ther. "In proportion as each
planet improved its own condition, its life exhausted itself by excess
of innervation; but with the consolation of rendering its self-devotion
more efficacious, when the extinction of its special functions, first
animal, and finally vegetative, reduced it to the universal attributes
of feeling and activity."[25] This stuff, though he calls it fiction, he
soon after speaks of as belief (croyance), to be greatly recommended, as
at once satisfying our natural curiosity, and "perfecting our unity"
(again unity!) "by supplying the gaps in our scientific notions with
poetic fictions, and developing sympathetic emotions and aesthetic
inspirations: the world being conceived as aspiring to second mankind in
ameliorating the universal order under the impulse of the Grand Etre."
And he obviously intends that we should be trained to make these
fantastical inventions permeate all our associations, until we are
incapable of conceiving the world and Nature apart from them, and they
become equivalent to, and are in fact transformed into, real beliefs.

Wretched as this is, it is singularly characteristic of M. Comte's later
mode of thought. A writer might be excused for introducing into an
avowed work of fancy this dance of the planets, and conception of an
animated Earth. If finely executed, he might even be admired for it. No
one blames a poet for ascribing feelings, purposes, and human
propensities to flowers. Because a conception might be interesting, and
perhaps edifying, in a poem, M. Comte would have it imprinted on the
inmost texture of every human mind in ordinary prose. If the imagination
were not taught its prescribed lesson equally with the reason, where
would be Unity? "It is important that the domain of fiction should
become as _systematic_ as that of demonstration, in order that their
mutual harmony may be conformable to their respective destinations, both
equally directed towards the continual increase of _unity_, personal and
social."[26]

Nor is it enough to have created the Grand Fetiche (so he actually
proposes to call the Earth), and to be able to include it and all
concrete existence in our adoration along with the Grand Etre. It is
necessary also to extend Positivist Fetishism to purely abstract
existence; to "animate" the laws as well as the facts of nature. It is
not sufficient to have made physics sentimental, mathematics must be
made so too. This does not at first seem easy; but