Maboh 4, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



377 



struction. How many edifices have crumbled 

 whose foundations have stood the test of time ! 

 But the superstructure was built upon that 

 foundation, and every line of the ' Politique 

 Positive ' must be read with the ' Philosophie 

 Positive ' in full view, otherwise it is utterly 

 incomprehensible. It is small wonder, there- 

 fore, that the readers of the English trans- 

 lation of the former, called Comte's ' Positive 

 Polity,' could make nothing of it, and set 

 Comte down as a dreamer or something worse. 



Another marked consequence of the failure 

 to translate the ' Philosophie ' has naturally 

 been a systematic plagiarism of Comte's ideas. 

 Persons of a certain type, and they are com- 

 mon enough, finding a great body of original 

 ideas in a work almost completely unlcnown, 

 have made it their opportunity to pass them- 

 selves off as profound thinkers. A learned pro- 

 fessor in one of the leading universities once 

 came by invitation and read a paper on the 

 classification of the sciences before one of the 

 scientific societies of Washington. It proved 

 to be simply a summary of the Comtian 

 hierarchy, but Comte's name was not men- 

 tioned and the views were put forth as orig- 

 inal with the speaker. There was only one 

 member present who detected the plagiarism 

 and felt it his duty to expose it. I have col- 

 lected a large number of similar cases, many 

 of which are amusing. 



As a third efiect of the same cause may be 

 mentioned the manner in which Comte's 

 ideas have influenced English thought. Ac- 

 cessible only to the highest types of mind, they 

 found themselves reflected only from such 

 high sources, and as such men usually have 

 systems of their own, they strive to conceal 

 the extent to which they are influenced by 

 others. This has been notably the case with 

 Comte's influence. In this day it is easy to 

 see that it was very great in England. John 

 Stuart Mill and George Henry Lewes were the 

 most frank in acknowledging it, but it is now 

 clear that Carlyle, Buckle and many others 

 were profoundly affected. That Herbert 

 Spencer recognized Comte's value to the sci- 

 entific world no one now doubts, notwithstand- 

 ing his vigorous disclaimers of discipleship. 

 "No one has maintained that he was a disciple. 



Indeed, the only disciples were those who ac- 

 cepted and strove to propagate his religion of 

 humanity, and these usually cared very little 

 for his scientific works; otherwise they would 

 have had his ' Philosophie Positive ' trans- 

 lated. That Spencer arranged his topics in 

 substantially the Comtian order I have re- 

 peatedly shown,* but this does not imply dis- 

 cipleship, since it is the true order of nature. 

 But Spencer could not have been ignorant of 

 Comte's classification of the sciences. It had 

 been before the world for thirty years before 

 Spencer began the ' Synthetic Philosophy.' 

 Others besides Mill had expounded it, and it 

 was familiar to all the best minds. Spencer 

 adopted both of Comte's new words ' sociol- 

 ogy ' and ' altruism,' and defended them with 

 proper acknowledgments. Even his ' Social 

 Statics ' proved to be Comte's term, although 

 Spencer thought it was Mill's. But his book 

 by that name shows that he really had no idea 

 of Comte's social statics or of social statics 

 in any scientific sense. 



Notwithstanding the handicap of a foreign 

 language, Comte's fundamental doctrines have 

 conquered the scientific mind, not only of 

 England, but of the whole world. In con- 

 formity with the Scriptural saying, Prance 

 was the last to recognize its own philosopher, 

 but his day is now come. Streets are named 

 for him, statues are erected to him, and his 

 power has penetrated not only into academic 

 but into legislative and administrative halls. 



M. Levy-Bruhl passes Comte's entire phi- 

 losophy in review, but the treatment is some- 

 what uneven. The biological side is the least 

 complete. It is true that Comte was not 

 strong in biology, and accepted with certain 

 reserves the doctrine of the fixity of species, 

 as did nearly everybody in those pre-Darwinian 

 days, but he was acquainted with Lamarck 

 and believed in evolution and in the descent 

 of man from an animal, even simian, ancestry. 

 He worked out the doctrine of the interaction 

 of the organism and the environment and 

 carried it to a very advanced stage. He even 

 foreshadowed the principle of natural selec- 

 tion, and it is remarkable that Levy-Bruhl 



* See Science, N. S. Vol. III., February 21, 

 1896, p. 294; 'Pure Sociology,' p. 69. 



