Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/293

Rh hearing for M. Comte, if he is to have one at all among our countrymen en masse. A brief biographical introduction is prefixed, from which it appears that the founder of Positivism as a science was born in 1797, of an "eminently Catholic and monarchical" family—that while at college, in his fourteenth year, he first felt "the necessity of an entire renovation in philosophy," involving the application of the scientific Method to vital and social problems, as well as to the phenomena of the inorganic world—that he subsequently co-operated for some time with St. Simon—that in his twenty-ninth year insanity (with which his enemies would taunt him to this day) was the transient result of a "transient cerebral disorder"—that he became professor at the Ecole Polytechnique, but lost that and other posts by the systematic hostility of some brother professors, and is now, indeed, a needy and dependent man. One year of"chaste and exquisite affection," of ample power to soften and subdue the angularities and asperities of his too exclusively intellectual system, gave him a new glimpse into man's destiny, and taught him the predominance due to the affections. His writings, composed with singular rapidity, already amount to twelve portly tomes.

Let us hastily glance at some of the salient points of M. Comte's philosophy.—Its fundamental law is, the passage of Humanity through three successive stages—the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. These three phases of intellectual evolution characterise the progress of the individual as well as of the race, of the unit man as well as of the mass of men. The preparatory phase—called the theological, or supernatural—is that in which the mind seeks causes, asks the how of every phenomenon, the ultimate whence of every fact, the wherefore of every why. In it, the mind ascribes every event to an immediate divine agent, and every unusual or exceptional appearance to the express favour or displeasure of that extra-mundane agent. The mind regards Nature "as the theatre whereon the arbitrary wills and momentary caprices of Superior Powers play their varying and variable parts. Men are startled at unusual occurrences, and explain them by fanciful conceptions. A solar eclipse is understood, and unerringly predicted to a moment, by Positive Science; but in the theological epoch it was believed that some dragon had swallowed the sun." Such is phase the first. And observe: not one honest English Churchman, not one plain English Christian, to this very hour, has advanced beyond this phase. For the former has not expunged from his prayer-book, supplications for rain or for fair weather; nor has the latter ceased to believe in a particular providence; things wholly set aside as old wives' fables by the positive philosophy. So that every father's son amongst us who holds to the creed of "ancestral voices," and so worships the God of his fathers, and still abides by the faith of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, must be prepared for the contempt, uttered or unexpressed, inalienable from, a positivist in the maturity of stage the third, towards a supernaturalist in the groping babyhood of stage the first.

Now for the second phase—the metaphysical. Here, a modification has taken place. The supernatural agents have merged in certain abstract forces, which are supposed to inhere in various substances, and to have a capacity of engendering phenomena. The gods are ignored, or displaced by metaphysical entities. The divine personalities have given way to