the ellipse, have foreseen
that nearly two thousand years afterwards their speculations would
explain the solar system, and a little later would enable ships safely
to circumnavigate the earth? Even in M. Comte's opinion, it is well for
mankind that, in those early days, knowledge was thought worth pursuing
for its own sake. Nor has the "foundation of Positivism," we imagine, so
far changed the conditions of human existence, that it should now be
criminal to acquire, by observation and reasoning, a knowledge of the
facts of the universe, leaving to posterity to find a use for it. Even
in the last two or three years, has not the discovery of new metals,
which may prove important even in the practical arts, arisen from one of
the investigations which M. Comte most unequivocally condemns as idle,
the research into the internal constitution of the sun? How few,
moreover, of the discoveries which have changed the face of the world,
either were or could have been arrived at by investigations aiming
directly at the object! Would the mariner's compass ever have been found
by direct efforts for the improvement of navigation? Should we have
reached the electric telegraph by any amount of striving for a means of
instantaneous communication, if Franklin had not identified electricity
with lightning, and Ampere with magnetism? The most apparently
insignificant archaeological or geological fact, is often found to throw
a light on human history, which M. Comte, the basis of whose social
philosophy is history, should be the last person to disparage. The
direction of the entrance to the three great Pyramids of Ghizeh, by
showing the position of the circumpolar stars at the time when they were
built, is the best evidence we even now have of the immense antiquity of
Egyptian civilization.[24] The one point on which M. Comte's doctrine
has some colour of reason, is the case of sidereal astronomy: so little
knowledge of it being really accessible to us, and the connexion of that
little with any terrestrial interests being, according to all our means
of judgment, infinitesimal. It is certainly difficult to imagine how any
considerable benefit to humanity can be derived from a knowledge of the
motions of the double stars: should these ever become important to us it
will be in so prodigiously remote an age, that we can afford to remain
ignorant of them until, at least, all our moral, political, and social
difficulties have been settled. Yet the