The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

healthier forms of labour a deep class feud, and spirit of strife, sweeping across our modern industry, as the plagues and famines of the Middle Ages swept over Europe—gigantic outrages and strikes, shaking the fabric of society, and threatening its institutions; on the one side a wild sense of wrong, on the other a raging desire to be rich? These are the evils we see, and for which we need a remedy; evils of moral, of social kinds, coming out of rotten systems of life and ungovernable passions’.

I make these references to show that what we are discussing is not something confined to an ivory tower or a laboratory, but was taken by men inspired by Comte straight into the forefront of the social struggles of the day. The full history of Positivist intervention into public affairs would be a remarkable document, as is even the condensed treatment of it by McGee. In the field of trade unionism it has been recognised in the researches of Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

The theoretical fortunes of the Positivist system were perhaps less favourable. John Stuart Mill, having first responded with such enthusiasm that he organised personal financial aid for Comte at a time when it was much needed, afterwards fell out with him and with his ideas. A second leading figure in English XIXth century thought who also attacked him—in a manner which does him little credit—was T. H. Huxley. A third giant who wrote against Positivism, in the person of Harrison, was Ruskin, but his attack was the least well-informed of all: he did withdraw from it in face of Harrison’s counter-attack. But there was still another of the giants of the age waiting to pounce: this was Herbert Spencer, who inveighed directly against Comte for his ‘consummate passion for regulating humanity’. If the leading English philosophers and scientists of the XIXth century turned against him, among those who responded with great enthusiasm were the writers Harriet Martineau (who translated some of his work), and George Eliot (who translated Feuerbach).

We have to wait for Sir Patrick Geddes to see, and to carry over into our present century, the profound significance of Comte’s intuitive grasp of basic sociological factors, (he did not apparently study the ancient Indian sources : did he perhaps know something

6