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 From the Library of the late 
 G. W. Foote.
 
 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES 
 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 JOHN HENRY BRIDGES, M.B., F.R.C.P. 
 
 SOMETIME FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 LATK MEDICAL METROPOLITAN INSPECTOR TO THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 FREDERIC HARRISON 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD. 
 1907
 
 EDITOR'S NOTE 
 
 OF the papers here collected some have already been 
 printed in one form or another. " Prayer and Work," 
 " Religion and Progress," " Man the Creature of Humanity," 
 and " Calderon," were included in the Discourses on 
 Positive Religion (2nd ed., 1891). We have to thank 
 Messrs. Macmillan for permission to include " Harvey and 
 His Successors," which was delivered as the Harveian 
 Oration before the Royal College of Physicians ; and the 
 Council of the Sociological Society for permission to 
 reprint " Some Guiding Principles of the Philosophy of 
 History," from Sociological Papers, vol. ii. The remain- 
 ing papers were written out for use in lecturing, and were 
 not revised by the author for publication. They are 
 printed here precisely as they stand, with no alterations, 
 except of a very few slips of the pen. Some of them are 
 portions only of lectures, the remainder existing only in 
 the form of rough notes. But in all cases they appear 
 sufficiently complete in themselves to be printed as they 
 
 stand. 
 
 L. T. HOBHOUSE. 
 1907.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY FREDERIC HARRISON 
 
 ALTHOUGH the life of Dr. Bridges was absorbed in active 
 work, first as a Physician to a hospital, then as Inspector 
 under the Government, as a zealous apostle of sanitation, 
 and finally as systematic teacher and preacher, he found 
 time to produce a large amount of literary achievements. 
 The extent and variety of this is only known to his friends 
 and colleagues ; but it is really extraordinary for one who 
 was a practical worker and would entirely disclaim the 
 character of being a mere student or a man of letters. The 
 present volume contains a selection of some of his occasional 
 pieces of permanent value and solid learning. 
 
 His more important works were these: (i) The trans- 
 lation, and editing with analyses, of the first volume of 
 Comte's Politique Positive in its English form (1875), a 
 bulky octavo of 678 pages. This contains the General 
 View, Cosmology, Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chem- 
 istry, and Biology and could not have been accomplished 
 by any one without a general training in the sciences as 
 well as philosophy. (2) He devoted many years of his 
 life to editing the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, 3 vols. 
 8vo. (1897-1900). (3) His RicJielieu and Colbert (1866) 
 obtained the enthusiastic praise of J. Cotter Morison, and 
 was worthy of such commendation. (4) The Unity of 
 Comte's Life and Doctrine, addressed to J. Stuart Mill
 
 viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 (1866), was a complete refutation of the criticism made 
 by Mill in his volume on Positivism. (5) To the New 
 Calendar of Great Men (1892) Dr. Bridges contributed 194 
 Biographies of philosophers, men of science, and poets. 
 
 To various publications he contributed the following 
 studies: to the Oxford Essays, 1857, The yews in Europe 
 in the Middle Ages; to International Policy, 1866, the 
 essay on- China ; to the Fortnightly Review, between 1869 
 and 1 88 1, seven different articles ; to the Revue Occidental 
 (in French) thirteen articles ; to the Sociological Society, 
 three papers (1905-6). For the Positivist Review, between 
 1893 and 1907, he wrote no less than one hundred papers, 
 and to the Positivist Society he gave an immense series 
 of addresses from 1879 to 1906. 
 
 A literary product so large, extending over exactly fifty 
 years, from 1857 to 1907, including posthumous papers, and 
 ranging in subject from the Jews in the Middle Ages to the 
 Taxation of Suburban Land, from Calderon to Herbert 
 Spencer, from Moses to Charles Darwin, was in no way 
 either miscellaneous or discontinuous, neither superficial 
 nor literary. It was all infused into organic unity by that 
 potent instrument of Synthesis the co-ordination of human 
 life and thought in all its phases by devotion to the deve- 
 lopment of Humanity under the inspiration of a scientific 
 philosophy of Nature and Man. 
 
 To this dominant ideal John Bridges over fifty years, 
 1856-1906, consecrated every hour of his life and every 
 energy of his mind. Of all the colleagues with whom he 
 worked and taught during this period, he was far the first 
 to master the encyclopaedic system of Auguste Comte, as 
 he was the one who had most truly and thoroughly absorbed 
 it in conception and in practice. Under a really scientific 
 synthesis, thus absorbed by a fully competent mind, over
 
 INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 a long course of years of study and experience, things 
 apparently disparate fall into their proper correlation, and 
 ideas of abstract science join forces with poetic imagination 
 and the conduct of practical life. Bridges was fond of 
 dilating on the infinitely subtle meanings of the verse in 
 which Comte expressed his co-ordination of the three 
 human forces Thought, Feeling, Activity : 
 
 " Agir par affection et penser pour agir." 
 (Affection prompts the act which thought must guide.) 
 
 The general works of John Bridges and the story of 
 his indefatigable life must be left for the future. The 
 present volume aims only at collecting some typical ex- 
 amples of his philosophical and literary labours. 
 
 The five essays in Part I. give an adequate sketch 
 of the Positivist scheme as a working propaganda. The 
 general Synthesis, or animating idea, runs through all of 
 them. But they illustrate various parts of the doctrine in 
 practical application to life. Their special subjects are : 
 Worship or Prayer Faith in a Positive Creed Love as 
 the moving force in human Nature The evolution and 
 influence of the Past The meaning and power over man 
 of Humanity as the collective spirit of the Past, the Present, 
 and the Future. 
 
 The first address, entitled "Prayer and Work," has 
 peculiar interests for all associated with the Positivist 
 movement. It was delivered on the Day of Humanity, 
 January I, 1879, and was the first of the series of annual 
 addresses which have now been publicly given on New 
 Year's Day by the same body without a break for twenty- 
 eight years. It gave the key-note of these addresses, and 
 was delivered when Dr. Bridges was the first President of 
 the English Positivist Committee formed by M. Pierre 
 Laffitte in 1878. It became the type which has been
 
 x INTRODUCTION 
 
 mainly followed ever since. It opens with an Exhortation 
 to bear in memory the great phases of civilization and the 
 heroes and martyrs of its long evolution. Such an Exhor- 
 tation takes the place of Invocations to supernatural 
 Powers and Supplications to obtain personal blessings. 
 
 Thence the preacher passes to Prayer. " To pray is to 
 form the ideal of our life, by entering into communion with 
 the Highest." But this communion cannot be attained by 
 dwelling in thought on an invisible ideal, unless it be trained 
 and supported by habitual union with beings nearer and 
 dearer to us in daily life. Nor can it end in mere feeling 
 without sinking into mysticism or into routine. Prayer and 
 Work Desire united with Effort is the essence of all true 
 religion. Positivism is " Catholicism become scientific.' 
 Religion does not consist in the repetition of formulas and 
 of rites. Religion is the devotion of heart, mind, and will 
 to the service of humanity. Goodness, justice, truthfulness, 
 and purity do not rest on any mysterious revelation, but on 
 laws of nature which all men may be taught to recognize 
 and to submit to in their lives. 
 
 The second essay, " Religion and Progress," was also 
 given in 1879 as an address when Bridges was President of 
 the new Positivist Committee. It was devoted to explain 
 the apparent paradox but profound truth of a favourite 
 maxim of Comte's Man becomes more and more religious. 
 Starting with a sympathetic extract from Cardinal Newman, 
 Bridges insists on the indispensable necessity for a solid 
 doctrine as the basis of all religion an idea which Neo- 
 Christianity in all its phases is now quite ready to throw 
 aside. Then he shows that, with the incessant march of 
 modern science and scientific thought, there can be no 
 hope of stability in any'doctrine which has not science in all 
 its aspects for its foundation. There can be no peace or
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 confidence in any religion which is liable to be continually 
 displaced by demonstrable certainties. 
 
 From this basis, Bridges unfolds Comte's scheme of a 
 religion of Humanity, entirely based as its creed on cer- 
 tainties, and aiming in all its purposes and institutions at 
 human improvement and the development of human well- 
 being on earth, as destined to give an immense enlargement 
 to religion. Far from destroying or sterilizing religion, as 
 was vainly imputed to him, Comte would open to religion 
 worlds of feeling, thought, and activity undreamt of yet by 
 any Saint or Pontiff, even if it had been dimly foreshadowed 
 by the hysterical mysticism of some saintly hermit in his 
 cell. The cramping and withering of religion in our age is 
 due to the obsolete perversity of theologians who continue 
 to restrain the meaning and aim of religion to supermun- 
 dane visions, which are utterly remote from the actual world 
 of modern men, and have no relation to what reasonable 
 men think and know, or to what good men and women love 
 and desire. 
 
 The third essay, " Man the Creature of Humanity," was 
 an address given at Newton Hall in the first year of its tenure 
 by the Positivist Society (1881); and it is a resumt of the 
 Positivist conception of Humanity as a source and centre 
 of Religion. It opens with the first paragraph of Comte's 
 Synthtse Subjective, which Bridges truly says contains 
 "the whole essence of Comte's teaching." It may be worth 
 while to repeat the first sentence of four lines but thirty 
 words in French a striking example of Comte's closely 
 knit and profound aphorisms. "The subordination of 
 Progress to Order, of Analysis to Synthesis, of Self-love to 
 Love of Others ; these are the three modes, practical, 
 theoretical, and ethical, of describing the problem of man's 
 life, the attainment of complete and lasting unity." As
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 Bridges says, rightly to understand this intricate sentence 
 " would ask the study of a lifetime." 
 
 But nothing can be more effective than Bridges' 
 exposition of the relation of mathematics to morals, of the 
 relation of broad or narrow views of science to social 
 affection or to self-love. Yet the whole aim of Positivism 
 is to show the concatenation of abstract thought to moral 
 conduct, the sequence of philosophic breadth to practical 
 altruism. The key of the mystery is found in Humanity, 
 wherein all modes of thought, of feeling, and of life, find at 
 once their inspiration and their purpose. 
 
 The whole of this essay is a typical example of the 
 singular power of the conception of Humanity as under- 
 stood by Positivism, to correlate the most dissimilar ideas 
 and to illustrate the most diverse facts. Wordsworth's 
 Excursion, Watts' steam-engine, Goethe's poems, Burns' 
 Daisy, the Irish Incumbered Estates Act, mediaeval and 
 Oriental monasticism, Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Dante's 
 Paradise, Communism, the Decalogue of Moses, the Virgin 
 Mother, the Iliad, the basis of ethics, the mariner's sextant, 
 the battle of Salamis, Wagner's operas, and Calderon's 
 Autos Sacramentales all in turn join in expounding the 
 infinite sources of Humanity the Power of whom only we 
 can say, nihil a se alienum. 
 
 The address on " Love the Principle" (October, 1888) is 
 perhaps of all pieces in this volume the one which will cause 
 the greatest surprise to those who know nothing of Positivism, 
 and yet is the piece which is the most redolent of Bridges' 
 spiritual attitude. There are whole passages in it which 
 Cardinal Newman might have penned, and which do not 
 fall below his high-water mark of veneration for early 
 Catholicism and his fervour to arouse devoutness of heart. 
 Yet withal no Agnostic could more unsparingly denounce
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 the radical failure of Catholicism to accomplish its mission 
 and the degradation of the Christian Church when it sank 
 "to the bedimmed folly" of declaring in the Church Article 
 that all works done before the grace of Christ are evil and 
 of the nature of sin. Nor could any Darwinian insist more 
 earnestly on the universal law of evolution. It is the union 
 of devotional zeal with scientific reality that makes the 
 force and the fascination of the Positivist Synthesis. And 
 it is especially in such a part as this that Bridges' best work 
 was done. 
 
 This treatise on " Love " depends on a different under- 
 standing of the term than that we find in Plato's Phadrus, 
 or in St. Bernard's De Amore Dei and yet it combines 
 something of both. In unfolding all the connotations of 
 the central maxim of the religion of Humanity Love as the 
 Principle Bridges traces in turn all the sides of this 
 ancient, world-wide, human conception from the lowest to 
 the highest, showing it to be real, that is, innate in human 
 nature ; useful, as was said, omnia vincit amor, for friend- 
 ship, loyalty, patriotism, are but some of its forms ; certain, 
 precise, definite, as every scientific demonstration is bound 
 to be. Finally, Love is obviously and necessarily relative, 
 organic, sympathetic. Now, these seven connotations are all 
 involved in the dominant term, Positive. 
 
 The paper on the " Philosophy of History," read before 
 the Sociological Society in 1905, is a study of the place of 
 History in the science of Sociology, and the conditions and 
 limits of scientific history. It in no way undervalues the 
 necessity for specialist research ; but it insists on the need 
 for a dominant conception of general history to give 
 coherence and sequence to the special history of periods, 
 nations, and institutions. And this involves not merely a 
 scheme of general history as a record of facts, but a
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 scientific outline of the evolution of human society. The 
 paper shows how largely this conception of human evolution 
 has been developed by modern research in the Oriental 
 nations and in the lowest fetichist races since the time of 
 Comte : yet, withal, how recent studies in the last fifty 
 years have given life and meaning to Comte's profound 
 generalizations. 
 
 The rest of this paper is mainly devoted to expounding 
 the law of human progress as the passage from the primitive 
 Theocracy we now find dominant in Asia long ages before 
 Moses through a series of stages down to the Sociocracy, 
 or the ordering of society in the light of scientific canons of 
 social morality, which we may distinctly note for the last 
 hundred years as being in advancing ascendency in Europe. 
 The essence of the argument lies in the ingenious and 
 novel attempt to trace a law of progress in the absorption 
 into the Roman Empire of the discordant activities of 
 the scattered Hellenic republics, in the dissolution of 
 Roman imperialism into a new Feudal and Catholic West. 
 Hellenists, Professors of Roman law, and enthusiasts of 
 Romantic or Christian mediaevalism, are not to be easily 
 convinced that an intelligible stream of progress can be 
 shown in the long, broken, stormy course of evolution from 
 Solon and Thales to the nineteenth century of Cavour and 
 Darwin. But a true philosophy of History can trace a real 
 and consistent sequence. 
 
 In passing to the second part of this volume estimates 
 of the great thinkers and poets we leave the more formal 
 exposition of Positive doctrine for the life-work of foremost 
 men and general surveys of the philosophy and the litera- 
 ture of their epochs ancient, mediaeval, and modern. Each 
 of the five essays bears the name of some illustrious writer 
 in science, poetry, and letters ; but it is a striking feature in
 
 INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 Bridges' biographies of men, that they appear as types and 
 representatives of those movements out of which they arose 
 and which they largely developed. These are not detached 
 biographies of famous individuals : they are aperpts of the 
 great ages of new light and the progress of ideas. 
 
 It is the distinctive note of Bridges' mind, as it is of the 
 Positive Philosophy, to look on intellectual progress in its 
 entirety, and to see it in the interaction of all its sides and 
 its reaction on all parts of human life. This is " seeing life 
 whole," as we are told to do. Accordingly, these six 
 names range from the views of Greek geometers in the sixth 
 century B.C., to Diderot at the close of the eighteenth 
 century A.D. from geometry and eclipses of the sun to 
 the French theatre and the Encyclopaedia of D'Alembert 
 and his friends. The chosen types open with Thales to 
 remind us of Comte's incessant appeals to base all syste- 
 matic thought on mathematics. As Plato said, " Let no 
 man enter if ignorant of geometry." This cardinal truth 
 of Positivism is one which Bridges is especially keen to 
 inculcate. 
 
 The essay on Roger Bacon an address given at Oxford 
 in 1903 sums up the essential results of Bridges' long 
 study of the great Franciscan thinker to whom he devoted 
 some of the best years of his life, even going to Rome to 
 consult the manuscript in the Vatican. It is, indeed, much 
 more than an essay on Bacon. It is an illuminating 
 study of the whole course of mediaeval thought, especially 
 interesting by the light it throws on the incalculable impor- 
 tance to European and Christian thought of the Arabian 
 and Mussulman learning without which it is hard to see 
 how the filiation of Greek science could have been re- 
 covered in the Middle Ages amid the destructive fanaticism 
 of Catholic theology. But for the Arabs of Baghdad and
 
 xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 Cordova, Aristotle might have suffered the fate of Sapho. 
 As we read the story of Bacon's marvellous genius and 
 prophetic intuitions of the science to come, we see him as 
 a man in advance of his age by five we may almost say 
 six centuries. And one wonders if we are right in putting 
 Francis on a pedestal higher than that occupied by Roger. 
 But the Chancellor had great predecessors and great con- 
 temporaries the Monk had none akin to his own mind. 
 What was utterly premature to Roger, was fully ripe to 
 Francis Bacon. 
 
