262 COSMIC PHILOSOrUY. [pi. u 



no patience with atheists, because of the chiefly negative 

 and destructive character of the atheistic philosophy domi- 

 nant in the eighteenth century. But when he lets us into 

 his philosophic reasons for rejecting atheism, we find him 

 complaining of the atheists, not because of their denial of 

 Deity, nor because their doctrine contravenes the relativity of 

 knowledge, but because they indulge in " metaphysical at- 

 tempts to explain the origin of life upon the earth's sur- 

 face." (!) On reading such passages, it becomes sufficiently 

 evident that Comte did not really understand why meta- 

 physical inquiries are illegitimate, but rejected them very 

 much as the general reader might reject them, because they 

 muddled his mind; and we may acknowledge the justice of 

 Prof. Huxley's sarcasm, that " metaphysics " is, with Comte a 

 "general term of abuse for anything that he does not like." 

 Certain it is that Comte never understood the true import of 

 the doctrine of relativity, as it is stated in our fourth chapter, 

 — that there exists an Unknowable Eeality, of which all phe- 

 nomena, as presented in consciousness, are the knowable 

 manifestations. As I have already observed, his most illus- 

 trious follower, M. Littre\ unreservedly stigmatizes as "meta- 

 physical " this very doctrine of the Unknowable, upon which 

 the Cosmic Philosophy bases its rejection of metaphysics. 

 Had Comte ever understood this doctrine, he would neither 

 have sought to impose upon us a phenomenal God, in the 

 form of idealized Humanity, nor would he have virtually 

 abandoned his original Positivism in the wild attempt to 

 "regenerate" the subjective method. All these things show 

 that Comte never really fathomed the distinction between 

 metaphysics and science ; and as the final outcome of all 

 this complicated misconception, we find him, in his famous 

 " Law of the Three Stages," setting forth as the goal of all 

 speculative progress a state or habitude of mind which never 

 has existed and which never can exist. Herein the antago- 

 nism between Cosmism and Positivism becomes so funda- 



