478 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ft. in. 



destroyed, and ought not to be destroyed, save as they are 

 gradually supplanted by habits of thought that are relatively 

 more accurate and by theories of the world that are relatively 

 more complete. 



In view of these considerations we may the better com- 

 prehend the significance — upon which I formerly (Part I. 

 chap, vii.) insisted — of the change in the attitude of philo- 

 sophy of which Comte's celebrated doctrine of the " Three 

 Stages " was partly the cause and partly the symptom. In 

 spite of his hostility to the Doctrine of Evolution, in most of 

 the forms in which he came into contact with it as techni- 

 cally stated, Comte was nevertheless thoroughly inspired by 

 the comparative method, so far as the study of history was 

 concerned. As far as was possible with his slender scientific 

 resources, he looked at human affairs with the eye of an 

 evolutionist. "When he announced it as a law that every 

 human conception must pass through three stages — the theo- 

 logical, the metaphysical, and the positive — though his state- 

 ment was a crude one, it nevertheless clearly showed that a 

 time had come when opinions were no longer to be tried by 

 their conformity to some absolute standard, whether of ortho- 

 doxy or of radicalism, but were henceforth to be estimated 

 in their relations to the circumstances which had given rise 

 to them. 



Those who have most carefully studied the iconoclastic phi- 

 losophy of Voltaire and the Encyclopedistes of the eighteenth 

 century, will best appreciate the character and extent of the 

 revolution in the attitude of philosophy which was effected 

 by this new method of criticism. In the opinion of those 

 metaphysical thinkers, everything old was wrong, and any- 

 ihing new was likely to be right. They classified men, not 

 relatively, as ancients, medisevals and moderns, but absolutely 

 as fools and philosophers ; the philosophers being all who 

 subscribed to the doctrines of the Encyclopedic, the fools 

 being all those who believed in miracles or in a personal God 



