2O FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART i 



debris of an obsolete intellectual and social order. 

 Hence the reign of metaphysics must be incompara- 

 bly shorter than the prevalence of the theological 

 spirit. Already the new, the true, the final stage of 

 thought was unfolding itself in a few rarely gifted 

 minds. The one solid result of metaphysical inquiries 

 consisted in the fragments of science accidentally dis- 

 covered, either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages, by 

 minds too finely touched for the metaphysical dreams 

 which chiefly occupied them. In a sense, therefore, 

 science antedated metaphysics. But more still, there 

 must have been a leaven of positivism i.e. of science 

 even in the earliest fetishist days, if human life was 

 to be maintained on earth. And so we do not wonder 

 to find that society was being built up, piece by piece, 

 long before sociology was possible. In the days of 

 fetishism the family was developed, the most es- 

 sential of all social formations. Polytheism, which 

 ushered in the epoch of militarism, witnessed the 

 construction of the State. At first, however, spiritual 

 power and secular power were closely combined. 

 Either the State was a Theocracy, in which the priests 

 ruled; or in subsequent days the military classes, 

 who had assumed command of the State, kept the 

 priests under control. Both of these systems yielded 

 very imperfect types of the State ; yet humanity owed 

 much to them. The practical wisdom of the priests, 

 and, still more, the sagacious instincts of secular 

 statesmanship, did a great deal to counteract the anti- 

 social tendencies of a developed theology. Instead 

 of dreaming away their lives in religious joys, or in 

 thoughts of another world as their creeds may have 

 demanded men were disciplined by their wise rulers 



