e of
geographical and climatic conditions, of social and national
institutions, and especially of education, however difficult to be
estimated, can not be utterly disregarded. And whether all these
influences have not been controlled, and collocated, and adjusted by a
Supreme Mind in the education of humanity, is also a question which can
not be pushed aside as of no consequence. Now, unless it can be shown
that the same outward conditions which have accompanied the individual
and modified his mental development, have been repealed in the history
of the race, and repeated in the same order of succession, the argument
has no value.

But, even supposing it could be shown that the development of mind in
humanity has followed the same order as that of the individual, we
confidently affirm that Comte has not given the true history of the
development of the individual mind. The account he has given may perhaps
be the history of his own mental progress, but it certainly is not the
history of every individual mind, nor indeed, of a majority even, of
educated minds that have arrived at maturity. It would be much more in
harmony with facts to say childhood is the period of pure receptivity,
youth of doubt and skepticism, and maturity of well-grounded and
rational belief. In the ripeness and maturity of the nineteenth century
the number of scientific men of the Comtean model is exceedingly small
compared with the number of religious men. There are minds in every part
of Europe and America as thoroughly scientific as that of Comte, and as
deeply imbued with the spirit of the Inductive Philosophy, which are not
conscious of any discordance between the facts of science and the
fundamental principles of theology. It may be that, in his own immediate
circle at Paris there may be a tendency to Atheism, but certainly no
such tendency exists in the most scientific minds of Europe and America.
The faith of Bacon, and Newton, and Boyle, of Descartes, Leibnitz, and
Pascal, in regard to the fundamental principles of theology, is still
the faith of Sedgwick, Whewell, Herschel, Brewster, Owen, Agassiz,
Silliman, Mitchell, Hitchcock, Dana, and, indeed of the leading
scientific minds of the world--the men who, as Comte would say, "belong
to the elite of humanity." The mature mind, whether of the individual or
the race, is not Atheistical.

3. _The third proof is drawn from a survey of the history of certain
portions of our race._

Comte is fa