Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/475

Rh these kinds are in addition to the other multitudinous regulations contained in those parts of the highly elaborated "System of Positive Polity," in which M. Comte prescribes the social organization, under the arrangements of which "the affective, speculative, patrician, and plebeian" classes are to carry on the business of their lives.

It is, I say, not a little remarkable that a height of assumption exceeding that ever before displayed by a human being—a self-deification along with the deification of Humanity—should not have negatived belief in the general doctrines set forth by him. One might have thought that by exhibiting a lack of mental balance unparalleled among sane people, he would have wholly discredited his speculations. However, recognizing the fact that this is not so, and assuming that M. Comte's disciples discover in the Religion of Humanity propounded by him, a truth which survives recognition of his—eccentricities, let us call them—we will now go on to consider this proposed creed.

To those who have studied that natural genesis of religion summarized in the article Mr. Harrison criticises, it will appear anomalous that a proposed new and higher religion should be, in large measure, a rehabilitation of the religion with which mankind commenced, and from which they have been insensibly diverging, until the more advanced among them have quite lost sight of it. After an era during which worship of the dead was practiced all the world over, alike by savages and by the progenitors of the civilized—after an era of slow emergence from this primitive religion, during which the propitiation of ghosts completely human was replaced by the propitiation of comparatively few superhuman ghosts or spirits, and finally by the propitiation of a spirit infinitely transcending humanity, and from which human attributes have been gradually dropped, leaving only the most abstract which are themselves fading; we are told by the Positivists that there is coming an era in which the Universal Power men have come to believe in, will be ignored; and human individualities, regarded now singly and now in their aggregate, will again be the objects of religious feeling. If the worship of the dead is not to be completely resuscitated, still the proposal is to resuscitate it in a form but partially transfigured. Though there is no direction to offer at graves food and drink for ghosts, yet public worship of the so-called "Great Being Humanity," "must be performed in the midst of the tombs of the more eminent dead, which tombs are surrounded by a sacred grove, the scene of the homage paid by their family and their fellow-citizens;" while "at times within each consecrated tomb, the priesthood will" superintend the honoring of the good man or woman: proposed usages analogous to those of many ancestor-worshiping peoples. Moreover, again taking a lesson from various races of pagans,