ch. vii.] ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND COSMISM. 165 



narrowly implicated with much of the following discussion, 

 that I must devote a few moments to the elucidation of it, 

 before entering upon the special subject of this chapter. 



In spite of his feebleness as a psychologist, and his 

 numerous unphilosophic idiosyncrasies of temperament, 

 Comte was possessed of one mental endowment, most 

 brilliant at any time, and most useful to a thinker living 

 in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is by virtue 

 of this mental endowment that Comte is chiefly dis- 

 tinguished fiom the thinkers of the eighteenth century ; and 

 it was by dint of this that he succeeded in making himself, 

 more conspicuously than any of those thinkers, the herald, 

 though not the inaugurator, of modern philosophy. I refer 

 to that historic sense, — that almost unique power of invest- 

 ing himself, so to speak, with the mental habits of bygone 

 generations, and of entering into the very spirit which dic- 

 tated past events and obsolete modes of thinking, — which 

 makes the fifth volume of Comte's great work one of the 

 most valuable and suggestive treatises ever written concern- 

 ing the concrete phenomena of history. Many thinkers 

 before Comte had conceived the idea of a philosophy of 

 history — such were Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Voltaire, 

 Turgot, and Condorcet ; but none of these great men 

 possessed in so high a degree the historic sense necessary for 

 the realization of such a project. It is the influence of this 

 historic sense of Comte, more or less consciously felt, which 

 lends a great part of their value to many of the most striking 

 historical treatises of our time, — to the colossal works of 

 Grote and Mommsen, as well as to the monographs of 

 Mr. Bryce, Dr. Bridges, M. Taine, M. Benan, and the author 

 of " Ecce Homo." It was the lack of such a historic sense, 

 and the adherence to the old disposition to examine past 

 ( vents through the refracting medium of recently acquired 

 habits of thought, which constituted Mr. Buckle's chief 

 source of failure as a philosophic historian. 



