138 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. l 



thinker who isolates himself, year after year, from the work 

 which his contemporaries are doing. Such a proceeding, as 

 Comte's experience is enough to show, is fraught with grave 

 dangers, both intellectual and moral. The intellectual danger 

 is that the thinker will be left hopelessly in the rear of the 

 scientific movement of the age ; will lose, from lack of the 

 requisite stimulus supplied by open criticism and argument, 

 the habit of bringing all his conclusions to the test of verifica- 

 tion ; and will thus gradually fall into the habit of reasoning 

 upon his plausible hypotheses as if they were established. 

 The moral danger is that which menaces all isolation, social 

 or intellectual,— the danger of excessive egoism, of over- 

 confidence in one's own conclusions, and undue respect for 

 one's own achievements. It is well enough for a writer 

 to be dogmatic, provided his dogmatism is sustained by 

 vigorous argument. But the writer is past all hope who 

 habitually thinks to make loud assertion do the duty of 

 argument ; and this is a habit into which every one is 

 more or less liable to fall who is not constantly coming 

 in contact with other thinkers, and forced continually to 

 defend his conclusions by the objective appeal to univers- 

 ally admitted principles. 



I believe these considerations will go far toward accounting 

 for the unfortunate position taken by Comte toward the close 

 of his life. Always of a warm and enthusiastic tempera- 

 ment, self-confident to an inordinate degree, and vain with 

 more than a Frenchman's vanity, during his long period of 

 isolation these traits and tendencies were unduly strengthened. 

 The consciousness — to a certain extent well founded — of the 

 grandeur of the task which he had accomplished, grew upon 

 him apace ; and not taking note of the serious defects and 

 omissions which advancing science was constantly disclosing 

 in that work, he became more and more settled in the con- 

 viction that it was final, so far as it had gone. Measuring 

 all his newly-framed hypotheses solely by their congruity 