 When the Harveian oration was offered to Bridges by 
 Sir Andrew Clark, the President of the Royal College of 
 Physicians, it was a happy inspiration which reflected honour 
 both on Bridges and the learned Society which chose him 
 for the task. As one of those who was present, I can bear 
 witness to the success of the lecture and the emphatic 
 welcome it received from those who heard it. 
 
 The fragment on Dante, brief as it is, does full justice 
 to one who, in a special sense, must always be the poet of 
 the religion of Humanity. No adept of the Dantesque 
 school could feel that any side of his teaching has been 
 here underrated. And all students of Dante will be 
 interested in Bridges' mode of dealing with the vexed 
 problem. Was Dante a sincere Catholic or a conscious 
 sceptic and reformer ? The answer given is, that Dante 
 was long absorbed in free criticism of the Church, but at the 
 close of his life he felt himself to be in sincere communion 
 with the Catholic institutions, if not in humble acceptance 
 of the Catholic Creed. But Bridges goes on to show that 
 what a man thinks he believes is not always the same 
 thing as the real effect of his thoughts. And in this sense, 
 although Dante is truly "the voice of ten silent centuries," 
 and idealizes the inmost spirit of Catholicism from
 
 INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 Augustine downwards, he belongs in imagination quite as 
 truly to the six centuries of modern progress and free thought. 
 Nay, indeed, Dante has only just begun to be understood 
 in all his spiritual depths, and the religion of Humanity 
 alone can supply the key to unlock the subtle convolutions 
 of mystic meaning wherein the secret of the Paradiso has 
 been so long enshrined. 
 
 The essay on Calderon is a model of deep and inform- 
 ing judgment on one of the great poets of the world such 
 as we rarely get even from the most subtle of literary 
 critics. It is not merely a study of the Shakespeare of 
 Spain, but it is a revelation of the spirit of Spain itself, 
 the only possible apology of the Spanish Church, a lesson 
 to Protestant England of the nineteenth century on the 
 religious meaning of the mediaeval drama. Cultivated 
 men and women to-day are willing to admit the genius 
 of Calderon : but how few of them know him otherwise 
 than in the isolated fragment of Shelley, the ingenious 
 fantasias of FitzGerald, and it may be a play or two from 
 McCarthy ! John Bridges read Calderon for himself in the 
 original. In his long life of eighty years Calderon wrote 
 more than two hundred dramas, besides minor interludes. 
 For the last thirty years of his life he devoted himself 
 almost entirely to his Sacramental Acts Miracle Plays in 
 honour of the Sacrament. 
 
 I know no one who has traced the origin, aim, and 
 devotional reaction of these Autos Sacramentales so well as 
 we find it in the pages of his essay. " The occasion, the 
 subject, the place, the audience, the style, the mode of 
 construction, were all different from those of other dramas." 
 It is a form of art most alien to everything we conceive of 
 the stage ; one particularly hard for the England of to-day 
 to understand. Bridges put it to us in clear form, because
 
 xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 he unveils to us, with historical and sociological insight, the 
 innate character of the mixed Iberian nature, and the 
 indomitable traditions of which the Spanish religion and 
 drama were the popular expression. In doing this, he 
 gives an admirable analysis of the spiritual contrasts 
 between mediaeval Catholicism and modern Protestantism. 
 From first to last, the Spanish drama during the hundred 
 years of its great age (1580-1680) was entirely a religious 
 institution, had religious ideals as its inspiration, and was 
 composed by men who, like Calderon, ultimately entered 
 priestly orders. " His work was the portraiture of the 
 manners and the passions of a Catholic and Feudal people." 
 
 The conjunction in a single lecture of Corneille with 
 Diderot of the severe, heroic, Catholic poet of the mon- 
 archy with the audacious, bohemian, anti-Christian philo- 
 sopher of the revolution is a tour de force, highly 
 characteristic of Bridges' mind, a paradox only to be 
 solved by Positivist ideas. Corneille and Diderot in the 
 Positivist Calendar hold corresponding places under Shake- 
 speare and Descartes respectively, each representing an 
 influence on the evolution of Humanity the one of noble 
 Art, the other of clear Thought. For all his Catholic 
 creed, Corneille idealizes human (not clerical) morality. 
 And Diderot, for all his restless diversity of genius, is 
 the most synthetic of all the revolutionary spirits. Bridges' 
 analysis of the grand ethical motives of Corneille may read 
 many a lesson to our age, which can endure on the stage 
 nothing but Elizabethan fantasias and psychologic pro- 
 blems. I know no critic who has unfolded the moral and 
 spiritual meaning of Corneille's Polyeucte as we find it 
 explained in this essay. 
 
 We are all so familiar with the marvellous activities of 
 Voltaire, whose name just now is receiving a new apotheosis,
 
 INTRODUCTION xix 
 
 that it may surprise some readers to find Diderot assigned 
 as the really creative mind of the eighteenth century. If 
 Voltaire did the principal work of analysis and destruction, 
 it was Diderot who laid the germ of the constructive New 
 Age of which we see as yet little more than the ground 
 plan. The fact is that, scattered through the diversified 
 products of Diderot's encyclopaedic mind, we find one after 
 another the germs of the positive conceptions of Nature 
 and of Man, which Auguste Comte cast into a system. 
 More than any of the thinkers of the eighteenth century, 
 Diderot had conceptions of philosophy from the relative, 
 not the absolute point of view, of an anthropocentric world 
 displacing an immeasurable and incomprehensible universe. 
 The Encyclopaedia, with all its faults and its weaknesses, 
 was an adumbration of the concentration of thought, science, 
 and zeal on the practical realization of human well-being 
 on earth.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PACE 
 
 EDITOR'S NOTE v 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY FREDERIC HARRISON vii 
 
 PART I 
 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 I. PRAYER AND WORK 3 
 
 II. RELIGION AND PROGRESS 34 
 
 III. MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY .... 65 
 
 IV. LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 96 
 
 V. SOME GUIDING PRINCIPLES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 HISTORY 114 
 
 PART II 
 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 a. HEROES OF THOUGHT 
 
 THALES 143 
 
 ROGER BACON i$g 
 
 HARVEY AND His SUCCESSORS ^9 
 
 b. HEROES OF LITERATURE- 
 
 DANTE 220 
 
 CALDERON 235 
 
 CORNEILLE AND DlDEROT 264 
 
 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 292 
 
 xxi
 
 PART I 
 
 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST 
 DOCTRINE
 
 PRAYER AND WORK* 
 
 I 
 
 WE meet here to-day to celebrate the festival of Humanity. 
 By thought and by feeling we seek to enter into the pre- 
 sence of that assemblage of noble lives, who, from the 
 earliest ages until now, have laboured for the benefit of 
 men, and have left a store of material and spiritual good 
 from which all the blessings of our present life have issued. 
 Before the resistless power of this unseen host we bow in 
 thankful submission ; knowing well that of ourselves we 
 are insufficient, either to see or to do what is right. What- 
 ever wider thoughts or generous impulses prompt us to 
 rise above ourselves, and to live unselfishly, come to us 
 from a higher source. They are the free gift of Humanity. 
 We commemorate, therefore, with thankful hearts, the 
 service rendered by the countless generations of men, from 
 the earliest ages till now, who lived and died unknown, 
 but whose labours are our inheritance ; the love that bound 
 them to a common hearth ; the loyalty that knit them 
 together in danger ; the gentle courage that brought the 
 higher animal races into friendly service ; the subtlety of 
 hand and eye that mastered the first arts of peaceful 
 union ; the simple .beliefs that fostered the first germs of 
 
 * This address was delivered January ist, 1879. 
 
 3 B 2
 
 4 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 reverence ; for these things are at the root of human 
 progress ; the starting-point in the struggle upwards to a 
 higher life. 
 
 We commemorate the service of those wise leaders of 
 men, whether in Egypt, India, or Judea, who saved men's 
 lives from the waste of deadly strife, by laying down the 
 first rules for their guidance; to whom it is due that 
 reverence for parents, inviolability of marriage, respect for 
 life, and truthful intercourse between man and man, have 
 been clothed with a vesture of sanctity that has endured 
 through ages. 
 
 We commemorate the nation whose great men, burst- 
 ing through the oppressive bonds of theocratic dominion, 
 sought to idealize and to enlighten human life, by art 
 founded on reality, and by discovery of the laws of nature ; 
 and chief among these we speak of Homer and of 
 jEschylus, of Thales, Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Archi- 
 medes. 
 
 We commemorate the Roman State, eternal type of 
 heroic endurance sustained through centuries, using the 
 arts of conquest and of government for the establishment 
 of a peaceful dominion, from which the commonwealth of 
 Western States has sprung. And from the long roll of 
 her great names we take the three greatest ; Scipio, Caesar, 
 Trajan. 
 
 We commemorate the Catholic Church founded by St. 
 Paul, and built up of the holy lives of countless men and 
 women who, seeking to deny themselves and to purify 
 their lives from every selfish thought, became a leavening 
 influence in the world around them, a spiritual power not 
 resting on the force of armies and the ordinances of 
 magistrates, but on the inward force of conscience. 
 
 We commemorate the mediaeval rulers, Charlemagne,
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 5 
 
 Alfred, or Godfrey, who, uniting Roman energy with 
 Christian faith, created in chivalry the new ideal of man- 
 hood, the loyal sense of honour, the reverent protection 
 of weakness ; and who saved the Western world from the 
 barbaric floods that threatened to overwhelm it 
 
 We commemorate the birth of civic-industry, purified 
 henceforth for ever from the stain of slavery, gaining, 
 under the guidance of Gutenberg, Watt, and countless 
 others, mastery over the forces of our planet, and thus, 
 when wisely directed to its true social purpose, setting 
 human energies free for higher aims. We celebrate the 
 poets, painters, and musicians of modern Europe, Dante, 
 Raphael, Shakespeare, and Mozart, who, amidst the in- 
 evitable decay of religious faith, have kept alive the flame 
 of ideal sympathy, and have saved us from the death of 
 sordid vulgarity or acrid political agitation ; the audacious 
 spirit of Descartes, of Bacon, and the other lamps of 
 modern philosophy, who swept away the fictions that 
 stifled the growth of thought, and concentrated intellectual 
 force on the ennoblement of human life by prescient 
 submission to the order of nature ; the vigorous statesmen, 
 William, Cromwell, Frederic, whose firm government was 
 the surest defence of free thought against corrupt and 
 retrograde superstition ; and, finally, the men of special 
 science, of whom Kepler, Newton, and Bichat are worthy 
 to be the types, who, availing themselves of the freedom 
 thus secured, and of the methods of research thus opened 
 to them, unfolded to us, each in his own sphere, the laws 
 of the material world around us, and of vegetable and 
 animal life. 
 
 The lives and works of all these men seem to us to 
 find their central meeting-point in the founder of the 
 Religion of Humanity, who first revealed to us how,
 
 6 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 unknown to themselves, they worked together towards a 
 common purpose ; and who, by establishing the spiritual 
 truths of man's nature, so long contested by revolutionary 
 scepticism, upon the sure basis of science, has been the 
 restorer of true religious conviction to mankind. 
 
 With these greater names we join the multitude whom 
 no man can number of beautiful and self-denying lives of 
 whom no record is left, but who have none the less con- 
 tinued to live from generation to generation in those whom 
 their purity and their strength inspired. 
 
 With the strength given by this communion with the 
 past, we desire to join our own measure of service in 
 sympathy with men and women of all creeds and countries 
 who strive to live rightly, in sympathy yet more close for 
 those who cling with noble hopes to the religious faith 
 which we have left, or with those who having left it, in 
 ardour for true progress, have found as yet no stable 
 foundation for their action ; in fellowship of a more special 
 kind with those of our faith, in Paris, in London, in 
 Ireland, and in other lands, who look forward amidst the 
 turmoil and discouragement around them, to the sure 
 hope of a more blessed future, for the full attainment of 
 which it is none the less our highest happiness to work 
 that our own eyes will not behold it. That in this cause 
 our zeal may continue so long as life shall last, and may 
 spread from us to others who, entering into our labours 
 with firmer courage and wider insight, shall bring them to 
 a good result, is our earnest prayer. 
 
 II. 
 
 The time has now come for each one of us to examine 
 very thoroughly the position which he holds ; to sound its
 
 PRAYER AND WORK ? 
 
 foundations ; to test the superstructure. Each one of us 
 has now to ask himself, how far the faith which he 
 professes is in any true sense a religion to him ; how far 
 it enables him to pray. I use that old word because there 
 is absolutely no other that expresses the facts of the case 
 so simply. After every wish that the laws of nature may 
 be suspended for our individual benefit has been unflinch- 
 ingly set aside, the final meaning of the word remains ; 
 rather, it appears for the first time in all its purity. To 
 pray is to form the ideal of our life, by entering into 
 communion with the Highest. 
 
 The faith of the Mussulman is concentrated in a single 
 word, Islam ; devotion, resignation of our own will to the 
 supreme decree. That word was not limited by Mahom- 
 med to his own followers ; it was used ungrudgingly of 
 his Judaic and Christian predecessors. There is no fitter 
 word for the religion of the human race. If there is any 
 one word in Western language which can translate it fully, 
 it is the word religion itself ; and that word needs inter- 
 pretation for ears untrained in Latin speech. The word 
 Islam unfolds itself for us, as for the followers of Mahom- 
 med, into the two great and inseparable aspects of life : 
 prayer and work. Pray and give alms, said Mahommed ; 
 almsgiving in his wide interpretation of it, conceived with 
 admirable wisdom relatively to the simple wants of his 
 time, covering the whole field of doing good to men. Pray 
 and work, said the mediaeval saint : pray as though nothing 
 were to be done by work : work as though nothing were 
 to be gained by prayer. 
 
 In different ways and under every possible variety of 
 language and symbol, the same thing is said by every 
 spiritual leader of men in every age and country. I find 
 it in Confucius, the founder of the faith that has kept
 
 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 Chinese society together for five-and-twenty centuries : I 
 find it in the ancient theocracy of Hindostan ; I find it in 
 the monuments of Egypt as their secrets are gradually 
 revealing themselves to modern learning. I read it in the 
 premature effort of Pythagoras, premature, yet profoundly 
 fruitful of momentous result, to found in the chaotic 
 democracies of Greece a discipline of life upon a human 
 basis. And last of all I find it where most men think a 
 monopoly of such knowledge is to be found, in the Hebrew 
 and Christian Bible. 
 
 Islam, then, or in the English tongue, devotion the 
 devotion of our life to the highest, the bringing of our own 
 will into accordance with r the supreme will ; this is the 
 word that sums up the lives of pious men in every age and 
 every country. They have framed for themselves an 
 ideal, a model, a pattern of what their life should be. 
 They have done their utmost to make that ideal a reality. 
 In other words, they have prayed, and they have worked. 
 
 Omitting then all those points in which the religions 
 of the world are hostile to each other, leaving out of sight 
 all those disputable articles of faith which, if they be 
 exclusively true for any one case, must be false for all the 
 rest, we find underneath all the countless varieties of form, 
 something that abides, that remains for ever the same ; 
 and this abiding truth is the groundwork of positive 
 religion. That the foundations of that religion are not 
 new but old, is the first reason why it deserves our notice. 
 Were they new, its upholders would deserve the laughter 
 that Moliere heaped on the physician who pretended to 
 have changed the position of the organs of the human 
 body. Religion is simply spiritual health; so long as 
 man is man its principles must always be the same. No 
 nostrum can secure it, no royal road can reach it, for it is
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 9 
 
 the very essence of the life of man ; it is the state in 
 which all his energies are harmoniously guided to the 
 highest aim. 
 
