, lie calls "the insurrection of the living against
the dead." To this complexion has Positive Philosophy come at last!

Worse, however, remains to be told. M. Comte selects a hundred volumes
of science, philosophy, poetry, history, and general knowledge, which he
deems a sufficient library for every positivist, even of the theoretic
order, and actually proposes a systematic holocaust of books in
general--it would almost seem of all books except these. Even that to
which he shows most indulgence, poetry, except the very best, is to
undergo a similar fate, with the reservation of select passages, on the
ground that, poetry being intended to cultivate our instinct of ideal
perfection, any kind of it that is less than the best is worse than
none. This imitation of the error, we will call it the crime, of the
early Christians--and in an exaggerated form, for even they destroyed
only those writings of pagans or heretics which were directed against
themselves--is the one thing in M. Comte's projects which merits real
indignation. When once M. Comte has decided, all evidence on the other
side, nay, the very historical evidence on which he grounded his
decision, had better perish. When mankind have enlisted under his
banner, they must burn their ships. There is, though in a less offensive
form, the same overweening presumption in a suggestion he makes, that
all species of animals and plants which are useless to man should be
systematically rooted out. As if any one could presume to assert that
the smallest weed may not, as knowledge advances, be found to have some
property serviceable to man. When we consider that the united power of
the whole human race cannot reproduce a species once eradicated--that
what is once done, in the extirpation of races, can never be repaired;
one can only be thankful that amidst all which the past rulers of
mankind have to answer for, they have never come up to the measure of
the great regenerator of Humanity; mankind have not yet been under the
rule of one who assumes that he knows all there is to be known, and that
when he has put himself at the head of humanity, the book of human
knowledge may be closed.

Of course M. Comte does not make this assumption consistently. He does
not imagine that he actually possesses all knowledge, but only that he
is an infallible judge what knowledge is worth possessing. He does not
believe that mankind have reached in all directions the extreme limits
of useful