire in- 

 tellectual resources of the theoretic mind should 

 be concentrated, until it is either resolved, or 

 has to be given up as insoluble ; after which 

 mankind should go on to another, to be pur- 

 sued with similar exclusiveness." ^ It only re- 

 mains to add that this all-important problem 

 was to be prescribed by the High Priest of 

 Humanity. When now, knowing as we do 

 Comte's intense aversion to certain kinds of 

 inquiry, we consider what would have been the 

 result could such a system have gone into oper- 

 ation forty years ago ; when we reflect that Bes- 

 sel would never have been allowed to measure 

 the parallax of a star, that the cell doctrine in 

 biology would have been hopelessly doomed, 

 that Mr. Darwin's researches would have been 

 prohibited as useless, that the correlation of 

 ^ Mill, Auguste Comte and positivism , p. 1 64. 



354 