 That the value of prayer was something entirely apart 
 from the personal and material advantages supposed to be 
 derived from it, has been dimly felt by good men of all 
 ages, and clearly seen by the wise. That men, by using 
 set forms of words, should be able to effect a change in 
 the laws of the distribution of wealth or in the direction of 
 rain-clouds, is a superstition which, though it lingers in our 
 official prayer-book to the present day, it is hardly neces- 
 sary to meet with serious discussion. Thoughtful men in 
 Greek and Roman times had entirely discarded it. The 
 diffusion of a thin layer of knowledge in our own time is 
 sufficient for its rapid disappearance. The mockery of 
 sceptics and the deepest feelings of pious people, if they 
 have not been in unison in this respect, at least have 
 worked very visibly to the same end. 
 
 The flimsiest acquaintance with the laws of nature has 
 shown the absurdity of supposing them liable to a con- 
 tinued process of miraculous disturbance from the arbitrary 
 and inconsistent caprices of believers. And at the same 
 time, the conviction, which with truly religious people has 
 always been strong, has of late years become very far 
 stronger, that the true purpose and meaning of prayer is 
 communion with the Highest ; the outpouring of ardent 
 aspirations ; the formation of a loftier and more ideal 
 standard of life ; the earnest resolution to attain it. 
 
 With this loftier and purer conception of prayer it is 
 very evident that Positivists are in complete sympathy. 
 Nay, it is clear that so far as such a conception is formed, 
 it is not merely in sympathy with Positivism, but is itself 
 wholly and entirely Positivist. Positivism is concerned
 
 io ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 with fact : with the facts of the world as they touch man, 
 with the facts of man himself. And it is concerned with 
 these facts not from speculative curiosity, but with the 
 purpose of moulding them to the highest human uses. 
 Positivism, then, is something which, taking its stand on 
 what is real, aims at what is ideal. But, in the spiritual 
 region, this is the very meaning and purpose of prayer : 
 that taking the facts of our poor, feeble, soiled, imperfect 
 nature precisely as they are, making a full confession of 
 the truth as it stands, without concealment or self-decep- 
 tion of any kind, we should strive to purify and elevate it, 
 availing ourselves of all the " means of grace " as the old 
 religionists called them, that is to say, of all the influences 
 for spiritual good that lie in profusion around our life, 
 ready for all that will accept them, dwell upon them, and 
 ponder them in their hearts. 
 
 To measure the facts of our life, concealing none of its 
 failures, acknowledging its miserable shortcomings, to form 
 an ideal standard for its amendment, using all the highest 
 influences for good that lie within our reach ; this, then, 
 would seem to be the true and permanent conception of 
 prayer. Let us pass on for a while to consider what are 
 these influences for good which surround us, and which 
 may help each one of us to higher things. 
 
 The first and most obvious answer would be to point 
 to the central object of Positivist worship, Humanity ; the 
 assemblage of noble human energies which, during the 
 long course of ages, has prepared this inheritance into 
 which we have entered. Humanity is the highest that we 
 know. There is no higher word to represent the supreme 
 order to which man is subject. For Humanity being 
 herself subject to the laws of the surrounding world, to the 
 forces which, through a long course of ages, have fitted this
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 11 
 
 planet to become her habitation, to the supreme conditions 
 of space and time governing the whole universe of things 
 from human thoughts to stellar systems, is the representa- 
 tive to us of this supreme order ; and is clothed, in 
 addition, with the intenser interest following from the 
 human strivings, aspirations, and sympathies of which she 
 is built up, and from the germs of unrevealed greatness 
 which lie latent in her future. 
 
 Communion with Humanity, then, that is to say, the 
 attempt to bring before ourselves strongly and definitely 
 that stream of continuous effort for good, whether material 
 or moral, which has flowed from the first ages till now, 
 and which is the source of our spiritual life, would seem to 
 be the sole centre and stronghold of Positivist prayer. 
 
 Yet it is not altogether so that Comte has regarded the 
 subject. He knew human nature far too well to think that 
 it was possible for men to rise suddenly, and by a single 
 bound, from the love of self to the love of humanity. We 
 are knit together by many bonds, some narrower and 
 more intense, some weaker but more wide. Those who 
 have broken loose from the stronger ties are not likely to 
 feel the force of the weaker. Love gathers round the 
 home and slowly widens to the fatherland before it 
 can reach to higher and wider ranges. The narrower 
 circle must be well filled before the outer circles are 
 entered. 
 
 It was said of old, " If any man come to me, and hate 
 not his father and mother, and wife and children, and 
 brethren and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot 
 be my disciple." These were no vain words, as the history 
 of the Christian church has often proved. Some of the 
 societies that have arisen in that church, and that have 
 had much to do with its action, have striven hard to put
 
 12 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 them in practice. The Dominican and the Jesuit delibe- 
 rately strove, and not seldom strove successfully, to strip 
 off the encumbrance of earthly affections, that so that 
 they might devote themselves more ardently to the pro- 
 pagation of their faith. Admitting the heroic and the 
 saintly side in the lives of very many of these men, 
 and one must be blind not to see this, yet how terrible 
 was the loss, how mutilated the life, how disastrous the 
 result ! how certain was it to come to this, that men would 
 end by identifying their own narrow systems with the 
 interests of their church ; that, holding these to be supreme, 
 and being unchecked by the noble inconsistencies that 
 spring from home, and love, and friendship, and contact 
 with men in the daily round of civic duty, they would be 
 driven straight forward by one intense mechanical impulse, 
 like a cannon-ball spending its force upon a wall of living 
 flesh, till its power for misery was gone. Surely the 
 history of the Spanish Inquisition, or the war waged by 
 Jesuits in later times against the whole stream of human 
 progress, or again, Robespierre's organization of massacre 
 in the name of Rousseauist philanthropy, are proofs plain 
 enough of what comes when men ride roughshod over the 
 charities and duties of home life in the name of duty to 
 God, or to the church, or to the human race ; mixing up, 
 as they are well-nigh sure to do, their aspirations for the 
 public welfare with the fumes of combative self-will or 
 irritated ambition ; blinding their sense of public good 
 with the prejudiced delusions of self-love ; so that at last 
 unscrupulous means are justified for pious ends, evil is 
 done that good may follow; and the highest attributes 
 of manhood, mercy, loyalty, and justice, are swept clean 
 away. 
 
 Between the love of self and the love of Humanity,
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 13 
 
 Positivism interposes two intermediate objects of our love ; 
 the home,* the city. With philanthropy severed from 
 its root in the home and in* the fatherland, with the 
 abstract love of mankind that has no reverence and tender- 
 ness to spare for mother or wife or child, no loyalty to 
 friend, no glow of patriotism at a fellow-countryman's 
 heroic deed or brilliant thought, Positivism has no 
 sympathy whatever. "It is from personal experience of 
 strong love," says Comte, "that we rise by degrees to a 
 sincere affection for all mankind." "The man who is 
 incapable of deep affection for one whom he has chosen 
 for his partner in the most intimate relations of life can 
 hardly expect to be believed when he professes devotion 
 to a mass of human beings of whom he knows nothing. 
 The heart cannot throw off its original selfishness without 
 the aid of that affection which by virtue of its concentra- 
 tion on one object is the most complete and enduring." f 
 
 In the home, then, begins with infancy our earliest 
 training in the instincts of love, by which alone in after 
 years our service of humanity can become real and 
 fruitful ; and in the home, under pain of barrenness and 
 failure, that training must go on till death. That ideal 
 of life which the Positivist calls prayer is to be fostered 
 and purified by daily thought on the ties which bind us 
 to those we love, and whose lives form part of our own, 
 whether in the past or present. Comte has dwelt on this 
 largely in his Positivist Catechism, and has laid down with 
 regard to it what some readers of that book call precepts, 
 but what I prefer to regard as typical examples, drawn 
 
 * In this word is included the whole circle of private affections ; 
 differing in range, intensity, and direction, according to the infinite 
 variety of circumstance. 
 
 t Positive Polity, vol. i. p. 189, Eng. Trans.
 
 14 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 from his own personal experience, and rendering his mean- 
 ing far more definite and clear than it could otherwise 
 have been : for the rest, to be modified by every one for 
 himself in accordance with the infinitely-varying con- 
 ditions of our personal life. Sufficient to say that those 
 who have played the greatest part in forming the character 
 of most men certainly, possibly of most women, are women 
 rather than men. And since the formation of character 
 is incomparably the most important work that can be 
 done in human life, it follows inevitably that this fact, the 
 predominance, namely, in the deepest things of our moral 
 life, of womanhood over manhood, will show itself in the 
 outpourings of private meditation, and ultimately, when 
 the time shall be ripe, in public manifestations also; the 
 highest honour being paid where the highest honour is due. 
 Those who read Comte with uncandid or superficial 
 thoughts have fallen into the mistake of supposing that he 
 fabricated idols endowed with sentimental and impossible 
 perfections, and offered them to men to worship. Were 
 this true, it would surely be utterly inconsistent with the 
 whole spirit of Positivism : for the very spirit of Positivism 
 is frankly to admit and fully to acknowledge the Real 
 with all its obvious imperfections and failures, as the basis 
 from which the Ideal is to spring ; dwelling on the beautiful 
 and hopeful and tender side of things, and throwing into 
 shade that which is hard and callous ; with reverent and 
 humble admiration for excellence ; with piety not less 
 reverent for weakness and shortcoming ; always aiming at 
 the true progress which comes by slow natural growth, not 
 impatient for sudden changes of nature which can only be 
 apparent not real. To idealize our relations with those 
 we love is, not to cut rag and tinsel into the shape and 
 tint of artificial flowers, but to imitate the skilful gardener
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 15 
 
 who contends with difficulties of soil and climate, and by 
 patient, tender care brings the beautiful wild rose into one 
 stiil more lovely in form and fragrance. 
 
 Such at least seems to me the spirit of that inward 
 meditation with which Comte counsels his disciples to 
 begin their day. Thankfulness for what we have received 
 from others, earnest resolution to repay the debt by purer 
 and more unselfish service ; rising slowly from the sacred 
 influences of the hearth, to the wider range of public duty ; 
 tilling the garden round the house before we reclaim 
 Indian swamps or African deserts ; yet guided always and 
 throughout by self-renouncing devotion to the highest 
 hopes of humanity; this is the meaning and purpose of 
 Positivist prayer. 
 
 And if we are told that it is nothing new, we gladly 
 accept that assurance ; believing as we do that it has been 
 a part, and the best part, of the prayer of devout men from 
 the beginning of the world. 
 
 Or if, again, it is said that systematic meditation of this 
 kind is needless, because the highest life may be led with- 
 out it, we need not deny this, believing as we do in the 
 infinite superiority of noble action to noble thought or 
 resolution of any kind. Yet wise men of all times, who 
 have watched the instability of man's spirit, the changeful- 
 ness of his moods, the uneven, uncertain temper in which 
 he looks at his higher duties, have recognized the need of 
 method, of discipline, of what may be called the hygiene 
 of the soul. A few words of Thomas a Kempis will 
 express this clearly. 
 
 " Trust not to thy feeling ; for whatever it be now, it 
 will quickly be changed into another thing. 
 
 " As long as thou livest, thou art subject to mutability, 
 even against thy will ; so as thou art found one while
 
 16 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 merry, another while sad ; one while quiet, another while 
 troubled ; now devout, then indevout ; now diligent, then 
 listless ; now grave, and then light. 
 
 " But he that is wise and well instructed in the spirit 
 standeth fast upon these mutable things ; not heeding 
 what he feeleth in himself, or which way the wind of 
 instability bloweth ; but so that the whole intention of his 
 mind tendeth to the right and best end. 
 
 " For thus he will be able to continue throughout, and 
 the self-same, and unshaken ; in the midst of so many 
 various events the single eye of his intention being directed 
 unceasingly towards Me." * 
 
 And let the imagination of each one try to conceive, 
 for assuredly the imagination of the boldest would fail 
 adequately to represent, the growth in all the nobler 
 elements of human life, the advancement of that kind of 
 progress which consists in the triumph of good over evil, 
 that would result, were the feelings of religious men and 
 women concentrated during the earliest minutes of every 
 day upon the work of clothing with beauty and mercy 
 and truth that one department of human life which the 
 weakest and humblest have power to modify, the relations 
 of their home. Think of the infinite reactions on public 
 life that would follow were such motive powers set in 
 action ; of the stimulus that would be given to truth and 
 loyalty; of the control that would be exercised over 
 feverish speculations, or mean competitions, or noisy poli- 
 tical faction, or acrid personal animosities. The public 
 life of men would again become beautiful as in the noblest 
 days of our forefathers ; only without the misery of inter- 
 national hatreds, with which the nobleness of Roman and 
 mediaeval life was so inseparably connected. 
 * Book iii. ch. 33,
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 17 
 
 It will have been remarked that I have spoken exclu- 
 sively of private devotion, as Positivists understand it. I 
 have said nothing of public religious manifestations. Nor 
 have I at present very much to say. It will be noted, 
 however, that the two modes of devotion, public and 
 private, stand, neither in Comte's writings, nor by their 
 intrinsic character, on the same level of urgency. The one 
 is an essential part of the religious life, incumbent on all 
 Positivists,* whether now or in the future, whether they 
 live in large groups or dispersed and isolated. The 
 other depends essentially on temperament, on opportune- 
 ness, on place and circumstance. The difference is marked 
 in Comte's own life with unmistakable plainness. To 
 private meditation and devotion he consecrated the first 
 hour of every day for years. But he never attempted the 
 composition or the recital of any public liturgy ; advising 
 his followers, when once they had made their position 
 clear from all reproach of hypocrisy, to avail themselves of 
 the religious services and assemblies of the Catholic 
 Church, till the time should be opportune for presenting 
 the festivals of the religion of Humanity with something 
 like an adequate foreshadowing of their ultimate splendour. 
 
 Long before that time may arrive, however, meetings 
 of those who share our faith, whether for purposes of social 
 intercourse, of instruction, of practical action, or of religious 
 commemoration, will be possible and expedient. The 
 festival of to-day, and the commemoration of the death 
 of the founder, have been observed in Paris for twenty 
 years ; and last year a large group assembled round the 
 tomb of the founder, an example to be imitated in future 
 
 * When I say " incumbent," I mean that it follows inevitably from 
 all sincere acceptance and application of Positive doctrine to the facts 
 of man's moral life.
 
 i8 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 years, frequently by those who live near, once at the least 
 in their lives by those whose distance from Paris is the 
 greatest. 
 
 Gradually religious gatherings of all kinds will become 
 more frequent ; and this is much to be desired. Only let 
 them be regarded not as the end, but as the means to an 
 end. Such meetings are not religion itself: they form 
 but one out of many modes through which religion may 
 become a reality to us. It is obvious, I think, that much 
 latitude must here be left for differences of feeling and 
 temperament ; much also for difference of circumstance. 
 
 The united outpouring of strong emotion acts, we all 
 know, strongly upon each who shares in it Let it be 
 borne in mind that, apart from Positivist meetings, we are 
 not left destitute of this source of spiritual strength. 
 Knowing that religion of a most real though imperfect 
 kind has existed in the world always, and is to be found 
 everywhere around us, it is open to us, so soon as our own 
 doctrinal position has become unmistakably clear, to be 
 present, without hypocrisy, rather with deep and unfeigned 
 sympathy, at the religious services of other faiths than 
 our own. Extending this tacit co-operation with perfect 
 impartiality to all creeds alike, Catholic, Protestant, or, 
 Mussulman, we are preserved from entanglement in the 
 dogmas peculiar to either. 
 
