m. v.] TME TWO METHODS. 143 



Otherwise : Otherwise is Otherwise, and not Being), ^e, are 

 overawed perhaps, but not immediately disgusted. There is 

 an air of excessive profundity about the oracular dictum, and 

 for a moment we think there may perhaps be something in 

 it, which does not appear on the surface, — some occult verity 

 which, as Hegelians tell us, fifty years more of enlighten- 

 ment may enable us to realize. But Comte's thoughts are 

 presented, not in the muddiest technical German, but in the 

 clearest idiomatic French : when he makes the earth a fetish, 

 and talks about a dance of the planets, the idea stands out 

 in all its naked absurdity. In spite of all this, however, I 

 am inclined to believe that Comte sounded a deeper depth 

 of extravagance than either Plato or Hegel. Insanity is, 

 after all, only the excessive lack of correspondence between 

 the order of conceptions and the order of phenomena. That 

 is what we mean when we characterize it as delusion or 

 hallucination. And when we avowedly employ a method 

 which never deigns to adapt the internal order to the 

 external order, there is no foreseeing the depth of the ditch 

 in which we may be landed. The difference between the 

 delusion which we regard as compatible with sanity, and 

 that which we commiserate as insane, is mainly a difference 

 of degree. And whether we are to call Comte crazy or not, 

 is to a great extent a question of terminology. Certain it 

 is, that if Adelung had lived to witness Comte's latest 

 speculations, he might have found in them the materials for 

 a more wonderful chapter than any of those now contained 

 in his voluminous " History of Human Error." 



In these interesting vagaries we may find renewed evidence 

 of the close kinship between the " dreams " of the ontologist, 

 the fancies of the myth-maker, and the hallucinations of the 

 insane, in so far as concerns the method employed. Never- 

 theless it would be highly unjust to hold the Positive Philo- 

 sophy responsible for these inanities, or for those of the 

 pseudo -positivists who would seem to set larger store by 



