The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

of connection between the ingenious visionary and the systematic thinker. We see the debt, and we also see that, when it is stated at the highest possible, nothing has been taken from Comte’s claims as a powerful original thinker, or from his immeasurable preeminence over Saint-Simon in intellectual grasp and vigour and coherence’.

I have mentioned the English Positivists. They were a notable group, first led by four Oxford men, all of Wadham College:Congreve, and three of his pupils, Harrison, Beesley, and Bridges. They all attained to some eminence in their respective professional worlds, and certainly exercised some influence in the great social questions of the day, including trade-unionism, education (at the time when the first great Education Act, 1870, was beginning to be thought of), industrial welfare, and Home Rule for dependent peoples. Among much interesting information, the valuable book by McGee gives an example of how they carried Comte’s ethical teachings into the fray of any prominent issue; as when there was a public exposure of the extent to which vivisection was being carried on, and Drs. Congreve and Bridges condemned it absolutely in connection with teaching, declaring that the student does not need it; and maintained that while it is useful as an instrument of research, it should be used only for a specific problem and not as a means of chance discoveries. Their reason was that a debased tule of behaviour towards animals not only tends to harm the investigators themselves but is an influence ramifying far beyond them, carrying in its train some weakening of the finer sympathies, some callousness to human suffering.

As to their feeling on the human score, there is a tremendous article by Harrison in the ‘Fortnightly Review’ for June, 1865, attacking with the fire of a Ruskin the flagrant abuses and exploitations of workers, especially women and children, which were still there to be attacked, in industry and in housing, in the England of less than a century ago. And not only the ‘works reeking with cruel blots’ came under the lash, but also ‘gangs of women and children driven from farm to farm by an actual slavedriver. Is there not our rural labourer, the portent of England, without hope or energy, plodding wearily through life like his ox?

And where such abomination is not, is there not amidst the

5