34 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PARTI 



admitted to-day in most quarters that J. S. Mill failed 

 logically in his generous attempt to establish the 

 claims of all upon the fact of each man's personal 

 interest in his own happiness. Some more recent 

 sociological schools do indeed resume the appeal to 

 hedonism ; but they do so as we shall shortly note 

 in connection with a doctrine of evolution which 

 was unknown to Comte, and which those who rely 

 on it regard as affording a new basis for morals, a 

 new rampart against the assaults of a destructive 

 individualism. To unsophisticated phenomenalism, 

 one fact is as good as another ; and there is no fact 

 more pressing than the claims of self. It may pos- 

 sibly be argued that the new doctrines of evolution 

 bridle the spirit of selfishness by showing that each 

 individual inherits a sort of compendium of the moral 

 experience of past ages. But, at any rate, in the 

 absence of evolutionary doctrine, Comte had to qual- 

 ify or corrupt his phenomenalism in the interests 

 of the public weal. It is not because experience 

 proves society to be the true source of individual 

 happiness that Comte champions society, or that he 

 sings the praises of the social life. He ignores our 

 specifically human experience, and assimilates man's 

 life, as far as possible, to natural or animal existence. 

 He will not admit that reason has disintegrated the 

 purely instinctive co-operation of gregarious animals, 

 so that it can never be reconstituted. And he has no 

 vision of a higher fellowship, created only by the 

 rational and moral nature of man, or by that glorious 

 Nature whose image is borne by man alone, of all 

 creatures upon earth. Comte has his psychology of 

 the rational nature, of its characteristic selfishness 



