CHAP, ii COMTE'S LIFE AND TEACHING 17 



ism had so deeply infected. The later treatise rec- 

 ognises that a science of morals ought to handle the 

 problems of personal conduct, in the light of the 

 conditions of social well-being established or defined 

 by sociology. As being more complex, the discussion 

 of personal duty in morals a treatise which Comte 

 never was able to compose is placed by him later 

 than sociology in his list of the sciences. 



Beyond this statement of his alleged Law of the 

 Three Stages, Comte does not argue in favour of his 

 agnostic background. He takes it over from his pred- 

 ecessors in the business of speculation, empiricists 

 and individualists of the ordinary type. Once he 

 refers to Kant, telling us that Kant had had a very 

 fair inkling of the biological view of human knowledge 

 as a thing absolutely relative to its environment 

 being partly due to the activity of the organism, partly 

 to the reaction of the environment ; the two elements 

 mixing in a way that defies us to decompose them, 

 and that forbids us to regard man as capable of pos- 

 sessing absolute truth. But usually Comte is content 

 to let history, as he understands history, tell its own 

 tale. Once, mankind aspired to penetrate to the 

 knowledge of causes. The race devoted itself to a 

 theological interpretation of the world. First came 

 Fetishism; every object in nature, every part of the 

 mighty whole, was held to be alive, just as man him- 

 self is alive. Unlike the writers of to-day, who gener- 

 ally identify Fetishism with Animism in the most 

 approved sense of that slippery and misleading word 

 Comte has no intention of admitting that primitive 

 mankind believed in spirits, temporarily or perma- 

 nently connected with the Fetish. Not so; Comte 



