y
art of Cousin's contemporaries.

As a basis for social reconstruction the spiritualist philosophy was
ineffectual. Another school of thought issuing from the Revolution,
yet opposing its anarchic individualism, aspired to regenerate
society by the application of the principles of positive science.
CLAUDE-HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON (1760-1825), and FRANCOIS-CHARLES
FOURIER (1772-1837), differing in many of their opinions, have a
common distinction as the founders of modern socialism.
Saint-Simon's ideal was that of a State controlled in things of the
mind by men of science, and in material affairs by the captains of
industry. The aim of society should be the exploitation of the globe
by associative effort. In his _Nouveau Christianisme_ he thought to
deliver the Christian religion from the outworn superstition, as he
regarded it, alike of Catholicism and Protestantism, and to point
out its true principle as adapted to our nineteenth century--that
of human charity, the united effort of men towards the well-being
of the poorest class.

Saint-Simon, fantastic, incoherent, deficient in the scientific
spirit and in the power of co-ordinating his results, yet struck out
suggestive ideas. A great and systematic thinker, AUGUSTE COMTE
(1798-1857), who was associated with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824,
perceived the significance of these ideas, and was urged forward by
them to researches properly his own. The positivism of Comte consists
of a philosophy and a polity, in which a religion is involved. The
quickening of his emotional nature through an adoring friendship with
Mme. Clotilde de Vaux, made him sensible of the incompleteness of
his earlier efforts at an intellectual reconstruction; he felt the
need of worship and of love. Comte's philosophy proceeds from the
theory that all human conceptions advance from the primitive
theological state, through the metaphysical--when abstract forces,
occult causes, scholastic entities are invented to explain the
phenomena of nature--to the positive, when at length it is recognised
that human knowledge cannot pass beyond the region of phenomena. With
these stages corresponds the progress of society from militarism,
aggressive or defensive, to industrialism. The several abstract
sciences--those dealing with the laws of phenomena rather than with
the application of laws--are so arranged by Comte as to exhibit each
more complex science resting on a simpler, to which it adds a new
order of tr