Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/219

 He found that each of these sciences had in the course of its development passed through three stages,—a theological, a metaphysical, and a positive. Take, for example, life in man and brute: what is it? The answer of primitive man—the theological answer—is, God breathed into their nostrils the breath of life, and they became living creatures. Then came the metaphysical explanation: they live because their blood is pervaded by a mysterious sublimated essence called "vital spirits," or "physiological units." Then at last the question why they live is given up as hopeless; and it is only asked how they live, and by what means the conditions of life can be modified for their profit or loss. This is the last or positive stage which is ultimately reached in every science.

From 1822 to 1842 Comte was busily engaged in verif3'ing the above profound generalization in detail. Heureka! He had found a master-key to the whole history of mankind, religious, philosophical, moral, and political. The foundations of a true science of sociology might at last be confidently laid. The gods and the metaphysicians might now be safely, nay, advantageously, bowed out of the great Temple of Humanity, in appropriate niches of which should be placed such miscellaneous benefactors of the race as Moses, Christ, Mohammed, the Buddha, St. Thomas Aquinas; Plato, Socrates, Æschylus, Confucius, Shakespeare, Dante; Thales, Archimedes, Newton, Kepler; Ariosto, Cervantes, Moliere; Julius Caesar, Trajan, Danton, and a great company of other prophets, who, in their day and generation, had worked hard in the sacred cause of Humanity, without, of course, apprehending very clearly what they were about. Some of them, no