14 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PARTI 



there is the Polity of the future, dogmatically detailed 

 upon Positivist lines. It is plain that such a pro- 

 gramme affords plenty of scope for repetition and 

 reiteration. Comte makes full use of his opportuni- 

 ties. We must remember that Comte had already in 

 view the composition of the Polity when he issued 

 his Philosophy. It is characteristic of the man to 

 grind his few leading ideas round and round and 

 round again in his own and in his reader's mind. A 

 division or a generalisation is never expounded once 

 for all ; we shall meet with it again as a subdivision 

 in a different section. This is a failing which leans 

 to virtue's side, but its scale is positively gigantic in 

 Comte. 



Along with the difference in scale, and in precision 

 of semi-political or legislative detail, there is to be 

 noted a difference, up to a certain degree, in the 

 animating spirit. Both treatises rely upon Comte's 

 hierarchy of the sciences ; both rely upon his his- 

 torical law of the Three Stages ; and both of them 

 are affected by his belief that the heart ought to rule 

 the head, or the intellect to be the servant of the 

 affections. But the last point certainly counts for 

 vastly more in the Polity than in the Philosophy. 

 Between the date of the two treatises the church 

 of humanity, as represented by its prophet Comte, 

 had developed a whole system of worship. Some 

 have regarded the two stages of Comte's thinking as 

 flatly contradictory of each other. It seems better 

 to recognise that, at every stage, there were diverse 

 currents of thought or " streams of tendency " min- 

 gling in Comte ; that he was perhaps divided against 

 himself, habitually inconsistent, continuously self- 



