nites them into
a collection force is a common belief, an idea. Ideas are related to
feeling--to quote a comparison from John Stuart Mill's valuable treatise
_Auguste Comte and Positivism_, 3d ed., 1882, a work of which we have made
considerable use--as the steersman who directs the ship is to the steam
which drives it forward. Thus the history of humanity has been determined
by the history of man's intellectual convictions, and this in turn by the
three familiar stages in the theory of the universe. With the development
from the theological to the positive mode of thought is most intimately
connected, further, the transition from the military to the industrial
mode of life. As the religious spirit prepares the way for the scientific
spirit, so without the dominion of the military spirit industry could not
have been developed. It was only in the school of war that the earliest
societies could learn order; slavery was beneficial in that through it
labor was imposed upon the greater part of mankind in spite of their
aversion to it. The political preponderance of the legists corresponds to
the intermediate, metaphysical stage. The sociological law (discovered by
Comte in the year 1822) harmonizes also with the customary division which
separates the ancient from the modern world by the Middle Ages.

In his philosophy of history Comte gives the further application of these
principles. Here he has won commendation even from his opponents for a
sense of justice which merits respect and for his comprehensive view. The
outlooks and proposals for the future here interspersed were in later
writings[1] worked out into a comprehensive theory of the regeneration
of society; the extravagant character of which has given occasion to his
critics to make a complete division between the second, "subjective or
sentimental," period of his thinking, in which the philosopher is said to
be transformed into the high priest of a new religion, and the first, the
positivistic period, although the major part of the qualities pointed out
as characteristic of the former are only intensifications of some which may
be shown to have been present in the latter. Beneath the surface of the
most sober inquiry mystical and dictatorial tendencies pulsate in Comte
from the beginning, and science was for him simply a means to human
happiness. But now he no longer demands the independent pursuit of science
in order to the attainment of this end, but only the believ