 People will feel, and must be allowed to feel, variously 
 in things of this kind. I must be considered as speaking 
 for myself alone, when I say that for my own part I get 
 more of the sense of communion with my fellow-men, and 
 even with the past and future of humanity, by listening to 
 the organ and choir in St Paul's Cathedral pealing out 
 one of the magnificent anthems of the Anglican Church, 
 than by the bare recital of invocations to Humanity in a
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 19 
 
 Positivist meeting. I speak, I again repeat, solely for 
 myself in this, without venturing to criticise in the slightest 
 way the feelings of others, which may possibly differ widely 
 in this respect from mine. For in principle there is no 
 difference whatever. I only feel that, for myself, I prefer 
 to wait till the resources of poetry and music and the 
 other arts can be called in to render with some approach 
 to justice the varied splendour, the genial gaiety, the deep 
 and wide sympathies, the sweet modulations of spirit, 
 alternately solemn, bright, and tender, of the object of 
 Positive worship. Think that the Positivist calendar holds 
 up for our veneration, not merely Moses, and Bouddha, 
 and Abraham and Mahomet, and St Paul and St. 
 Augustine, but also Homer and yEschylus, and Aristo- 
 phanes, and Shakespeare and Ariosto, and Cervantes, and 
 Moliere, and Mozart; and it may seem at least worth 
 considering, whether the infinite variety and many-sided- 
 ness of the festivals of humanity which future generations 
 will enjoy, may not be concealed rather than promoted 
 by attempts which with our present scanty numbers and 
 these insufficiently prepared by long continuance of deep 
 and inward conviction, must inevitably be imperfect and 
 immature. 
 
 III. 
 
 Be this as it may, prayer, public or private, is but the 
 gate through which to enter upon a field of work. Prayer 
 without work is either a Pharisaical and hypocritical 
 routine, odious to those to whom true religion is dear, or 
 else it is mysticism ; that is to say, a luxurious abandon- 
 ment of the soul to elevated emotions, which, when not 
 followed by prompt action, act as a spiritual opiate, and 
 paralyse the powers they were intended to stir and kindle.
 
 20 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 Prayer and work, Desire united with effort, aspiration 
 for the highest followed instantly by lifting of the foot up 
 the first steep step of the long ladder that leads to it 
 this is the essence of all religion that has ever deserved 
 the name. In other words, it is the essence of all spiritual 
 health. What we preach is nothing new, we are told. 
 If it were altogether new, if its main substance were not 
 older than Rome, or Jerusalem, or the temples of Egypt, 
 if we could not trace it back to the first family that 
 clustered round a hearth, to the first rude combat where 
 men stood loyally together in defiance of a common foe, 
 why then it could not be true. Man has the same physical 
 frame as he had, modified in secondary ways, by climate 
 and race, but unaltered in its principal outlines, or in 
 internal organs ; and man's mode of spiritual life, result- 
 ing from the ways in which men have lived together, and 
 handed down the growing framework of tradition from 
 one generation to another, is fundamentally the same 
 also. True, the higher and more delicate the functions 
 of life are, the more possible it is to modify them. But 
 in their essence they remain the same. The heart beats 
 on the left side of the chest, and not on the right, nor 
 will all the physicians of Moliere's plays alter that 
 arrangement. 
 
 Therefore the religious state is essentially the same in 
 all times and in all places. For there is only one human 
 nature : under myriad modes of character and costume, 
 still in all underlying principles the same. Religion is 
 the health of that nature, the balance of its faculties, 
 resulting from their concentration on an unselfish purpose 
 which calls the whole of them into play. Therefore, there 
 can be only one religion. 
 
 And yet, when we have said this, and laid it down as a
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 21 
 
 fixed starting-point, as a foundation stone on which the 
 whole superstructure of our faith must rest, we know too 
 well that from another point of view the case is far other- 
 wise. For if there is one state, and one only of perfect 
 health, there are many modes of the imperfect, many 
 modes of disease ; and equally various are the attempts 
 to cure, be these chimerical or sound. It is not difficult 
 to imagine a paradise in which there should be no hunger 
 and cold, from which the wild beast scramble for existence, 
 whether we call it war or industrial competition, should be 
 utterly shut out, and where the only toil should be that of 
 putting together new words, new shapes, new sounds, so 
 as to make life more beautiful to those around us. There 
 would be no religious problem in such a land as this, for 
 life itself would be one continuous poem or prayer. 
 
 The facts of life, as we know too well, are far other than 
 these. There has been a slow painful struggle upwards 
 from the wild beast to the man, which is as yet not nearly 
 over, and which has kindled in its course passions far 
 fiercer than any tiger's ; and the problem for wise men has 
 been how to bring these wild desires and raging lusts into 
 subjection ; how to give the mastery to those feelings of 
 love and of union, the germs of which are found every- 
 where among animals no less than among men, and which 
 only await their time and opportunity of growth. 
 
 How did they solve this problem ? How did they 
 stimulate the principle of love and so reach the end, 
 progress ? 
 
 By revelation of a higher power, before which man 
 bowed in reverence. " The fear of God is the beginning of 
 wisdom." This was the language of the early religious 
 teachers, Oriental, Greek or Roman. Not that they 
 invented the gods whom they held up to men's worship.
 
 22 .ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 They simply obeyed with the profoundest sincerity a great 
 natural law of intellectual growth, the discovery of which 
 is the starting-point of Comte's work. They sincerely 
 believed that all the sights and sounds around them, all 
 the thoughts within them, were caused by the will of a 
 supernatural being. While teaching men they supposed 
 themselves to be revealing the will of God. Faith in God 
 was the foundation of their love, and the starting-point of 
 their action. Love was their principle, the will of God 
 their basis, progress their end. 
 
 Now the sole difference between the faith of Positivists 
 and the faith of the old theologies is that for the Will of 
 God we substitute the Order of Humanity. 
 
 Just as the planets, once thought to be moved at the 
 pleasure of some deity within them, are now known to 
 follow fixed and measurable laws, so we find it to be with 
 the facts of human life. In due measure we can interpret 
 those facts, and know something of the law that governs 
 them, of the natural order which they follow. On that 
 basis of natural order, of positive fact, we take our stand, 
 making it the centre of our emotions, the starting-point of 
 our action. 
 
 Hence the word by which so many have been offended, 
 because it has to many so unsympathetic a sound, the 
 word Positivism. Yet it was chosen by the founder, we 
 may be very sure, with deliberate intention, and the more 
 closely that intention is looked for the wiser will it be 
 found. 
 
 Most people dislike the word because there is, they 
 think, something dull, unimaginative, material, prosaic 
 about it, as opposed to what is elevated, poetic, ideal. No 
 doubt the word has carried this kind of meaning hitherto. 
 But why was this? Not because truth was mean and
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 23 
 
 ugly, but because men's eyes were dim. They clutched at 
 the facts that satisfied their hunger and thirst, and gave 
 them warm clothing, and housed them comfortably ; and 
 these facts being to them very certain, they called them 
 Positive. Meantime their higher nature cried out for 
 nourishment, and no nourishment was at hand except such 
 as could be drawn from shadows and imaginations, which 
 certainly were not Positive, for they were as changing and 
 as transient as the clouds of sunset. 
 
 Now the special mission of Comte in this world was to 
 teach men that the higher spiritual facts connected with 
 man's life and work were as certain, as demonstrable, as 
 positive as the facts of the first four rules of arithmetic, or 
 the facts of hunger and thirst, and lodging and shelter. 
 The religion he preached was Positive religion, religion 
 standing on a groundwork of undeniable fact, of demon- 
 strable science, as opposed to religions resting on the 
 shifting basis of disputed theological beliefs. 
 
 This is the very essence of Comte's work and life from 
 the beginning to the end. To carry out this purpose must 
 be the chief business of his followers. The most extra- 
 ordinary feature of Comte's life is the unity of it the 
 concentration from first to last on a definite purpose. 
 True, he worked for twenty years without ever using the 
 word religion, which had at first seemed to him to be too 
 closely involved in theological associations to be capable 
 of being used without danger of misleading. But, in aim 
 and purpose, the first half of his life and the last were 
 absolutely identical. From his earliest manhood to the 
 last year of his life his fixed object was to put an end to 
 the anarchy of thought and feeling that was dissipating the 
 energies and endangering the civilization of Europe. And 
 he sought to do this by placing the highest spiritual
 
 24 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 truths of man's nature on the firm basis of science. 
 Whether he spoke as in his earlier days of Sociology 
 becoming an inductive science, or whether, as in later 
 years, of the demonstrable religion of Humanity succeeding 
 to the revealed religions of antiquity, the essential meaning 
 in both cases was one ; to convince men that the laws of 
 mercy and of justice rested on the same sure foundation as 
 the laws of number, or the revolutions of the planets. 
 This was the restoration of faith as Comte conceived it ; 
 the only faith possible in the nineteenth century, the only 
 faith that could stand the test of every logical assault that 
 could be brought against it. 
 
 The Philosophic Positive that work which has made 
 such a stir amongst men of culture, but of which they 
 understand the bearing so very dimly had no other 
 purpose than this, to present all the principal truths 
 affecting man's life in an orderly series, and to show that 
 the laws or conditions of spiritual health were precisely 
 of the same positive, scientific, ascertainable kind as the 
 laws of his bodily health ; that the conditions of harmony 
 among man's variable passions were as definitely fixed, 
 though far more difficult to realize, as the conditions of 
 harmony in the vibrations of musical strings ; that misery 
 will follow injustice with the same certainty that a stone 
 set free from the hand will fall to the earth. The first 
 and the last object of Comte's life was to instil that sense 
 of steady firm conviction which scientific truth establishes 
 in the region of man's emotions and conduct. 
 
 Therefore, when I hear people speak of the "scientific 
 aspect " of Positivism, as opposed to the " religious aspect " 
 of Positivism, I ask myself, What possibly can be their 
 meaning ? it would almost seem as though we were 
 getting back to the old theologies again, and establishing
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 25 
 
 a rivalry or a concordat between faith and science. To 
 the older forms of religious faith science was undoubtedly 
 either distinctly hostile, or at least indifferent: it stood 
 outside them, either as an enemy or as a stranger. But 
 in Positivism the case is wholly different. Science is not 
 one of the " aspects " of Positivism ; it is the very founda- 
 tion on which it rests. Positivism is not, as has been said, 
 Catholicism plus Science : it is a Catholicism become 
 scientific, a Catholicism of which the principal dogmas 
 are shown to be a component part of the order of the 
 world ; in exactly the same sense in which we say this 
 of the laws of number, or the laws of electricity, or the 
 laws of life. Without science, religion, in the Positive 
 sense of the word, has simply no existence whatever. 
 For while love is our principle of action, and progress is 
 the aim of our action, order that is to say the natural 
 process of things as perceived by the scientific intellect 
 is the basis on which that progressive action is to rest. 
 
 Any organization of Positivism in which there is a 
 so-called religious aspect separate from the scientific 
 aspect seems to me to rest upon a mistake, and to be 
 predestined to failure. Religion does not consist in the 
 repetition of prayers or the performance of rites or cere- 
 monies. These things may be religious, or they may be 
 irreligious, according to the spirit that animates them. 
 Religion is the devotion of our heart, mind, and will to 
 the service of humanity: it is the effort for progress, 
 animated by love, and proceeding on the basis of order. 
 To know what this order may be is then of the very 
 essence of Positive religion. It is the one specially new 
 thing that we have to teach men, that goodness and 
 justice, truthfulness and purity of life do not rest on the 
 mysterious revelations of this or that prophet, be he
 
 26 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 Bouddha, Christ, or Mahommed, but on laws of nature, 
 on an order of the world which the followers of all these 
 three can recognize in common. 
 
 Therefore to make the conception of a scientific law 
 as universal and as familiar as possible is a most vital 
 part of Positive religion. It is this which explains the 
 extraordinary persistence shown by Comte in popularizing 
 the principles of astronomy in a course of public lectures 
 repeated for fifteen years ; and also the fact that the last 
 work of his life should have been a grouping together of 
 the most essential truths of mathematics. The conviction 
 is, therefore, very strong upon my own mind that the 
 greater part of the work we have to do lies in the direction 
 of implanting this conviction by every available mode in 
 the minds and hearts of those among whom we live. The 
 special work of Positivism is the establishment of a 
 renovated education, an education which shall implant 
 true religious conviction, by connecting the order of man's 
 spiritual life with the order of the physical world. It is 
 to this object that the director of the Positivist movement, 
 M. Larfitte, has, during a long course of years, and with 
 slight encouragement either from within or from without, 
 directed his principal efforts, taking, as indicated by Comte 
 in the last modelling of his synthesis, the two extremes 
 of the scientific scale, the mathematical and the moral ; 
 the perfect logical type of certainty and definite convic- 
 tion, and the ultimate sphere of man's highest activity ; 
 endeavouring thus to create a school of true Positivist 
 doctrine ; to implant the sense of order, on which alone 
 true progress can rest. 
 
 We shall not be true to our principles unless we follow, 
 as far as our feebler powers may admit, in the same path. 
 More of us, it so happens, in our little English group,
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 27 
 
 are qualified to teach in the more human and practical 
 end of the scale than in the more logical and abstract. 
 But it is none the less important that those who under- 
 take to teach sociology, to implant the source of that 
 human continuity to which our whole social and spiritual 
 life is due, should so far fill up the gap in their own 
 education as to be aware of the indispensable links in 
 that continuous chain formed by Archimedes, Descartes, 
 and Leibnitz. 
 
 Failing this, there seems great danger lest Positivism, 
 as taught among us, should present the appearance of 
 a group of arbitrary and shifting opinions, listened to with 
 the degree of respect which may happen to attach to 
 those who deliver them, but having no other coherence or 
 foundation. 
 
 The time will come, doubtless, when the foundations 
 of the Positive Church shall have been sufficiently laid, 
 and when, therefore, more effort can be concentrated on 
 the superstructure which those foundations are to support ; 
 when more regular, uniform, and copious expression can 
 be given to our feelings of devout reverence for the past, 
 and of ardent aspirations for the future ; when all conflict 
 of doctrines being over, the festivals of the Religion of 
 Humanity will call forth poetic energies among men and 
 women, that are now dormant or at least compelled to 
 clothe themselves in obscurer guise, working underground 
 in wintry weather till the spring shall break. But this 
 time is not yet ; and there would be, perhaps, some danger 
 in premature attempts to realize it. For the present we 
 must work and wait, content to leave the harvest to those 
 that follow us. Those alone are fit to be Positivists who 
 can accept this stern truth. 
 
 Where then does our work lie ?
 
 28 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 First, I would say, Progress, that is to say Positivist 
 work, must be regarded as the development of Order. 
 Our first work, therefore, the basis of all other work, must 
 be to learn ourselves, to teach to others, or to promote the 
 teaching of, the Order of Humanity. With love for our 
 principle, that is to say, penetrating ourselves with the 
 enthusiasm of humanity, we have to find out for ourselves, 
 and to teach others the condition of wise action. The 
 propagation by every available method of the Positive 
 synthesis, the establishment of the Positive faith must be 
 the aim of each of us. There is at present amongst us 
 one man, and one only," who is competent himself to do 
 the work in its entirety. I speak of the chief of the 
 Positivist body, M. Laffitte. But it is possible for each 
 one of us, from the least instructed upwards, to help him 
 in this work, to encourage him by sympathy, and to 
 contribute to the pecuniary aid which is still wanting. 
 And this is the more urgent for two reasons : First, that 
 M. Laffitte, from his peculiarly close intimacy with Auguste 
 Comte during a period of twelve years, has been the deposi- 
 tory of many practical applications of the doctrine that 
 can be preserved in no other way than through his teach- 
 ing : and secondly, because the city in which M. Laffitte's 
 work is carried on has been for generations the centre of 
 the great occidental revolution, and there is consequently 
 a society there ripe for the application of Positivist prin- 
 ciples to a degree of which we in England, where theology 
 still possesses a firm hold, have little conception. 
 
 We, too, in London and elsewhere, though less perfectly, 
 may and must do something in the same direction, pene- 
 trating those around us as far as possible with the historic 
 spirit, with the principle of continuity : availing ourselves 
 always for this purpose of the Positive Calendar, which it
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 29 
 
 will be our business to interpret and illustrate ; and at the 
 same time doing what we can to fill up the deficiencies in 
 our own training, and familiarizing ourselves for our own 
 use, if not for the teaching of others, with the logical basis 
 of our own system. 
 
