which lead me unhesitatingly to accept Mr. Congreve's challenge, and to refuse to recognise anything which deserves the name of grandeur of character in M. Comte, unless it be his arrogance, which is undoubtedly sublime. All I have to observe is, that if Mr. Congreve is justified in saying that I speak with a tinge of contempt for his spiritual father, the reason for such colouring of my language is to be found in the fact, that, when I wrote, I had but just arisen from the perusal of a work with which he is doubtless well acquainted, M. Littré's Auguste Comte et la Philosophie Positive."

Though there are tolerably fixed standards of right and wrong, and even of generosity and meanness, it may be said that the beauty, or grandeur, of a life is more or less a matter of taste; and Mr. Congreve's notions of literary excellence are so different from mine that, it may be, we should diverge as widely in our judgment of moral beauty or ugliness. Therefore, while retaining my own notions, I do not presume to quarrel with his. But when Mr. Congreve devotes a great deal of laboriously guarded insinuation to the endeavour to lead the public to believe that I have been guilty of the dishonesty of having criticised Comte without having read him, I must be permitted to remind him that he has neglected the well-known maxim of a diplomatic sage, "If you want to damage a man, you should say what is probable, as well as what is true."

And when Mr. Congreve speaks of my having an advantage over him in my introduction of "Christianity” into the phrase that " M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be described as Catholicism minus Christianity;" intending thereby to suggest that I have, by so doing,

desired to profit by an appeal to the odium theologicum, -he lays himself open to a very unpleasant retort.

What if I were to suggest that Mr. Congreve had not read Comte's works; and that the phrase "the context shows that the view of the writer ranges-however superficially-over the whole works. This is obvious from the mention of Catholicism," demonstrates that Mr. Congreve has no acquaintance with the "Philosophie Positive"? I think the suggestion would be very unjust and unmannerly, and I shall not make it. But the fact remains, that this little epigram of mine, which has so greatly provoked Mr. Congreve, is neither more nor less than a condensed paraphrase of the following passage, which is to be found at page 344 of the fifth volume of the "Philosophie Positive: "1

"La seule solution possible de ce grand problème historique, qui n'a jamais pu être philosophiquement posé jusqu'ici, consiste à concevoir, en sens radicalement inverse des notions habituelles, que ce qui devait nécessairement périr ainsi, dans le catholicisme, c'était la doctrine, et non l'organisation, qui n'a été passagèrement ruinée que par suite de son inévitable adhérence élémentaire à la philosophie théologique, destinée à succomber graduellement sous l'irrésistible émancipation de la raison humaine; tandis qu'une telle constitution, convenablement reconstruite sur des bases intellectuelles à la fois plus étendues et plus stables, devra finalement présider à l'indispensable réorganisation spirituelle des sociétés modernes, sauf les différences essentielles spontanément correspondantes à l'extrême diversité des doctrines fondamentales; à moins de supposer, ce qui serait certainement contradictoire à l'ensemble des luis de notre nature, que les immenses efforts de tant de grands hommes, secondés par la persévérante sollicitude des nations civilisées, dans la fondation séculaire de ce chef-d'œuvre politique de la sagesse humaine, doivent être enfin irrévocablement perdus pour l'élite de l'humanité sauf les résultats, capitaux mais provisoires, qui s'y rapportaient immédiatement. Cette explication générale, déjà évidem ment motivée par la suite des considérations propres à ce chapitre,

1 Now and always I quote the second edition, by Littré.

sera de plus en plus confirmée par tout le reste de notre opération historique, dont elle constituera spontanément la principale conclusion politique."

Nothing can be clearer. Comte's ideal, as stated by himself, is Catholic organization without Catholic doctrine, or, in other words, Catholicism minus Christianity. Surely it is utterly unjustifiable to ascribe to me base motives for stating a man's doctrines, as nearly as may be, in his own words!

