Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/476

462 past and present, there is to be "a domestic altar," at which, in kneeling attitude, adoration is to be paid to "our own personal patrons, our guardian angels, or household gods:" these being persons living or dead. And as exemplified by M. Comte's worship of Clotilde de Vaux, the praying to a beloved person or wife may be continued for years; recalling the customs of multitudinous peoples who invoke departed members of their families, as instance the Balonda, among whom if the "spot where a favorite wife has died,"... "is revisited, it is to pray to her."

Now omitting for the present all thought about the worthiness of these objects of worship, and considering only the general nature of the system, there arises the question—How happens it that while in other respects M. Comte delineates human evolution as progressive, he, in this respect, delineates it as retrogressive? Beyond all question civilization has been a gradual divergence from primitive savagery. According to his own account, the advance in social organization, in knowledge, in science, in art, presents a certain general continuity. Even in speculative thought, M. Comte's formula of the three stages, the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive, tacitly asserts movements in the same direction toward a final theory. How happens it, then, that with an advancing change in other things, there is to occur a retreating change in one thing?—along with progression in all else, retrogression in religion?

This retrogressive character of the Comtean religion is shown in sundry other ways—being, indeed, sometimes distinctly admitted or avowed. Thus we are told that "the domain of the priesthood must be reconstituted in its integrity; medicine must again become a part of it," as from savage life upward it was until modern times. Again, education has been slowly emancipating itself from ecclesiasticism; but in M. Comte's scheme, after the sacrament of initiation, the child passes "from its unsystematic training under the eye of its mother to the systematic education given by the priesthood;" just as, after a parallel ceremony, the child does among the Congo people, and as it did among the ancient Mexicans. And knowingly or unknowingly, M. Comte followed the lead of the Egyptians who had a formal judging of the dead by the living: honorable burial was allowed by them only in the absence of accusations against the deceased proved before judges; and by M. Comte it is provided that after a prescribed interval, the priesthood shall decide whether the remains shall be transferred from their probationary resting-place to "the sacred wood" reserved for the "sanctified." Most remarkable of all, however, is the reversion to an early type of religious belief