 Secondly, it must be our work to bring forward the 
 applications of Positive principle to the problems of the 
 day, political and social, as they rise before us. The politi- 
 cal problems with which we are concerned fall chiefly 
 under the three heads of Oriental, Occidental, and National ; 
 these every year lapsing into closer connection with each 
 other. In the West it will be our duty to promote every 
 movement of opinion that tends to the harmonious union 
 of European States. We must patiently await their 
 gradual elevation into a system of self-governing republics, 
 purified from the two crushing weights that clog their 
 progress, their overgrown military system and their 
 bureaucracy with its official machinery of stunted and 
 stunting education, which the unfolding in its completeness 
 of the Positive conception of teaching can alone supersede. 
 So far as our own country is concerned, it will be our 
 desire to see her influence used in resisting violent change, 
 and especially in preventing the encroachment of the 
 stronger States upon the weaker ; these latter being, as 
 we think, in a more favourable condition than the rest for 
 political advancement, the safeguard of freedom in the 
 future no less than in the past. Should the Government 
 of France remain what it is, one of moderate and peaceable 
 though empirical progress, such a policy as I indicate 
 would imply the continuation and consolidation of the 
 Anglo-French alliance as a centre round which the smaller 
 and less military States could rally ; the extreme West of 
 Europe thus interposing a firm barrier to the extension of
 
 30 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 the military vices of the Eastern monarchies, which them- 
 selves, as they underwent the process of collapse that 
 inevitably, and perhaps soon, awaits them, would thus be 
 best prepared to imitate the pacific policy of their 
 neighbours. 
 
 It is, however, with Asiatic policy that English Posi- 
 tivists must be in the immediate future more closely 
 concerned. In India we are laden with a weight of 
 responsibility inherited from three generations which 
 thoughtful men have long felt to be crushing. A policy 
 of unscrupulous and frivolous ambition has led us during 
 the past year to increase that burden by aggressive action, 
 undertaken in disregard of the wisest expert judgment, 
 and as deliberately defiant of the plainest principles of 
 right and wrong as any recorded in the history of the 
 Napoleons. Years may pass before the crop thus sown 
 shall spring up and be harvested : meanwhile, the increas- 
 ing chaos of Indian finance defers to a more distant day 
 the time when we are to afford abstinence from a national 
 crime now continuously committed for forty years, the 
 maintenance of Indian revenue by forcing opium on 
 China. 
 
 It will be necessary then to let slip no occasion, first, 
 for spreading instruction as to the facts of our Eastern 
 policy to all who will listen to us ; secondly, for entering into 
 friendly and practical relations with some of those Orientals 
 who are watching with keen interest the politics of the 
 West, thus sowing the first seeds of what will ultimately 
 become the public opinion of the whole planet, operating 
 with irresistible force upon any isolated portion of it which 
 shall ignore the plainest principles of justice. 
 
 Coming to our own country, we have to watch closely 
 and calmly the inevitable results of the industrial anarchy
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 31 
 
 which for the last thirty years has become increasingly 
 critical. False theories of political economy have stimu- 
 lated the blind rush for sudden wealth which it was the 
 very business of cultivated publicists to have controlled. 
 The period of grace which, as a wise man warned us thirty 
 years ago, would be given us by the repeal of the corn 
 laws, has come to an end : unparalleled creation of wealth, 
 instead of being stored up as a reservoir of force for social 
 purposes, has been neutralized by unparalleled luxurious 
 expenditure ; competition, held up by economic teachers 
 as their idol, has ended by degrading the very standards 
 of manufacture on which its triumphs had rested ; and 
 men who face the future see that the people of England, 
 concentrated in vast towns, and divorced from the soil to 
 a degree unknown in any other country of the world, are 
 confronted by all the menacing problems of thirty years 
 ago magnified to a far larger scale, and without the hope 
 of temporary relief, which unloosing the floodgates of free 
 trade at that time afforded. Standing aloof, as we do, 
 from every war of classes, holding ourselves free to judge, 
 for instance, the action of trade unions with absolute 
 independence, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the 
 attempts now * going on to undo those legitimate results 
 of workmen's struggles which have secured for them more 
 favourable conditions of labour, need watching with most 
 jealous care. And in these and other like questions we 
 shall often be found as we have been already found 
 taking up the cause of the weak against the strong, while 
 ever guarding ourselves and others against the delusion 
 of supposing that any mechanical or forcible solution, 
 whether unionist or socialist, can touch the deeper moral 
 evils which lie at the root of suffering. 
 
 * 1878-9.
 
 32 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 Here, as in the battle of opinion which is raging round 
 us, our aim will be, alliance with good men of every school 
 and party as far as they will allow themselves to work 
 with us. There is much active philanthropy around us 
 from which, while we respect its motives, we feel bound 
 to stand aloof ; because it is of the kind that seeks to cure 
 a transient evil by sacrifice of permanent good ; to give 
 temporary relief at the cost of permanent misery. We 
 cannot help poor women to get rid of their infants in 
 creches, in order that they may earn more wages ; the 
 evils resulting from that course, such as careless procrea- 
 tion and nurture of children, lowering of a standard of 
 family life already too miserably low, being, as we con- 
 ceive, tenfold greater than the temporary pangs that are 
 alleviated. But gladly should we co-operate with the wise 
 efforts now being made in various parts of London, whether 
 by clergymen or others, to elevate the condition of the 
 poorest by fostering their sense of independence, by 
 improving their dwellings, by promoting among them the 
 highest artistic culture, and by entering with them into 
 relations of personal friendship. It may be that a few 
 years' work with such a society as that for the Organiza- 
 tion of Charity would be useful to some of us in more 
 ways than one. 
 
 Animated by the love of humanity, holding fast to our 
 belief in the permanent principles of order, to our hopes in 
 ultimate progress, we refuse no alliance, we are intolerant 
 of no creed. We work side by side with anarchists eager 
 to uproot a palpable iniquity ; and side by side with retro- 
 grades, firm in the defence of some ancient bulwark of 
 social life against the assaults of lawless lust, or sordid 
 avarice. Ohm Hast, ohne Rast, unresting, yet not restless, 
 we wait for the time when our own creed shall approve
 
 PRAYER AND WORK 33 
 
 itself as the central stream in which all the stormy waters 
 and shifting eddies of European faith can unite : when it 
 shall be seen to offer the most certain and effectual way 
 of living for others : and to hold out the hope of the surest 
 and the purest blessedness, because the most free from the 
 sense of personal reward.
 
 II 
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS* 
 
 " L'homfne devicnt de plus en plus religieux" 
 
 AUGUSTE COMTE. 
 
 ABOUT six weeks ago a remarkable man, whose powers of 
 reasoning and purity of life are recognized by all his 
 countrymen, and who, by a great part of the Christian 
 world is regarded, and justly regarded, as the most forcible 
 expositor of Christian doctrine now living, was summoned 
 from an obscurity of forty years to take his place as a 
 prince of the Catholic Church. His words on that great 
 occasion were marked by the b.auty of feeling which has 
 shown itself in everything that Cardinal Newman has 
 written, and also by the unmistakable clearness that has 
 always distinguished what he says from most other theo- 
 logical utterances of our time. " To one great mischief," 
 he said, " I have from the first opposed myself. For 
 thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my 
 powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Liberalism in 
 religion," he went on to say, " is the doctrine that there is 
 no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good 
 as another; and this is the teaching which is gaining 
 substance and force daily. Religion is in no sense the 
 bond of society. Hitherto the civil power has been 
 
 * This Address was the last of a series delivered in the Co-operatire 
 Hall, Castle Street, in May and June, 1879. 
 
 34
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 35 
 
 Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, 
 as my own, the dictum was in force when I was young 
 that Christianity was the law of the land ; now everywhere 
 that goodly framework of piety which is the creation of 
 Christianity is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to 
 which I have referred, with a hundred others which 
 followed upon it, is gone or going everywhere; and by 
 the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it 
 will be forgotten. Hitherto it has been considered that 
 religion alone, with its supernatural sanctions, was strong 
 enough to ensure the submission of the mass of the 
 population to law and order ; now philosophers and 
 politicians are bent on satisfying this problem without the 
 aid of Christianity." 
 
 Cardinal Newman said much more, but it was to the 
 same purpose. All that he said, like all that he has 
 written throughout his life, has, as I said, that inestimable 
 gift of clearness which is, after all, the principal purpose 
 of human speech, and which lets us know what it is he 
 means by the word Christianity. On the same copy of 
 the Times from which I read his words I find a speech 
 from an enlightened theologian of a different school, the 
 Dean of Westminster. He was speaking at the annual 
 meeting of the British and Foreign School Society, and 
 he dwelt at some length upon the principles on which 
 that society was based. Those principles, he said, con- 
 sisted "in that common basis of Christianity on which 
 education can be conducted without exciting those peculiar 
 sentiments, or bringing to light the badges, which divide 
 us." And he went on to explain what he meant by a 
 reference to the controversy now pending as to the Burial 
 Question. It was certain, he said, that in churchyards 
 there could be no angry controversy, because there were
 
 36 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 common principles of humanity, feelings deeply rooted, 
 not merely in Christian but in human nature, which 
 asserted themselves on such solemn occasions, and made 
 any use of sectarian bitterness impossible. 
 
 Now I suppose that nearly every one who heard the 
 Dean of Westminster agreed with him on the practical 
 question at issue, as we now present should probably agree 
 likewise. But for the moment I call attention to the two 
 speeches of these two doctors of the Christian world, as 
 showing what incompatible things are included in the 
 word Christianity. By the one speaker, Christianity, what- 
 ever else it means, means at any rate a resolute adherence 
 to the tenets of the Catholic Church, embodied in definite 
 creeds, based on miraculous incident, and handed down 
 from generation to generation almost unchanged through 
 twelve or fifteen centuries. The meaning of the other 
 speaker is less easy to define. It is difficult to distinguish 
 the Christianity of which he speaks from the spirit of 
 philanthropic benevolence found alike among those who 
 accept and among those who reject the Christian faith. 
 And in any case it would seem the expression of precisely 
 that spirit of liberalism in religion to protest against which 
 has been one of the principal aims of Cardinal Newman's 
 life. Christianity is thus divided in a far deeper and more 
 real way than at the time of the Reformation. There, at 
 least, both sides, Protestant as well as Catholic, had a clearly 
 defined creed. Now the creed of the first has become 
 drifting as cloudland, adapting itself to every new change 
 of circumstance, but as soft and shapeless as the morning 
 mist. The other remains as a majestic ruin, solid and 
 unchangeable, because the slightest change would crumble 
 it to dust 
 
 It is in no spirit of detraction that I use these words.
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 37 
 
 The beauty of life, the calm and trustful temper, the pious 
 hopes, the self-denying zeal that cluster round Christian 
 churches of every kind, are facts which every one must see 
 who does not blind his own eyes ; facts which I hope 
 every one here would willingly recognize. And there are 
 many for whom this is enough. Their daily round of duty 
 spends all their force ; they have not leisure or strength 
 for entering into new regions of thought, or for promoting 
 unpopular ideas. They see much that is good in the old 
 creeds, heroism, self-denial, elevation of soul. The 
 foundations on which these creeds rest lie deep ; they care 
 not to examine them. 
 
 Now to the large mass of conscientious men and 
 women who do their duty in this simple, plain, straight- 
 forward way we have nothing to offer but our profound 
 respect for their convictions, our sincere desire not to 
 disturb them, and our hope that they too may learn to 
 respect the motives on which we act, our willingness 
 to co-operate with them in every good work. Our own 
 first message is not to them, but to that large and increas- 
 ing number who are seeking for convictions, and who as 
 yet have found none. And this class has an importance 
 far beyond that of numbers ; for it includes a very large 
 proportion of those who have read, who have thought, who 
 have mixed in the political life of our time. We appeal to 
 those who have passed or are passing into that stage of 
 negation of all supernatural belief which since the middle 
 of the last century has become so prevalent in France, 
 and which is by this time universally diffused through 
 Western Europe. Many of those who are in this case are 
 the very salt of their generation. They are the most con- 
 scientious, the most aspiring, the most highly cultivated, 
 the most tenderly loving, the most ardent to leave the
 
 38 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 world better than they found it. Only they do not know 
 where to betake themselves ; they have no rallying point. 
 Therefore the weaker of them waste their lives in mis- 
 guided and often mischievous philanthropy, and the 
 stronger, seeing through the fallacies of this, sink into 
 silence and ignoble apathy, 
 
 " Like a sword laid by 
 That eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously." 
 
 Sixty years ago a young lad, a poet of extraordinary 
 genius, astonished the world by a frank and eloquent 
 defence of Atheism. It was, in principle, little more than 
 a selection from prominent French writers of the last 
 century. But every syllable of it was lit up not merely 
 with poetic fire, but with zeal for the progress of man that 
 marked him out at once from the herd of scoffers and 
 destroyers. The name of this poet was Shelley. And it 
 is very noticeable, though I think that few have remarked 
 it, that Shelley's second poem, written a year or two after- 
 wards, though without a single concession of any kind to 
 orthodoxy, has for its motto a passage from the Confessions 
 of St. Augustine. I quote it, because of its bearing on 
 what I have to say : 
 
 " Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, et quserebam quid 
 amare amans amare." " As yet I did not love, though I desired 
 to love ; and I sought longingly for what should be loved" 
 
 Now in the very years when Shelley was pouring out his 
 soul in scornful rejection of dead idols, and blind aspira- 
 tions for an ideal that should come hereafter, another 
 young man of nearly the same age was meditating in Paris 
 over the same problems. His boyhood, like Shelley's, had 
 been marked by precocious zeal for the widest interests of 
 humanity. Like Shelley, he was an ardent Republican, and
 
 39 
 
 like him he had very early come to see that the dogmas of 
 the Established Church were unbelievable. But to these 
 conditions he added a vigour and firmness of character 
 which to those who knew him recalled the old Roman 
 type ; a tenderness of nature like that of Dante, and a 
 philosophic grasp and breadth which to some of us 
 appears without a parallel since the age of Aristotle. He 
 saw that the French Revolution, and the ever-widening 
 circle of disorder which was reaching into every depart- 
 ment of human life, the family, the state, the intercourse 
 of states with one another, the intercourse of human beings 
 with one another, was no transient thing, no matter of 
 to-day or yesterday. It was the final outcome of a great 
 war of principles that had been going on in Europe for 
 five centuries. The two most prominent combatants in 
 the battle were, and still are, the Catholic Church on the 
 one side, the Revolution on the other. The divine right 
 of the Church, as the representative of God, to govern men 
 on the one hand ; and on the other the inherent right of 
 men to govern themselves, or even to dispense with all 
 government whatsoever. The dispute seemed without an 
 issue, because it consisted of strong statements on either 
 side equally incapable of proof. The Church says, Thou 
 shalt accept me as the guide of life. The Revolution says, 
 Every man henceforth shall be his own priest. What end 
 could there be to such a conflict ? 
 
 Now Comte saw that the end lay in bringing into the 
 facts of human life that sense of quiet, firm, immovable 
 conviction which we have with regard to the world around 
 us, so soon as scientific men have found out the natural 
 progress, the law, according to which these facts take place. 
 The irregular movements of the planets among the other 
 stars were very alarming and perplexing to men for
 
 40 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 thousands of years, until astronomers had found out that 
 they moved according to a fixed law. Lightning terrified 
 men in the same way till the laws of electricity were 
 discovered. Was there any law of the same kind to be 
 found in the revolutions of human affairs ? Was there any 
 natural process of growth to be discovered by which 
 opinions and principles, which were apparently in deadly 
 conflict, could be shown to take their place as part of the 
 ordinary healthy development of man and of society ? 
 
 Comte discovered such a law. Like all great scientific 
 discoveries, it had been dimly apprehended by others 
 before him. But by none had it ever been worked out in 
 all its details and applications. Comte showed that it was 
 a natural law in all departments of human thought that we 
 should begin by attributing what we saw to supernatural 
 agencies; that we should end by doing without these 
 unseen powers, and by simply watching how things went 
 on. He showed how in astronomy, in physics, in chemistry, 
 in biology, we began with theological imaginings, and 
 ended with positive explanations. There were gods of the 
 planets, gods of the winds, the waves, the lightning ; gods 
 dwelling in the forest, and clothing themselves in the 
 likeness of beasts, and birds, and men. Then when we 
 found how the planets moved, how plants and animals 
 grew, these gods disappeared. 
 