My readers would hardly be interested were I to follow Mr. Congreve any further, or I might point out that the fact of his not having heard me lecture is hardly a safe ground for his speculations as to what I do not teach. Nor do I feel called upon to give any opinion as to M. Comte's merits or demerits as regards sociology. Mr. Mill (whose competence to speak on these matters I suppose will not be questioned, even by Mr. Congreve) has dealt with M. Comte's philosophy from this point of view, with a vigour and authority to which I cannot for a moment aspire; and with a severity, not unfrequently amounting to contempt, which I have not the wish, if I had the power, to surpass. I, as a mere student in these questions, am content to abide by Mr. Mill's judgment until some one shows cause for its reversal, and I decline to enter into a discussion which I have not provoked.

The sole obligation which lies upon me is to justify so much as still remains without justification of what I have written respecting Positivism—namely, the opinion expressed in the following paragraph :

"In so far as my study of what specially characterises the Positive Philosophy has led me, I find therein little or nothing of any scientific value, and a great deal which is as thoroughly antagonistic to the very essence of science as anything in ultramontane Catholicism."

Here are two propositions: the first, that the " Philosophie Positive" contains little or nothing of any scientific value; the second, that Comtism is, in spirit, anti-scientific. I shall endeavour to bring forward ample evidence in support of both.

I. No one who possesses even a superficial acquaintance with physical science can read Comte's "Leçons" without becoming aware that he was at once singularly devoid of real knowledge on these subjects, and singularly unlucky. What is to be thought of the contemporary of Young and of Fresnel, who never misses an opportunity of casting scorn upon the hypothesis of an ether-the fundamental basis not only of the undulatory theory of light, but of so much else in modern physics-and whose contempt for the intellects of some of the strongest men of his generation was such, that he puts forward the mere existence of night as a refutation of the undulatory theory? What a wonderful gauge of his own value as a scientific critic does he afford, by whom we are informed that phrenology is a great science, and psychology a chimæra; that Gall was one of the great men of his age, and that Cuvier was "brilliant but superficial"!2 How unlucky must one consider the bold speculator who, just before the dawn of modern histology-which is simply the application of the microscope to anatomy-reproves what he calls "the abuse of microscopic investigations," and "the exaggerated credit" attached to them; who, when the morphological uniformity of the tissues of the great majority of plants and animals was on the eve of being 1 "Philosophie Positive," ii. p. 440.

2 "Le brillant mais superficiel Cuvier."-Philosophie Positive, vi. p. 383.

demonstrated, treated with ridicule those who attempt to refer all tissues to a "tissu générateur," formed by "le chimérique et inintelligible assemblage d'une sorte de monades organiques, qui seraient dès lors les vrais éléments primordiaux de tout corps vivant;"1 and who finally tells us, that all the objections against a linear arrangement of the species of living beings are in their essence foolish, and that the order of the animal series is "2 necessarily linear," 2 when the exact contrary is one of the best-established and the most important truths of zoology. Appeal to mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, chemists, biologists, about the "Philosophie Positive," and they all, with one consent, begin to make protestation that, whatever M. Comte's other merits, he has shed no light upon the philosophy of their particular studies.

66

To be just, however, it must be admitted that even M. Comte's most ardent disciples are content to be judiciously silent about his knowledge or appreciation of the sciences themselves, and prefer to base their master's claims to scientific authority upon his "law of the three states," and his "classification of the sciences." But here, also, I must join issue with them as completely as others notably Mr. Herbert Spencer-have done before me. A critical examination of what M. Comte has to say about the "law of the three states" brings out nothing but a series of more or less contradictory state

"Philosophie Positive," iii. p. 369.

2 Ibid. p. 387.

3 Hear the late Dr. Whewell, who calls Comte "a shallow pretender," so far as all the modern sciences, except astronomy, are concerned; and tells us that "his pretensions to discoveries are, as Sir John Herschel has shown, absurdly fallacious."-" Comte and Positivism," Macmillan's Magazine, March 1866.