t
of humanity, legislating concerning a new religion. It is but fair to
say that at this point Littre and many others parted company with Comte.
He developed a habit and practice ascetic in its rigour and mystic in
its devotion to the positivists' religion--the worship of humanity. He
was the friend and counsellor of working-men and agitators, of little
children, of the poor and miserable. He ended his rather pathetic and
turbulent career in 1857, gathering a few disciples about his bed as he
remembered that Socrates had done.

Comte begins with the natural sciences and postulates the doctrine of
evolution. To the definition of this doctrine he makes some interesting
approaches. The discussion of the order and arrangement of the various
sciences and of their characteristic differences is wonderful in its
insight and suggestiveness. He asserts that in the study of nature we
are concerned solely with the facts before us and the relations which
connect those facts. We have nothing to do with the supposed essence or
hidden nature and meaning of those facts. Facts and the invariable laws
which govern them are the only legitimate objects of pursuit. Comte
infers that because we can know, in this sense, only phenomena and their
relations, we should in consequence guard against illusions which creep
in again if we so much as use the words principle, or cause, or will, or
force. By phenomena must be understood objects of perception, to the
exclusion, for example, of psychological changes reputed to be known in
self-consciousness. That there is no knowledge but of the physical, that
there is no knowing except by perception--this is ever reiterated as
self-evident. Even psychology, resting as it does largely upon the
observation of the self by the self, must be illusive. Physiology, or
even phrenology, with the value of which Comte was much impressed, must
take its place. Every object of knowledge is other than the knowing
subject. Whatever else the mind knows, it can never know itself. By
invincible necessity the human mind can observe all phenomena except its
own. Commenting upon this, James Martineau observed: 'We have had in the
history of thought numerous forms of idealism which construed all
outward phenomena as mere appearances within the mind. We have hitherto
had no strictly corresponding materialism, which claimed certainty for
the outer world precisely because it was foreign to ourselves.' Man is
the highest product of