 But it was not by a single bound that our belief passed 
 from the supernatural to the Positive stage. There was an 
 intermediate stage, in which the supernatural agency, the 
 god, was replaced by a metaphysical abstraction. Why 
 does this animal live ? The first answer was, because God 
 had breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. That was 
 the theological answer. The second answer was, the 
 animal lived because its blood was pervaded by a
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 41 
 
 mysterious abstraction called vital spirits ; or because 
 there were mysterious particles in its substance called 
 " physiological units." That was the metaphysical answer. 
 And, thirdly, men gave up asking the question altogether. 
 Instead of asking why animals lived, they set themselves 
 to find out how they lived, and how their life could be 
 modified for good or evil. That was the Positive answer. 
 
 Then Comte applied the same law to the facts of human 
 life. In ancient days every institution, every rule of life 
 came through the mouth of a lawgiver who was supposed 
 to have received it direct from the gods. That was the 
 theological answer. Then came the time when everything 
 had to be squared with the sovereignty of the people and 
 the right of private judgment. The Rights of Man were 
 called in to explain everything. Every one has a right to 
 do what will not injure his neighbour, it was said. It 
 would be difficult to defend truth and honesty on this 
 basis. Lying may often be no injury to your neighbour. 
 By stealing your neighbour's property you may often 
 hinder him from making a bad use of it. The rights of 
 man will help us but a very little way in these things. 
 However, this was the metaphysical answer. 
 
 Then comes the Positive answer. We find certain 
 institutions, certain actions surrounded with a halo of 
 sanctity. There is a sacred tradition, a deep inherent 
 prejudice or pre-judgment in favour of honesty, chastity, 
 truth. We begin by accepting that tradition as a 
 fact of social life ; not in any spirit of blind absolute 
 subjection, but with the intention of testing it. We test it 
 by the permanent interests not of our own poor transient 
 life, but the life of the human race. We find that these 
 institutions, prejudices, and traditions are inseparably 
 bound up with the past life of Humanity ; that they are
 
 42 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 necessary to her growth in the future. Therefore they 
 acquire for us a new sacredness. Their ultimate origin it 
 may, or it may not, be possible to discover. Further search 
 may throw partial light on them. Much of them may be 
 irretrievably lost in the abyss of pre-historic time. We 
 accept them, cherish them, perpetuate, and enlarge them. 
 
 This is the Positive answer. 
 
 Such, in a very few words, was the discovery made by 
 Auguste Comte sixty years ago : the discovery that all 
 our beliefs in every department of thought, passed, or 
 tended to pass through these three stages theological, 
 metaphysical, and positive. The explanation of the 
 present disorderly state of society followed. He showed 
 that on social and moral subjects the process was not 
 completed ; that some men were reasoning on theological 
 principles ; some on metaphysical principles, some on 
 positive principles. 
 
 Now the importance of this discovery was twofold. 
 
 First, it was the beginning of the science of Sociology. 
 It introduced for the first time into the affairs of human 
 life that sense of quiet firm conviction which men like 
 Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Bichat, Faraday, have been 
 establishing during the last three hundred years in the 
 facts of nature round us. In science you have a govern- 
 ment of belief without any tyrannical compulsion of it. 
 Every one may go on believing, if he chooses, that the 
 earth is flat, and that the sun moves round it But as a 
 matter of fact all people with a smattering of education 
 believe, and that against the evidence of their own senses, 
 that the earth is round, and moves round the sun. And 
 yet hardly one of these people, certainly not one in a 
 hundred thousand, can go through the proof of this 
 belief. They take it on trust from mathematicians and
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 43 
 
 astronomers, and nobody thinks them irrational for doing 
 so. Now the discovery of Comte, of which I have been 
 speaking, was the first step towards bringing about this 
 quiet sense of scientific conviction in social matters, which 
 has long ago been established in astronomical and physical 
 matters. 
 
 This was one result, and a most important and funda- 
 mental one. But there was also another, and one of quite 
 a distinct kind. 
 
 This discovery of a natural law of growth in human 
 beliefs made it possible for the first time to sympathize 
 fully and deeply with the religions of the past ; to recognize 
 the immensity of our debt to them ; to feel our continuity 
 with them. It lies therefore at the very root of the 
 religion of Humanity. 
 
 I have heard people say, when talking about Positivism : 
 It is hard to ask me to believe that all the brave and 
 devoted men and women who have lived and worked and 
 struggled in the world until now have been all their lives 
 acting under delusions and false hopes. Is it now for the 
 first time in all these thousand years that men and women 
 are beginning to have a glimpse of the truth on what con- 
 cerns the highest aims of our life ? We cannot believe it. 
 You are asking us to break off utterly from our whole 
 Past, and begin the history of the world again. You ask 
 too much. The sacrifice is too painful. We abide by 
 what we have received from our fathers. 
 
 Now since the men and women who have such thoughts 
 as these are just those whose sympathy is the tenderest 
 and the widest, reaching as it does far back to those 
 multitudes whom they have never seen, and who have 
 long ceased to live, they should be answered, if there is an 
 answer to give them.
 
 44 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 And mark, first, that these painful thoughts do not 
 occur now for the first time. They come with every great 
 religious change. The same question was asked by pious 
 Pagans when Christianity first came into the world. And 
 Christian teachers had no answer to give. Neither has 
 the pure revolutionary thinker any answer. I have heard 
 one such speak of the whole history of the Catholic Church 
 as of a period in which the human race was suffering from 
 a pestilential fever, and was only now beginning to recover. 
 He who said this was a man of singularly ardent and 
 unselfish aspirations. But his belief was as miserably 
 narrow and mutilated as that of the Christian of the third 
 century burning Greek manuscripts and breaking Greek 
 statues. Every one who loves Shelley's poetry, and feels 
 the lofty inspirations of love and sympathy that kindled 
 every page, must have been pained in the same way by 
 the fatal narrowness of a philosophic creed which could 
 see nothing in the religious leaders of bygone ages but 
 ambition, tyranny, and imposture. So eager was he to 
 fill the whole universe with his sympathy that his thoughts 
 reach back even to the time when the Earth was preparing 
 herself to become the dwelling-place of man. But to the 
 past history of man himself his revolutionary creed made 
 him utterly alien and hostile. 
 
 Now see how vast a change was contained in Comte's 
 law of Development. Instead of the hard angry antagonism 
 between the old and the new, which had risen up hitherto 
 whenever any new thought came into the world, all the 
 creeds of the world were brought into harmonious union. 
 Things that seemed quite incompatible were shown to be 
 part of one and the same process. As in a stream winding 
 tortuously in a flat valley, one part seems to be travelling 
 from west to east, another part from east to west, but in
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 45 
 
 reality the water everywhere is travelling towards the sea, 
 so it is with the history of human faith. The founders of 
 the great religions of the world put forward doctrines 
 which seemed utterly incompatible with each other. The 
 Sky-worship of Confucius, the divine multitudes of 
 Hindoo and Greek religions, the monotheisms of Moses, 
 of St. Paul, and of Mahommed, the revolutionary zeal of 
 Voltaire and Shelley, were no longer in deadly antagonism, 
 no longer bandied between them the harsh words, pagan, 
 miscreant, bigot, heretic, infidel, impostor. They were 
 seen, so far as their upholders were sincere and true to 
 themselves, to have been working together by one and the 
 same law of growth, towards a common goal The pious 
 labours, the strenuous meditations of Christian men and 
 women in the dark ages were not wasted, because their 
 forms of thought, their modes of conceiving the Highest, 
 were other than ours. They have entered into the growth 
 of Humanity : we are what we are, partly because of them. 
 
 And this is true, though it is harder to realize, even 
 when these different modes of faith exist side by side 
 in the same population, sometimes even in the same 
 individual. The very first application made by Comte of 
 his law of Development was to show that the anarchy of 
 Western Europe, then as now, was due to the incomplete- 
 ness of the process of development in different parts of 
 the population ; so that, to use his own technical language, 
 the three methods of philosophizing theological, meta- 
 physical, and positive were all being employed at the 
 same time. 
 
 Now the very fact of analyzing the complications of 
 modern opinion in this way, of showing that the pain and 
 suffering was very often of that kind which belongs to 
 incomplete growth, was in itself likely to breed a patient,
 
 46 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 tolerant, forbearing spirit. For let us be very careful to 
 remark this point. If Comte had simply said, Here are 
 these three stages, theologic, metaphysic, and positive, and 
 those who have reached the third or second stage are in 
 advance of those who have reached the second or first, he 
 might be thought to be encouraging a spirit of arrogant 
 intolerance between the three. But what he showed was 
 that different subjects of thoughts were being treated on 
 opposite methods, sometimes by one and the same mind. 
 Our own great natural philosopher, Faraday, was a positivist 
 in matters relating to electricity ; but in all that related to 
 the spiritual affairs of man he was content to remain in 
 a purely theologic stage of thought Comte never for a 
 moment encouraged people to think that all theological 
 thinkers were men of feeble minds as compared with 
 positive thinkers. Such a mind as that of Cardinal 
 Newman's would alone be sufficient to refute such an idea, 
 should any one be tempted to put it forward. But the 
 fact is that Comte took pleasure in pointing out what 
 important contributions to social philosophy had been 
 made by theological thinkers, and not merely by St. 
 Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St Bernard, and Thomas 
 a Kempis, in the middle ages ; but in our own century by 
 Chateaubriand, De Maistre, and other champions of Chris- 
 tianity against Voltairianism. He said to the scientific 
 world : So long as you confine your scientific researches 
 to the physical world around you, or to man's animal 
 nature, so long as you refuse to enter into the domain of 
 the social and moral nature of man, so long will the world 
 refuse to regard you as its spiritual leaders. For though 
 the world wants steam-engines and electric telegraphs, 
 there are other things which it wants yet more. It wants 
 to be taught what to believe, what to worship, what to
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 47 
 
 hope ; how to act, how to suffer. So long as your science 
 declines to enter upon this field, so long will it have to 
 remain content with a very secondary and subordinate 
 place among the influences which act on the European 
 mind. 
 
 And to the theologians he said, You profess to occupy 
 the central field of human thought. You cannot, indeed, 
 pretend to put forward an all-embracing doctrine ; because 
 on questions of science, on questions of politics, on the 
 practical ordering of society, even on the education of the 
 young, people no longer listen to you. You defend certain 
 fundamental traditions of morality without which society 
 would fall to pieces. For this we owe you our cordial and 
 unfeigned thanks. But is it not beginning to occur to 
 you that the institutions which your doctrines defend are 
 seriously endangered by the decay of the defences ? that 
 in its defence of marriage, for instance, theology is in 
 reality exposing it to the attacks which were intended for 
 itself? Face to face with Russian Nihilism, again, are 
 honesty, truth, chastity, respect for human life to be left 
 with no other bulwark than yours I 
 
 In order to make it perfectly clear what he meant by 
 applying the scientific spirit to the study of society and 
 of man, Comte devoted many years to a detailed arrange- 
 ment of the principal truths of each science, beginning 
 with the simplest truths, those of number and of space ; 
 passing to the laws of the physical world around us, the 
 laws of heat, electricity, chemical affinity, and so on ; 
 thence to the laws of living objects ; so preparing the 
 way for the most complex of all objects of study, that 
 of society and of man. That he was considered com- 
 petent, even by those who did not accept all his con- 
 clusions, to do such a work as this, is shown by the fact
 
 48 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 that three of the greatest mathematicians of the day (one 
 of them the very greatest),* three of the greatest biolo- 
 gists, and the most illustrious of all naturalists, Alexander 
 Humboldt, attended the long and elaborate course of 
 lectures in which he went through these subjects, and 
 which were afterwards published as his System of 
 Positive Philosophy, f The concluding half of this work 
 is the application of scientific method to human affairs. 
 It contained the proof that the development of what we 
 call civilization, our standard of right and wrong, our 
 conception of duty, were the result not of supernatural 
 revelation, but of the long arduous struggles, generation 
 after generation, of brave men and of good women. They 
 have been the growth of Humanity. 
 
 These, then, were the two results of Comte's great 
 discovery of the law of the three stages of human belief. 
 First, the extension of scientific law, of the conception of 
 a definite ascertainable order, to the facts of human life, 
 as opposed to the arbitrary will of a supernatural Power. 
 And, secondly, the sense of Continuity ; the proof that 
 all the previous struggles of men were not lost to us, 
 that though the forms of their belief might change from 
 one generation to another, yet that all, fetichist, polytheist, 
 monotheist, atheist, had been each in their own way 
 working to one common end. Our more perfect state has 
 grown from their labours. To look upon ourselves as 
 
 * Fourier. 
 
 t As statements have been put forward leading some people to 
 think that Comte in his later years disavowed this earlier treatise, it 
 is well to remark that this is a complete error. In the preface to the 
 third volume of his Positive Polity, he explains the necessity of 
 studying his former work. Le recours a mon premier travail devient 
 particulierement indispensable envers le mouvement moderne, &c. 
 Nor did he ever cease to speak of this work as his ouvrage 
 fondamental.
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 49 
 
 independent of them would be as insane as for the blossom 
 to assert its independence of root and branch. All genera- 
 tions past, present, and to come, are joined together in 
 one common service. 
 
 The first twenty years of Comte's philosophical life, 
 from 1822 to 1842, were devoted to the working out in 
 detail of this vast conception. Let it be noted that the 
 word which forms the principal subject of my lecture 
 to-night, Religion, was as yet not used by him. The 
 thing is there indeed, but not as yet the name. 
 
 The influence of a remarkable woman brought about 
 the crisis, which, though it changed neither the nature nor 
 the direction of his thoughts, yet gave them new intensity, 
 and a simpler and stronger form. It raised them from 
 the obscure recesses which only a few students of philo- 
 sophy could enter, into the open air of day, where from 
 that time they have become a living force in the world. 
 Henceforth they have become available for the service of 
 all men and women, who, ardently desiring to see and to 
 share in the highest life, have cast off the old faith without 
 as yet seeing any way to the new. 
 
 This Continuity, this working together of countless 
 generations throughout the Past and the Future, this is 
 what we call Humanity. Here is the source of our 
 highest Reverence and our highest Hope. Here is to be 
 found guidance for each one of us in the efforts of our 
 own short life. For that life may either be spent in 
 conflict with humanity or in union. It may be a life of 
 rebellion, spent in weakening, so far as one man can 
 weaken it, some sacred tradition ; in spoiling the happi- 
 ness, and thus thwarting the work, of good men and 
 women around him. Or it may be a life of indolent 
 self-seeking pleasure ; and whether such pleasure be of 
 
 E
 
 50 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 the refined Epicurean sort, or be coarse and low, the life 
 spent in seeking it has to be maintained like other lives, 
 by the labour of others, and is therefore a burden upon 
 them not an organ of Humanity, but rather a parasitic 
 growth. Such lives as these are in the truest sense irre- 
 ligious lives. They are not bound up with the life of 
 Humanity. So far as in them lay, they have hampered 
 and retarded her growth. They are cast out from her. 
 
 When we speak with pride and affection of England, 
 we mean all the hard and honest work material, in- 
 tellectual, and moral that has gone on upon the soil of 
 this island from the earliest ages until now; ploughing, 
 digging, reclaiming of marshes, clearing of forests, toiling 
 in seed-time and harvest, in the mine, and at the loom ; 
 strenuous defence against unprovoked attacks, wise labours 
 of statesmen to make just laws ; the brainwork of her 
 thinkers and poets and spiritual teachers ; the lives of 
 her mothers and daughters who have maintained the 
 standard of purity and of mercy. All this is what we 
 mean by England. We do not include in it all the 
 criminals, all the slothful, the greedy, the selfish, and the 
 unjust, whose lives have weighed down her destiny, have 
 been a drag upon the wheels of her progress. It is in 
 spite of sin, public and private ; in spite of many worthless 
 lives and many national crimes ; in spite of outrages and 
 wrongs in Ireland, in China, in India, in South Africa, 
 that the name of England still retains a hold on the 
 respect of men. And so with Humanity. It is the 
 triumph of good over evil that is the object of our 
 reverence ; and, to a conscience not wholly seared, the 
 strongest impulse to repentance for a life of selfishness 
 will be the thought that, so far as in one man may lie, he 
 has hitherto not forwarded but has delayed that triumph.
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 51 
 
 I have said enough to show that the Religion of 
 Humanity is something very different from philanthropy, 
 and very different from utilitarianism. The mere impulse 
 of benevolence, without thought or principle, will lead 
 woefully astray. A man is condemned to death for a 
 foul and treacherous murder, and the instinct of benevo- 
 lence cries out for pardon. But how if by your weak 
 indulgence the sanctity of human life be infringed, the 
 sacred horror for treachery be lessened ? These things 
 are of far greater moment than to preserve a life. To 
 the condemned criminal himself the Positivist teacher 
 would say : The sole reparation by which the last moments 
 of your life may redeem the past is that you should desire 
 to die, to yield your life as a sacrifice, as a solemn sacra- 
 ment, by which loyalty and faith and hatred of foul treason 
 may be increased among men. 
 
