260 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. t 



a polity which should be competent to reorganize society. 

 The belief that society can be regenerated by philosophy 

 is a belief which underlies all his speculations from first to 

 last. His aims were as practical as those of Saint-Simon 

 and Fourier, the difference being chiefly that these un- 

 scientific dreamers built their Utopias upon abstract theories 

 of human nature, while Comte sought to found his polity 

 upon the scientific study of the actual tendencies of humanity 

 as determined by its past history. In a future chapter I 

 shall have occasion to show that this whole attempt of 

 Comte's was based upon a profound misconception of the 

 true state of the case. For the present we need only observe 

 that with Comte the construction of a Philosophy meant 

 ultimately the construction of a Sociology, to which all his 

 elaborate systematization of scientific methods was intended 

 to be ancillary. Why must we study observation in astro- 

 nomy, experiment in physics and chemistry, comparison in 

 biology? In order, says Comte, to acquire the needful 

 mental training for sound theorizing in sociology. To him 

 the various physical sciences were not sources from which 

 grand generalizations were to be derived, embracing the 

 remotest and most subtle phenomena of the Universe ; they 

 were whetstones upon which to grind the logical implements 

 to be used in constructing a theory of Humanity. All other 

 theorizing was to be condemned, save in so far as it could 

 be shown to be in some way subservient to this purpose. 

 Thus Comte's conception of philosophy was throughout an- 

 thropocentric, and he utterly ignored the cosmic point of 

 view. There can be little doubt that he who, in 1830, 

 rejected the development-theory, which a more prescient 

 thinker, like Goethe, was enthusiastically proclaiming, would 

 have scorned as chimerical and useless Mr. Spencer's theory 

 of evolution. We may now begin to see why Comte wished 

 to separate Man from the rest of the organic creation, and 

 why he was so eager to condemn sidereal astronomy, the 



