been invented and so widely accepted and employed, it cannot be got rid of, and we must be content simply to guard against its being applied in ways calculated to create or foster prejudice. It was put in circulation by M. Auguste Comte, a man of remarkable intellectual power, but also of immoderate intellectual self-conceit and arrogance. He was born in 1798, and died in 1857. There is an able biography of him by M. Littré, one of the most illustrious veterans of contemporary French science and literature; and there are a multitude of sketches of his life, executed with different degrees of care and skill. His voluminous writings have been translated into our language by a few of his English disciples with self-denying zeal, and in a manner which leaves nothing to be desired.

M. Comte has no valid claim to be considered the originator of the theory to which he gave a new name and a vigorous impulse. It was taught in all its essential principles by Protagoras and others in Greece more than four hundred years before the Christian era. Positivism is the phenomenalism of the Greek sophists revived and adapted to the demands of the present age. Hume and Kant and Saint Simon were positivists before the appearance of positivism. It is scarcely possible to find in Comte's writings an original view-except on the subject of scien

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tific method which is generally accepted by those who are called his disciples. He formed, indeed, a great many original notions,-notions his own by right of paternity or creation, but these children of his brain few even of his warm admirers have felt inclined to adopt. They are the mere vagaries of an individual mind, and must be left out of account by those who are judging of the general doctrine of positivism. But although all the chief ideas of Comte had been clearly and repeatedly enunciated by earlier thinkers, he had great strength and skill in systematising doctrines and elaborately applying principles, and his influence has been both extensive and intense.

The Positivism which he taught, taken as a whole, is at once a philosophy, a polity, and a religion. It professes to systematise all scientific knowledge, to organise all industrial and social activities, and to satisfy all spiritual aspirations and affections. It undertakes to explain the past, to exhibit the good and evil, strength and weakness, of the present, and to forecast the future; to assign to every science, every large scientific generalisation, every principle and function of human nature, and every great social force, its appropriate place; to construct a system of thought inclusive of all well-established truths, and to delineate a scheme of political and religious life in which

duty and happiness, order and progress, opinion and emotion, will be reconciled and caused to work together for the good alike of the individual and of society. It sets before itself, in a word, an aim of the very largest and grandest kind conceivable; and as Comte believed that he had been signally successful in performing his mighty task, we need hardly wonder that he should have boldly claimed to have rendered to his race the services both of a St Paul and an Aristotle.

Is the system as consistent as it is undoubtedly comprehensive? Comtists themselves cannot agree as to the answer which ought to be given to this question. A few of the more enthusiastic and thoroughgoing among them such as Dr Bridges, Mr Congreve, and, in a lesser degree, perhaps, Mr Harrison-reply in the affirmative, and accept the system as a whole. A much larger number, of whom, since the death of Mr J. S. Mill, M. Littré is the most conspicuous representative, answer in the negative, and will have nothing to do with the positivist religion. I have no wish to take part in this controversy, which is of no very great importance, and in regard to which, besides, I have elsewhere stated the conclusion at which I have arrived. As, however, the philosophy and religion of Comte are both anti-theistic, and yet, in my opinion, inconsistent with each other, I must consider them.

separately, the one in so far as it would simply push theism aside, and the other in so far as it would provide a substitute for it.

What, then, is the attitude of the positive philosophy towards religion? As represented by Comte, it may be thus described. We know, and can know, nothing except physical phenomena and their laws. The senses are the sources of all true thinking, and we can know nothing except the phenomena which they apprehend, and the relations of sequence and resemblance in which these phenomena stand to one another. Mental phenomena can all be resolved into material phenomena, and there is no such thing discoverable as either efficient or final causation, as either an origin or purpose in the world, as, consequently, either a creative or providential intelligence. The mind in its progress necessarily finds out that phenomena cannot be reasonably referred to supernatural agents, as at a later period that they cannot be referred to occult causes, but that they must be accepted as they present themselves to the senses, and arranged according to their relationships of sequence or coexistence, similarity or dissimilarity. Wherever theological speculation is found, there thought is in its infancy.

Now, the first remark which this suggests is, that it is not consistent even as a theory of positivism. It is to a considerable extent a mate

rialistic theory, and so far as it is materialism it is not properly positivism. Materialism supposes matter to be more than a phenomenon. It supposes it to be a substance and a cause. The positivist may answer that such phenomena as feelings and thoughts are not resolved into material substances or causes, but into material phenomena. The self-contradiction, however, is not thus to be got rid of. If we know merely phenomena, we never can be warranted to say that those which we call mental can be resolved into those which we call physical. We can only be warranted in saying that the two classes of phenomena are related as coexistent or successive, similar or dissimilar. Comte went far beyond this, and therefore far beyond a self-consistent positivism-i.e., phenomenalism.

Further, the limitation or reduction of pheno mena to material phenomena is unwarranted. We have a direct and immediate knowledge of thinking, feeling, and willing, and simply as phenomena these are markedly distinct from the phenomena called material. They are never, as material phenomena always are, the objects of our senses. But we are at least as sure of their existence as of the existence of material phenomena, and to deny or overlook their existence is to reject or ignore that which is most indubitable. There is no testimony so strong as the direct immediate testi