 So, too, it is not by their seeming usefulness that 
 doubtful acts are to be judged. To tell a lie may be 
 useful, to steal may be useful, to violate every command- 
 ment of the Decalogue may be useful, on this occasion or 
 on that But how if the sacredness of truth be tainted in 
 yourself or in those around you ? How if this standard 
 of honesty and righteous dealing be lowered ? What fleet- 
 ing advantage would not be purchased thus at infinitely 
 too high a price ? 
 
 This, then, is the spirit in which the Religion of 
 Humanity deals with these elementary matters of right 
 and wrong. Our conscience is the precious gift to us of 
 Humanity. Our rule of right and wrong is the slow 
 arduous achievement of thousands of years of struggling 
 effort. Just as Capital, that great instrument for the 
 material advancement of man, is not the product of any 
 one man, nor of any one generation, but results from the
 
 52 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 stored-up labour of successive generations ; just as our 
 science is not created by Isaac Newton, or by any 
 other Englishman or Frenchman, but by Greeks and 
 Arabs and thinkers of many nations handing down the 
 increasing store from century to century ; so it is with 
 that infinitely more precious part of human wealth, that 
 which lies stored up in the consciences of men and 
 women. 
 
 It is not our business to make a clean sweep of all the 
 existing rules of right and wrong, and to say, These are 
 bound up with all kinds of worn-out theological beliefs, 
 therefore we can have nothing to do with them : we must 
 start afresh, and begin again on the principles of Positive 
 science. As well might the modern astronomer decline all 
 aid from the observations of the astronomers of antiquity, 
 because they were based on a wrong notion of the position 
 of the earth in the solar system. As well might we pass 
 by with indifference the poems of Dante or of Homer, 
 because the Purgatory of the one, and the Olympus of the 
 other, have lost their terrors. We have all of us a large 
 stock of prejudices, that is of instinctive judgments, felt 
 and expressed without any long reasoning process. Well 
 for us that we have them. Rightly used, they are the 
 most precious possessions that we have. A young man 
 once said to our philosopher Coleridge, " I will believe 
 nothing that I cannot understand." " Then, sir," was the 
 reply, "your creed will be the shortest of any that I 
 know." If we want to find men without prejudices, it is 
 to the lowest of the savages that we must go ; not to such 
 tribes as the Zulus, who have shown strong prejudices in 
 favour of obedience to their king and fighting for their 
 country, but to races far nearer to the apes than they. 
 There we shall find, no doubt, men stript of many of the
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 53 
 
 prejudices prevalent in Europe and Asia as to honour, 
 and loyalty, and truth, and chastity, and mercy. 
 
 These things are the slow creations of Humanity. It 
 will be the work of the Religion of Humanity to sift them 
 from the ore and the dross with which they are mixed up, 
 and which obscures their brightness, so that they may 
 become more precious to men than they have ever been. 
 
 Thus the chief business of the Religion of Humanity is 
 to gather together the noblest traditions of our race, to 
 preserve them, and to hand them down, a steadily in- 
 creasing store, to those that shall come after. Every one 
 is to help in this great work. The philosophic thinker 
 has to trace back their history, to show how they grew, to 
 show how they have become inseparably bound up with 
 the life of Humanity. But before we can reason scientifically 
 about a subject we must know the facts. We must observe 
 the stars before we can reason about their motions. Blind 
 men cannot observe the stars. And those who are blind 
 of heart cannot speak or think to any purpose about 
 things which the heart alone can reveal It is vain to 
 try and build up a philosophy of music, unless you have 
 first an ear for music. And so the spirit must be attuned, 
 and must be made sensitive to deeds and thoughts of 
 mercy, and purity, and justice, before there can be any 
 ranging of these facts in their right relation to each other ; 
 that is, before there can be any science of moral action. 
 
 Here it is that the subtle insight and the delicate con- 
 science of the best women will render in the future, as in 
 the past they have rendered, such inestimable service. 
 The instinctive choice of what is noble and pure, the 
 instinctive repulsion from what is base, are as needful for 
 wise thought in human conduct, as keen quick vision 
 through a telescope is to him who would forecast the
 
 54 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 position of the moon or planets. So, too, and in the same 
 way, do the great poets and artists contribute to the work. 
 They raise us to that higher atmosphere in which the 
 noblest things become more clearly visible to us ; they 
 make the sense of the soul keen ; they remove the blind- 
 ness from our hearts, so that we may get to know what 
 the facts are on which our principles of right and wrong 
 action are to be based. 
 
 In what I have said I have not so much been attempt- 
 ing to give a complete explanation of the Religion of 
 Humanity, as to show how it came, and how it deals with 
 the facts that lie at the deepest roots of human life. We 
 are sometimes asked, But what is your sanction ? If you 
 can tell us nothing about eternity, if you have no ultimate 
 everlasting state of punishment and reward to follow this 
 short, fleeting life, what is your test of right and wrong 
 doing ? Why keep faith with your neighbour, and dis- 
 appoint him not, though it be to your own hindrance ? 
 Why toil and till the ground for harvests which you cannot 
 hope to reap ? Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow 
 we die. 
 
 Our answer is that the Religion of Humanity brings its 
 own sanction along with it. Does it give men and women, 
 rich and poor, learned and simple, enough to live for ? 
 Does it call forth all the powers of will, of thought, of 
 sympathy ? Does it answer to our deepest feelings of 
 reverence and love ? Does it satisfy our longings for ideal 
 beauty ? Does it put an end to the strife of intellect with 
 feeling by disconnecting our highest hopes from a frame- 
 work of miraculous legend? Does it cease to taint the 
 very source of righteous and unselfish action by the so- 
 called sanctions of eternal happiness, or eternal torture ? 
 Does it supply a principle which can keep the ancient laws
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 55 
 
 of right and wrong unbroken ? Does it give clear, definite 
 teaching as to the path of duty, pointing out to rich men 
 the sinfulness of luxurious waste ? Does it ennoble the 
 life of workmen, not merely by a juster repartition of 
 leisure and comfort, but by making them soldiers in an 
 organized industrial army, whose purpose is to subdue the 
 powers of nature for wise human uses ? Does it kindle in 
 rich and poor alike a wholesome hatred for rotten and 
 dishonest work, raising them to due reverence for the 
 beauty of the Earth, so that forest and lake and ancient 
 stones shall be again sacred to us, as they were sacred to 
 our earliest forefathers ? 
 
 If the Religion of Humanity helps us to subdue the 
 paltry cravings of human selfish passions by inspiring us 
 with the hope of working for such a prospect as this, we 
 need ask for no further sanction. It brings its own sanction 
 with it. 
 
 I have dwelt principally on its applications to private 
 life, because these things lie at the root of man's conduct. 
 They must form the ultimate touchstone of every religion. 
 Positivism does not create morality any more than Christi- 
 anity created morality. Honesty, chastity, mercy, truth, 
 date back from far beyond the Christian era. What 
 Catholicism did was to defend these precious possessions, 
 and to enlarge them by making them part of the doctrines 
 and institutions of the Church. For a very large and 
 influential part of the population of Europe those institu- 
 tions have fallen into decay, those doctrines have ceased 
 to be credible. Positivism arises to do the same work in 
 a different way. Speaking to those, and to those only, 
 who cannot believe that the laws of right and wrong were 
 revealed once for all on a given hour and day in a flame 
 of fire from Mount Sinai, or that they have any special
 
 56 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 and exclusive connection with miraculous events stated 
 to have taken place at Jerusalem, Positivism upholds 
 Humanity. They have grown with her growth. They 
 are inseparable from her life. 
 
 But let us now pass from private life to public. When 
 Cardinal Newman made his celebrated speech at Rome, 
 expressing unshaken confidence in the final triumph of the 
 Church over all the hostile influences of modern progress, 
 it occurred to some to ask, How does that Church deal 
 with such a fact as the Zulu war ? Here we see the whole 
 forces of the English nation bent upon the destruction of 
 a barbarous nation, whose sole crime is to have defended 
 its independence. There is a deep and wide consciousness 
 throughout the nation that we are guilty in this matter. 
 Some of us feel as though a personal taint had fallen upon 
 them. Yet from the leaders of the Christian Church, 
 Catholic or Anglican, has come no voice of reprobation, one 
 only excepted, and that of suspected orthodoxy, which 
 has been ever raised on the side of justice the voice of 
 Bishop Colenso.* 
 
 Now, had this instance stood alone, it would not have 
 been worth while to refer to it here. But it does not stand 
 alone. The dealings of the Christian world with the non- 
 Christian nations have been almost uniformly iniquitous 
 from the first ages until now. And the reason is obvious. 
 It has been impossible for a Christian statesman to 
 sympathize with a non-Christian creed. The reckless 
 destruction of the ancient civilizations of Peru and Mexico 
 by the Spaniards of the sixteenth century showed this. 
 There were many good and merciful men in the Spanish 
 armies who deplored the avarice and cruelty of their 
 
 * Isendula, and what went before and after, were recent when this 
 lecture was given.
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 57 
 
 countrymen. But these men regarded the Mexican and 
 Peruvian worship as devil-worship ; therefore they could 
 feel no indignation at its destruction. It was a repetition 
 of what had been done to Greek temples and Greek books 
 in the early days of the triumph of Christianity. Of 
 Mohammedanism, the great rival of Catholicism, there is 
 no need to speak. There was an internecine war between 
 them in the middle ages, and we have seen the embers of 
 that war smouldering in the last three years. Protestantism 
 has been no whit superior to Catholicism in these things. 
 Our own action in India, in China, in Japan, has been 
 always tainted with the spirit of contemptuous dislike for 
 a religion and civilization which was not our own. 
 
 Never has there been a more striking example of this 
 than in the present South African War. Precisely the 
 same unholy alliance of commercial rapacity with religious 
 zeal is taking place there now which stained Spanish 
 history three centuries ago. "The present war is a war 
 of aggression," says one of the correspondents of our news- 
 papers, " begun by us under circumstances which are only 
 plausibly defended on the score of expediency, and yet 
 strange to say, by a large section of the missionaries as 
 well as by a vast majority of the colonial public it is 
 looked upon as a 'jehad,' or holy war, waged in the 
 interest of the spread of the Gospel, and, therefore, 
 to be sanctified by all the company of preachers. . . . 
 Elderly clergymen have taken the trouble to whet the 
 popular cry for revenge by declaiming in the colonial 
 newspapers on the enormities committed by the Zulus 
 some forty years ago, and one reverend gentleman goes 
 so far as to proclaim in Natal, by placard and printed 
 notice, that ' The Lord of Hosts is with us ; the God of 
 Jacob is on our side.' . . . There can be no doubt at all
 
 58 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 that in weighing the probability of future troubles in 
 South Africa the missionary and ecclesiastic element must 
 not be lost sight of." * 
 
 In contrast to this blind misunderstanding of all modes 
 of life that are not our own, this forceful imposition of our 
 own civilization and our own belief on populations to 
 whom they are odious, Positivism brings before us the 
 true Gospel of Peace. There can be no sympathy between 
 alien races without clear understanding each of the other ; 
 and Positivism establishes that understanding. The 
 African fetichist represents to us, not a degeneracy from 
 a primeval perfection caused by man's original fall and 
 by his ignorance of the true God, but the first stage in a 
 long journey of upward progress, along which we ourselves 
 have already passed more quickly, and through which it 
 will be our business to guide others whose development 
 has been less rapid than our own. Till we can do this, 
 till Africa can receive Positivist missionaries animated by 
 sympathy springing from the sense of Continuity, wisely 
 guiding the spontaneous efforts of progress without wanton 
 destruction of the established order; till that time can 
 arrive, the best wish we can frame for Africa is that she 
 may be able to defend her independence, if need be, with 
 the best weapons that European science can supply, against 
 the unholy alliance of European greed and proselytism. 
 
 I refer to this particular instance, not merely for its 
 intrinsic importance and its urgency, but because it shows 
 the way in which Positivism meets the problems of public 
 life. To subordinate politics to morals ; to recognize in 
 the public life of a nation what is recognized in the life of 
 good men, that power should be used for the benefit of 
 others, not for the aggrandisement of self, this is our 
 * Daily News, May 7, 1879.
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 59 
 
 starting-point ; and up to this point we should, no doubt, 
 get many good men of very various creeds to work along 
 with us. But then comes the question, How to act for the 
 benefit of others ? Granted that we have a national duty 
 towards the Zulus, the Hindoos, the Chinese, what pre- 
 cisely is that duty ? Here it is that the distinctive 
 principle of Positivism comes in, the principle of Historical 
 Growth, of Continuity. We repudiate the notion that a 
 great gulf is set between us and them by the fact that 
 certain articles of our faith are not of theirs. We know 
 that the life of Humanity arises from the working together 
 of a long series of generations. The fetich-worshipping 
 population of Africa represents one of the earlier stages of 
 social life through which we ourselves once passed. We 
 know that friendly sympathy and wise guidance might do 
 much to help on the natural process of growth, and enable 
 them to pass rapidly and without shock from their primi- 
 tive condition to a level with ourselves. We know at the 
 same time that a violent upsetting of their institutions, a 
 sweeping away their tenure of land, or their religious 
 reverence for the person of their king, that most difficult 
 achievement in the upward path of a savage tribe, the 
 claim that they shall strip themselves of the means of self- 
 defence, that they shall revolutionize their laws of marriage, 
 that they shall tolerate amongst them the presence of men 
 whose business it is to pour contempt on all the customs 
 that they have held most sacred, we know that all this 
 results in ruin and degradation, leaving behind it a dis- 
 organized and worthless mass, lingering out the remainder 
 of their days in mischievous indolence. 
 
 There is not one of the great problems of our time on 
 which this principle of Continuity fails to shed a flood of 
 light. That is to say, there is no question of any kind
 
 60 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 affecting man's life, whether it be our dealings with Eastern 
 and with savage nations, our intercourse with Western 
 Europe, the burning question of Socialism, the question of 
 education, of the position of women in modern life, of the 
 preservation of the moral law, there is, I say, none of 
 these problems in which we have not first to see what is 
 the Order of Humanity, before we can make any wise 
 efforts for Progress. The Order of Humanity exists, as 
 we have seen, by virtue of this Continuity ; by virtue of 
 the working together of all the generations that have 
 succeeded one to another from the earliest days until now. 
 To whatever side of our life we turn we find that the living 
 are under the dominion of the dead. We cannot utter the 
 simplest thought or feeling to one another without using 
 words that were created for us when the German, Latin, 
 and Indian races were a single tribe, feeding their flocks 
 in the central plains of Asia. Every moment of leisure 
 that we spare from bread-winning work is due to the hard 
 labour of the countless masses who have created human 
 capital. Our science, our art, our wealth, our language, 
 our law, our morality, are none of them our own. They 
 come to us from a power outside us : they are the creation 
 and the free gift of Humanity. 
 
 When we see how entirely everything within us and 
 around us which separates us from the higher animals is 
 due, not to our own efforts, but to the greater organism of 
 which we are the mere agents, all the loud talk of our 
 time about the rights of man or the rights of woman is 
 hushed into silence. Man, as an isolated independent 
 being, has no existence whatever, except as an imaginary 
 mental abstraction ; unless you can imagine the blossom 
 living apart from the tree, or the eye or the hand apart 
 from the body. No doubt the agent of Humanity, whether
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 61 
 
 man or woman, must have a certain free scope, otherwise 
 his or her work cannot be done. There must be adequate 
 food and clothing, there must be sufficient leisure for the 
 higher energies of life, there must be a wide margin of free 
 choice to act in this way or in that, otherwise the work 
 cannot be well and worthily done. But the cry for the abso- 
 lute right to independence and freedom is like the child's 
 cry for the moon. The story that men were born free 
 and equal, turns out, when we look well into it, to be 
 as incredible as the wildest fables that amused our 
 childhood. 
 
