3O FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PARTI 



mutually independent parts. This spirit grew on 

 Comte more and more. " Humanity," he said at 

 last, "is alone real; the individual is an abstraction." 

 In so far as he appealed to biology for encourage- 

 ment in such teaching, Comte was following biologi- 

 cal clues in the new science of sociology. 



Now, if this be so, an adherent of the German 

 idealism will welcome Comte's progress, such as it is. 

 He will think it far better to expound human reason 

 and what he regards as a creation of human reason, 

 human society in terms of biology rather than in 

 terms of mechanism, or of " matter and motion." 

 Neither interpretation may be adequate, but Comte's 

 will seem to the idealist much nearer the truth than 

 the other. Only the idealist will lament that the 

 scale of the sciences is cut off with a knife at biology. 

 He thinks life a truer, richer, fuller, worthier cate- 

 gory than affinity or force, or any purely physical 

 conception ; but he believes there is a higher cate- 

 gory still, viz. self-conscious reason. He believes 

 that, while the processes of life may do a good deal 

 to throw light upon the processes of reason, the pro- 

 cesses of reason throw back even more light upon 

 the allied yet inferior processes studied by physi- 

 ology. The idealist holds that reason has gone to 

 the making of all things ; that it shows a little of 

 itself in the lower sciences, much of itself in the 

 sciences of biology and physiology, but all of itself 

 in self-consciousness self-consciousness, which is 

 the open secret of the world, and which does not 

 need to be studied at second hand either in biology 

 or in sociology when we can study it in itself, 

 and in its workings everywhere. Good to use 



