166 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. i. 



Now I say it was by dint of this rare historic sense that 

 Comte succeeded in taking a step which was not only an 

 important advance, but in many respects a veritable revolu- 

 tion in philosophy. It was Cornte who first brought into 

 prominence the idea of a philosophy of history which .should 

 also be the history of philosophy. The thinkers of the 

 eighteenth century, with Hume at their head, had studied 

 systems of philosophy, much as anatomists before Cuvier 

 had studied animal and vegetal organisms, as detached in 

 dependent existences, without regard to their past or future. 

 But to Comte is due the grand and luminous conception of a 

 historic development of thought, from the earliest to the 

 latest ages of human speculative activity. Just as Cuvier 

 proclaimed it irrational to study existing organisms without 

 constant reference to extinct organisms, Comte pronounced 

 it irrational to coordinate existing opinions, save in their rela- 

 tion to past opinions. He grasped, as it had not before been 

 grasped, the truth that each body of doctrines has its root in 

 some ancestral body of doctrines ; that throughout the whole 

 of man's speculative career there has been going on an Evolu- 

 tion of Philosophy, of which the thorough recognition of the 

 relativity of knowledge must be the inevitable outcome. 

 Herein lay the originality of Comte ; an originality of which 

 it is hardly correct to say that Prof. Huxley disparages it, 

 since he passes over it in silence and does not appear to have 

 discerned it. Yet as to the originality of this conception, 

 there can be no question whatever. Neither Hume nor any 

 other thinker of the eighteenth century had compassed it. 

 Lessing, indeed, — a man far in advance of his age, — had, in 

 his work entitled " The Education of the Human Eace," 

 sketched a theory of the evolution of speculative ideas ; but 

 it was only imperfectly, if at all, that he comprehended the 

 nature and direction of that evolution. He may be regarded 

 as a forerunner, but not as an anticipator, of Comte. 



As to the importance of Comte's conception there can be 



