h and
wriggle and sprawl ignobly on the walls and ceilings of the dismantled
palace which crumbles away among the stunted willows, the stagnant
pools, and rank grass of the marshes of Mantua. But this is no more the
fault of antiquity than it is the fault of the Middle Ages; it is the
fault of that great principle of life and of change which makes all
things organic, be they physical or intellectual, germinate, grow,
attain maturity, and then fade, wither, and rot. The dead art of
antiquity could never have brought the art of the Renaissance to an
untimely end; the art of the Renaissance decayed because it was mature,
and died because it had lived.

VERNON LEE.

THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION OF COMTE.

IV.

In my last article I considered the subjective synthesis of Comte, or in
other words, his attempt to systematize human knowledge in relation to
the moral life of man. For it is his view, as we have seen, that science
can never yield its highest fruit to man unless it be
systematized--_i.e._, unless its different parts be connected together
and put in their true place as parts of one whole. Scattered lights give
no illumination; it is the _esprit d'ensemble_, the general idea in
which our knowledge begins and ends, that ultimately determines the
scientific value of each special branch of knowledge. But while
synthesis is necessary, it is not necessary, according to Comte, that
the synthesis should be objective. The error of mankind in the past has
been that they supposed themselves able to ascertain the real or
objective principle, which gives unity to the world, and able,
therefore, to make their system of knowledge an ideal repetition of the
system of things without them. Such a system, however, is entirely
beyond our reach. The conditions of our lot, and the weakness of our
intelligence, make it impossible for us to tell what is the real
principle of unity in the world, or even whether such a principle
exists. The attempts to discover it, made by Theology and Metaphysics,
have been nothing more than elaborate anthropomorphisms, in which men
gave to the unknown and unknowable reality, a form which was borrowed
from their own. They saw in the clouds about them an exaggerated and
distorted reflection of themselves, and regarded this Brocken spectre as
the controlling power whose activity was the source and explanation of
everything. Positivism, on the other hand, arises whenever men learn to
recog