CHAP, iv THE APPEAL TO HISTORY 43 



Oftener, however, Comte treats history in a differ- 

 ent fashion. He would agree with J. S. Mill, 1 that, 

 in contrast with the physical sciences, history dis- 

 closes a law, not of repetition, but of continuous 

 progressive development. Mill is careful to guard 

 himself against making any assumption in this defini- 

 tion as to the moral value of one stage in history 

 when compared with another. Progress in the moral 

 sense he does not affirm ; he affirms merely the 

 technical law that the curve which describes the 

 course of history never returns upon itself. This 

 belief is one of the characteristic differences between 

 the East and the West and between antiquity and the 

 modern world. The whole of oriental mankind, with 

 all its sages and all its faiths, believes in the doctrine 

 that history repeats itself. It is part of the burden 

 of the bitter book of Ecclesiastes in Old Testament 

 Scripture ; after immense labour, we find ourselves 

 again exactly where we stood long ago. Even in the 

 West, the same doctrine was largely held in classical 

 times. Perhaps in the modern West in the Chris- 

 tian or semi- Christian West we too easily make the 

 transition from asserting progress in the intellectual 

 sense, as a continuous evolution of change from 

 change, novelty from novelty, to asserting progress 

 in the moral sense, as continuous improvement. Per- 

 sonally, no doubt, Mill himself believed in moral 

 progress as firmly as in continuous historical change. 

 And Comte believed both the intellectual no less 

 than the moral : " as if," he cries, " history ever 

 repeated itself." But, if history does not repeat 

 itself, the past cannot furnish examples to the present. 



1 In his Logic, and elsewhere. 



