AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 19 



He is still in England an unsurpassed master of expression 

 this, certainly, in his History, if in his Essays he somewhat 

 baffles his own self by a certain laboured breadth of conscious 

 fine writing, often singularly inexact and infelicitous. Still 

 Kant, with reference to his products, must be allowed much the 

 greater importance. In the history of philosophy he will pro- 

 bably always command as influential a place in the modern 

 world as Socrates in the ancient ; while, as probably, Hume will 

 occupy at best some such position as that of Heraclitus or Pro- 

 tagoras. Hume, nevertheless, if unequal to Kant, must, in view 

 at once of his own subjective ability and his enormous influence, 

 be pronounced one of the most important of writers. It would 

 be difficult to rate too high the value of his French predecessors 

 and contemporaries as regards purification of their oppressed 

 and corrupt country ; and Hume must be allowed, though with 

 less call, to have subserved some such function in the land we 

 live in. In preferring Kant, indeed, I must be acquitted of any 

 undue partiality ; for all that appertains to personal bias was 

 naturally, and by reason of early and numerous associations, on 

 the side of my countryman. 



Demurring, then, to Mr Huxley's opinion on this matter, and 

 postponing remark on the doctrines to which he alludes, I must 

 express a hearty concurrence with every word he utters on 

 Comte. In him I too " find little or nothing of any scientific 

 value." I too have been lost in the mere mirage and sands of 

 " those dreary and verbose pages ; " and I acknowledge in Mr 

 Huxley's every word the ring of a genuine experience. M. 

 Comte was certainly a man of some mathematical and scientific 

 proficiency, as well as of quick but biassed intelligence. A 

 member of the Aufkldrung, he had seen the immense advance of 

 physical science since Newton, under, as is usually said, the 

 method of Bacon ; and, like Hume, like Reid, like Kant, who had 

 all anticipated him in this, he sought to transfer that method to 

 the domain of mind. In this he failed ; and though in a socio- 

 logical aspect he is not without true glances into the present 

 disintegration of society and the conditions of it, anything of 

 importance cannot be claimed for him. There is not a sentence 

 in his book that, in the hollow elaboration and windy preten- 

 tiousness of its build, is not an exact type of its own constructor. 

 On the whole, indeed, when we consider the little to which he 

 attained, the empty inflation of his claims, the monstrous and 

 maniacal self-conceit into which he was exalted, it may appear, 

 perhaps, that charity to M. Comte himself, to say nothing of 

 the world, should induce us to wish that both his name and his 

 works were buried in oblivion. Now, truly, that Mr Huxley 

 (the " call " being for the moment his) has so pronounced him- 

 self, especially as the facts of the case are exactly and absolutely 



