ch. v.] THE TWO METHODS. 139 



with the general system of his conceptions, he gradually lost 

 the scientific habit. He ceased to take into account the fact 

 that what seemed a necessary inference to him would not 

 necessarily seem so to minds differently moulded, unless 

 sustained by the requisite proofs Thus he emerged from the 

 scientific into a pontifical state of mind, in which, just as 

 with Plato in his old age, it was enough that an opinion 

 seemed true to him for him straightway to proclaim it as 

 binding on all men. 1 Moreover it is not improbable that his 

 too exclusive intercourse with the devotional writers of the 

 Middle Ages had much influence in generating that mystical 

 tone which characterizes all his later writings. The " Imita- 

 tion of Christ " is a noble w T ork, which has been a comfort to 

 many generations ; but it is hardly a suitable book with 

 which to nourish one's habits of scientific thought. By long 

 contemplation of the many admirable features of mediaeval 

 civilization — features to which no previous writer had done 

 such unstinted justice — Comte came at last to forget his 

 relative point of view, and in his horror of revolutionary 

 anarchy he began to imagine that certain points of medi- 



1 In its initial scientific attitude and in its final grotesque vagaries, the 

 career of Plato's mind may be instructively compared with that of Comte's. 

 In his earlier dialogues Plato professes to be, like Sokrate-, a mere investi- 

 gator of the methods by which trustworthy knowledge is obtained ; just as 

 Comte, in his first great work, is simply a co-ordinator of scientific methods 

 and doctrines. In the Parmenides and Theaitetos, indeed, we may find, as 

 strikingly presented as in any modern treatise, the antinomies or alternative 

 impossibilities which, like the lions before Palace Beautiful, confront the pil- 

 grim on either hand whenever he seeks to cross the barrier which divides the 

 realm of science from that of metaphysics. But at a later period we find 

 Plato, like Comte, renouncing the scientific attitude, and setting himself up 

 as the founder of an ideal Community, in which the pervading tendencies 

 which have shaped actual societies were to be ignored or overridden, and in 

 which existence was to be made intolerable to all persons not built after the 

 Vlatouic pattern. And finally we have seen Plato, in the Timaios, working 

 cut a system of the universe in accordance with his own subjective concep- 

 tions, and making a very sorry piece of work of it when compared with con- 

 temporary science as displayed in the writings of Hippokrates and Aristotle ; 

 just as Comte, in his latest years, began to write a "Subjective Synthesis" in 

 Vhich scientific truths are fearfully and wonderfully travestied. Historic 

 parallel]' sms are often very misleading ; but the parallel here indicated is one 

 which I believe the most sedulous examination will justify. 



