d. Yet the tragic failure of our
civilisation to give to vast multitudes that power and happiness, is the
proof that something more than the outward basis is needed. The success
of our civilisation is its failure.

This is by no means a recurrence to the old antithesis of religion and
civilisation, as if these were contradictory elements. On the contrary,
it is but to show that the present world of religion and of economics
are not two worlds, but merely different aspects of the same world.
Therewith it is not alleged that religion has not a specific
contribution to make.

POSITIVISM

The permanent influence of that phase of thought which called itself
Positivism has not been great. But a school of thought which numbered
among its adherents such men and women as John Stuart Mill, George Henry
Lewes, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison, and Matthew Arnold, cannot be
said to have been without significance. A book upon the translation of
which Harriet Martinean worked with sustained enthusiasm cannot be
dismissed as if it were merely a curiosity. Comte's work, _Coura de
Philosophie Positive_, appeared between the years 1830 and 1842. Littre
was his chief French interpreter. But the history of the positivist
movement belongs to the history of English philosophical and religious
thought, rather than to that of France.

Comte was born at Montpellier in 1798, of a family of intense Roman
Catholic piety. He showed at school a precocity which might bear
comparison with Mill's. Expelled from school, cast off by his parents,
dismissed by the elder Casimir Perier, whose secretary he had been, he
eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy
rallied to his support. He never occupied a post comparable with his
genius. He was unhappy in his marriage. He passed through a period of
mental aberration, due, perhaps, to the strain under which he worked. He
did not regain his liberty without an experience which embittered him
against the Church. During the fourteen years of the production of his
book he cut himself off from any reading save that of current scientific
discovery. He came under the influence of Madame Vaux, whom, after her
death, he idolised even more than before. For the problem which, in the
earlier portion of his work, he set himself, that namely, of the
organising of the sciences into a compact body of doctrine, he possessed
extraordinary gifts. Later, he took on rather the air of a high pries