406 An Estimate of Auguste Comte . [July, 
assigns to scientific men, or at least to philosophers in his 
sense of the word, a position something like what was 
formerly held by the priesthood, he subordinates Science to 
Emotion. In the words of his whilom interpreter, he con- 
siders the “ intellectual aspedt not the noblest aspedt of 
man.” He maintains that “ Science is a futile, frivolous 
pursuit, unworthy of greater respedt than a game of chess, 
unless its issue be in some enlarged conception of man’s life 
and destiny.” In other words, he did not feel that love of 
abstract truth for its own sake, quite independent of man, 
which actuates the bulk of our great investigators. If 
Science was not to him exactly — 
“ Eine tiichtige Kuh die ihn mit Butter versorgt,” 
as she is to most of our practical men, who for all that be- 
grudge her pasture, she is, on the other hand, not — 
“ Die hohe, die himmlische Gottinn.” 
Here I must avow my dissent. For what is man but a 
thinking brain, furnished with outward senses as its mes- 
sengers, with limbs as its agents, and with digestive, circu- 
latory, respiratory, &c., organs to maintain its adtivity ? 
The lower animals have wills, emotions, but they have no 
Science ; in them the intellect is a servant. In man alone, 
or at least in the higher man, the relation is inverted. He 
does not perceive and understand to live, but he lives to 
perceive and understand the world in which he is placed. 
The “ Positive Philosophy ” can scarcely, as time passes 
on, and as the excitement which greeted its avatar dies 
away, be pronounced as marking out any grand epoch in the 
intellectual history of the world. In comparison with the 
doCtrine of development it appears scantily fruitful in con- 
sequences. In its case, as in so many others, results stand 
in no definite relation, either quantitative or qualitative, to 
intentions. Just as the advocates of peace have before now 
brought on a bloody war, — just as the philanthropist often 
finds that he has been multiplying misery, — just as the en- 
thusiasts who seek to unite all Christian communities into 
one, simply succeed in generating a new heresy and a new 
intolerance, so it has been with the doCtrine which was to 
have absorbed all intellectual activity into one harmonious 
system. 