 This, then, is the doctrine round which we rally. Those 
 who receive it will find that it is in the truest sense of the 
 word a religious doctrine : that is to say, that it touches 
 the three sides of life, thought, feeling, and action, and 
 concentrates them on a common purpose. There is much 
 religion around us, very sincere and genuine as far as it 
 goes, which wholly fails to do this. It raises our feelings 
 to another world, and leaves our thoughts and our actions 
 to do as well as they can in this. Science, poetry, politics, 
 remain outside it. It is a shelter to which men and 
 women betake themselves when the confusion of modern 
 life becomes too violent, and dreary, and distracting. I 
 speak of it with the profound respect and sympathy which 
 I feel : but a religion in which thought tends one way, and 
 feeling another, cannot be looked upon as perfect ; and we 
 look forward to a more perfect religious state, in which 
 thought, feeling, and action shall have a common aim. 
 
 Those who accept this central truth, who think that it 
 holds out the hope of bringing all the nations of the world 
 one day into religious union, will do well to begin by 
 putting themselves, so far as the difficulties of modern life 
 allow, into communication with each other. We who
 
 62 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 have addressed you belong to a group of Positivists, whose 
 central point is in Paris, in the very house where Auguste 
 Comte lived and worked. In other parts of Europe, in 
 America, North and South, there are other groups also 
 connected with the same centre. 
 
 Those who join must be ready to content themselves 
 with very modest results ; and to work on in the faith that 
 they are preparing the way for a better future. The 
 immediate work, as I conceive it, is to make the word 
 Humanity a reality to ourselves and to those around us. 
 It is with this view that Comte prepared his calendar, in 
 which every month, week, and day in the year is conse- 
 crated to the memory of some one among the illustrious 
 men who have helped the common work by moral inspira- 
 tion, by philosophic thought, by wise practical endeavour. 
 One of our first objects, therefore, is to make his calendar 
 extremely familiar to us. If we are asked, Is not Humanity 
 a mere figment? how does Humanity differ from any other 
 theological or metaphysical abstraction ? our answer is, 
 Humanity is the assemblage of these noble lives ; of these 
 and of the countless multitude of those who have laboured 
 for the common weal without leaving any record of their 
 name. All that is good within us, all the good that we 
 enjoy, comes to us from these. 
 
 When these thoughts have sunk into our hearts and 
 have become part of the framework of our lives, they will 
 become the inspiring source of the poetry of the future ; 
 which with the sister-arts of music, colour, and form, is 
 destined to react hereafter on the life of man with a force 
 which the highest religion and the highest poetry of the 
 past can but faintly foreshadow. Yet such foreshadowing 
 we thankfully accept. We gaze with Dante at the mystic 
 Rose, whose every petal was a human life made pure from
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 63 
 
 selfish earthly stain. And as Dante * likened himself to 
 a pilgrim coming southward from the cold grey dusk of 
 the polar region, who at the sight of Rome and her lofty 
 structures was struck dumb with awe as the palace of 
 the Lateran rose above the common things around him ; 
 so, said he, was I astounded when I passed from human 
 presence to the divine ; from the things of time to the 
 things of eternity ; from the people of Florence to a people 
 that was sound in mind and heart ; so, too, may we take 
 refuge from the sordid vulgarity and venomous passion 
 that stains the transient life around us, in gazing on the 
 glories that have been and that shall be hereafter. 
 
 Or, again, we may sing with Shelley the hymn of the 
 Earth Spirit, telling how Love penetrated her primeval 
 structure, and prepared her for becoming the dwelling 
 place of Humanity : 
 
 It interpenetrates my granite mass, 
 
 Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass 
 Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers ; 
 
 Upon the winds, among the clouds 'tis spread, 
 
 It wakes a life in the forgotten dead ; 
 They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers. 
 
 And like a storm bursting its cloudy prison 
 With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen 
 
 Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being ; 
 
 With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver 
 Thought's stagnant chaos, unremoved for ever, 
 
 Till hate, and fear, and pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing, 
 
 Leave Man, who was a many-sided mirror 
 
 Which could distort to many a shape of error 
 This true fair world of things a sea reflecting love : 
 
 Which over all his kind, as the sun's heaven 
 
 Gliding o'er ocean smooth, serene, and even, 
 Darting from starry depths radiance and light, doth move : 
 
 * Paradise, Canto xxxi.
 
 64 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left, 
 
 Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft 
 Of rocks, through which the might of healing spring is poured ; 
 
 Then when it wanders home with rosy smile 
 
 Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile 
 It is a spirit, then weeps on her child restored. 
 
 Man, oh, not men ! a chain of linked thought, 
 
 Of love and might to be divided not, 
 Compelling the elements with adamantine stress ; 
 
 As the sun rules even with a tyrant's gaze 
 
 The unquiet republic of the maze 
 Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness. 
 
 Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, 
 
 Whose nature is its own divine control, 
 Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea : 
 
 Familiar acts are beautiful through love ; 
 
 Labour and pain and grief, in life's green grove 
 Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be ! 
 
 His will, with all mean passions, bad delights, 
 
 And selfish cares, its trembling satellites, 
 A spirit ill to guide but mighty to obey, 
 
 Is as a tempest-winged ship, whose helm 
 
 Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm, 
 Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway.
 
 Ill 
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY* 
 
 " TJie subordination of Progress to Order, of Analysis to 
 SyntJiesis, of Self-love to Love of OtJiers ; tfiese are tlie 
 three modes, practical, theoretical, and ethical, of describing 
 tfte problem of man's life, the attainment of complete and 
 lasting unity. Here are three ways of stating one and the 
 same question ; answering to tJie three sides of our nature, 
 activity, intelligence, and feeling : but so inter-dependent are 
 these, tJiat the three aspects of the problem are not merely 
 connected, they are identical NevertJieless the last of tJiese 
 takes precedence of tJie two otJiers : since it alone touches the 
 direct source in which the solution is to be found. For Order 
 implies Love ; Synthesis is impossible except as tJie result of 
 Sympathy. Consequently unity in speculation and unity in 
 action are impossible without unity in feeling. Therefore 
 Religion is more important tJian Philosophy or Polity. In 
 the last resort tlierefore it may be said that ttie problem of 
 life is to bring about harmony in our feelings by enlarging 
 social love and repressing self-love. To do this implies the 
 subordination of change to permanence, and of tlie spirit of 
 detail to large conceptions of the whole" 
 
 This'is the opening paragraph of the last volume which 
 Comte lived to write. It was a treatise on mathematics ; f 
 
 * Delivered at Newton Hall, Nov. 27, 1881. 
 t Synthhe Subjective, ou systeme universel des conceptions propres 
 a 1' e'tat normal de 1' humanitd. Vol. I. Paris, 1856, 
 
 65 F
 
 66 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 the first of a series of four volumes, of which the second 
 was to deal with human nature: the third with education, 
 moral and intellectual, conceived of as continuing from 
 birth to old age: and the fourth with man's practical 
 work in the world. 
 
 In the few sentences which I have read lie, as I 
 conceive, the whole essence of Comte's teaching. Rightly 
 to understand them would ask the study of a lifetime. 
 Yet a little time may be well spent in asking ourselves 
 what they mean. To begin a treatise on mathematics 
 with language of this kind, seems at first hearing, a strange 
 arrangement of thought. What can mathematics have to 
 do with morality ? What can the opposition between 
 broadness of view in science, and love for specialities and 
 details, have to do with the subordination of self-love to 
 social love? And again, this further question will be 
 asked : Admitting that love of others is good, that order 
 is good, that comprehensiveness of view is good, are we 
 in the future to do without self-love, to abandon progress, 
 to dispense with specialities and details ? If so, that may 
 be good for angels, but hardly for men ; and even if good, 
 surely impossible and Utopian. I think that the answer 
 to these questions will lead us some way towards under- 
 standing the whole purpose of Auguste Comte's life and 
 work ; the life and work which we here, within the varying 
 measure of our powers, propose for our imitation. 
 
 And, first of all, I dwell on the first word of the 
 sentence which I have read, the word subordinate. To 
 subordinate analysis to synthesis, progress to order, 
 egoism to altruism, does not mean that you replace one 
 member of these couples by the other; that analysis, 
 progress, egoism are to be superseded, and synthesis, 
 order, altruism substituted ; though many superficial
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 67 
 
 readers of Comte, whether disciples or critics, seem to 
 think so. One of the hardest and rarest things one of 
 the surest marks of a wise, healthy, well-balanced nature, 
 is to hold two good things of unequal value simul- 
 taneously, and yet not to set the same value on them ; 
 to be able to say, This is better than that, and yet that 
 is not bad, but, on the contrary, good, useful, indis- 
 pensable. To subordinate does not mean to suppress; 
 it means to give the utmost margin of free play to the 
 lower that may be compatible with the precedence of the 
 higher. 
 
 Let us follow out this thought in the case before us. 
 
 And first, the subordination of Progress to Order does 
 not mean the suppression of Progress ; as the principal 
 motto of Positivism Love the Principle, Order the basis, 
 Progress the end sufficiently shows. What is meant 
 appears more clearly in the thirteenth law of Comte's 
 First Philosophy, Progress is the development of Order. It 
 is the new growth of the tree essential, were it only as 
 the surest evidence of the life of the tree but not to be 
 compared in importance to the tree itself. Yet many of 
 the anarchists and some of the philanthropists of our day 
 seem to think otherwise. They are always killing the 
 goose for the sake of the golden egg. They are always 
 trying to knock down some permanent institution of 
 society, built up by centuries of persistent effort, because 
 it stands in the way of some partial and temporary reform. 
 They forget that the order of the nineteenth century 
 represents the accumulated progress of nineteen, or rather 
 thirty and forty centuries before it ; and that by the side 
 of this the Progress of the nineteenth century, or any 
 other, is but a small matter. The habits, principles, pre- 
 judices which keep a quiet village community together
 
 68 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 are the growth of ages. When for the sake of increasing 
 the week's earnings you set up factories and ironworks 
 without the least regard to the pre-established life of that 
 village, we know what happens. We have tried that on 
 a gigantic scale in Lancashire and elsewhere ; and I 
 imagine that if the industrial revolution of the last 
 hundred years in England had to begin over again if 
 we could put ourselves back, now, at the time of Ark- 
 wright and Watt that many of us would try and see 
 that the work was done rather differently. Wordsworth 
 from his mountains saw the revolution going on, and 
 prophesied its results truly. He saw wholesome village 
 life, a manly, independent peasantry, hardy, vigorous 
 children, disappearing, under canopies of smoke, into 
 hideous encampments of unwholesome cottages clustered 
 round the new industrial castles where wives were drawn 
 from their homes, and little children were imprisoned to 
 hard labour for twelve hours a day. An enormous popu- 
 lation has thus been stimulated into a disorganized 
 unwholesome existence. We have partially repaired or 
 palliated the evil by school boards, and people's parks, 
 and factory acts. But we might have prevented it. And 
 can we deny that there is wisdom in the instinct that 
 leads Chinese statesmen to shrink from sudden, un- 
 checked introduction of the same system into their 
 eighteen provinces holding one-fourth of the world's 
 population? They have got an order of village life, a 
 hard-working peasantry, a system of ancient rites, and 
 customs, and prejudices ; they have their reverence for 
 the dead, their respect for age, their fetish-worship of 
 the sky in short, a settled fabric of life, which when 
 destroyed is not so easily built up. And are they not 
 right to abide by this till they can be very sure that
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 69 
 
 the steam-engine and the railway shall not shatter it to 
 pieces ? 
 
 I must not pursue this subject. I only note, lest 
 I should be misunderstood as a supporter of an idle, 
 imaginary, or querulous conservatism, that one month 
 out of the Positivist Calendar is consecrated to the heroes 
 of industrial progress ; Gutenberg, Watt, Arkwright, and 
 their fellows. The subordination of progress to order 
 involves no discouragement to progress. Progress is the 
 very end we propose to ourselves. Only we contend that 
 it shall be a development of Order, not a destruction of 
 it ; and that Order shall mean the order of the whole 
 of man's life, not the one-sided consideration of a special 
 portion of it. 
 
 We begin, then, at once to see that Comte is right 
 in saying that the subordination of progress to order is 
 part of the same problem as the subordination of analysis 
 to synthesis, and the subordination of egoism to altruism. 
 That is to say, Our intellect must conceive the whole of 
 man's life : our heart must sympathize with the whole 
 of it. 
 
 And now let us pass to the second aspect of the three- 
 fold problem : the subordination of analysis to synthesis. 
 
 What is analysis ? What is synthesis ? 
 
 Analysis is the same thing as dissection: it means 
 taking to pieces. Synthesis is the reverse process : putting 
 together. A watchmaker separating the parts of a watch 
 and putting them together again, performs successively 
 an act of analysis and an act of synthesis. A botanist 
 takes a plant, examines each part separately its root, its 
 stem, the way the leaves are grouped, the shape of the 
 leaf, the mode of flowering ; the calyx, petals, stamen, 
 and pistils ; the position of the seed in the ovary, the
 
 70 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 position of the germ in the seed ; he analyses the plant. 
 But the list of all these parts does not make up the plant. 
 There remains the after process, which alone gives mean- 
 ing and purpose to what has gone before. A poet like 
 Gothe, who is a naturalist also, or a naturalist like Hum- 
 boldt, who is also a poet, will paint the whole life of the 
 plant, its climate, its distribution in the world, and its 
 importance to the life of man or of animals, its work in 
 this world, in short. That is synthesis, and that alone is 
 the final reality. And note, in passing, that I have let 
 fall the word poetry. For a little thought will show that 
 synthesis has something to do with sympathy. The man 
 who can " peep and botanize upon his mother's grave," 
 may be a good analyst. But Burns, stopping his plough 
 to pick the daisy, which he has immortalized, was of 
 another mould. Not that the analyzing process is to be 
 depreciated. So long as the dissector keeps his place, let 
 there be no word that is not respectful of his patient 
 labour. Anatomy is needful : the dog or horse cannot be 
 fully understood without minute record of muscle, bone, 
 and brain. Only let it be always remembered that the 
 crowning process is when such a naturalist as Leroy enters 
 with all the power of heart and mind into the actions and 
 thoughts and feelings of the living creature, and paints 
 them as a whole. 
 
 Take another instance. The life of a nation has many 
 sides to it, and one of those sides is the acquisition of 
 wealth. It is possible by an effort of abstraction to con- 
 centrate exclusive attention on the instincts which prompt 
 man to buy and sell and accumulate, and to speculate on 
 the arrangements which would come about if he had no 
 other motives or instincts but these ; if he were a mere buy- 
 ing and selling animal. And these supposed arrangements
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 71 
 
 have been embodied in a doctrine called Political 
 Economy, which was regarded, a generation ago, as a sort 
 of foundation of modern statesmanship. Here is an in- 
 stance of analysis insufficiently subordinated to synthesis. 
 A truer philosophy has shown us that man regarded as a 
 commercial machine is a pure abstraction ; that the life 
 of a nation is made up of customs, laws, prejudices, institu- 
 tions, hopes, and fears ; and that among these the money- 
 loving instincts play an important, but by no means 
 always a preponderating part Statesman after states- 
 man has been compelled to see that this analysis or 
 abstraction of the wealth-loving instinct is no sufficient 
 foundation for practical legislation : that hundreds of 
 other things, in a word, the whole multiplex nature and 
 environment of man's life must be taken into account. 
 
 The contrast of the Irish Encumbered Estates Act of 
 thirty years ago with the Land Act of 1881 is a signal 
 proof of this. And note that practical wisdom is at one 
 with the deepest philosophy of our time in this tendency 
 to subordinate analysis to synthesis, abstraction to con- 
 crete reality. Not that the abstraction was not good and 
 necessary in its way. The service rendered by Hume, 
 Adam Smith, and other great publicists in analyzing the 
 economic side of human affairs is unquestionable. Only 
 the results of their dissection should have been kept duly 
 subordinated to the concrete realities of the case. That 
 this was not done is not to be imputed to them, but to 
 statesmen led astray by the instincts and prejudices of 
 plutocracy, who were too apt to regard these economic 
 abstractions as precepts for practical legislation. And 
 note further that for the rectification of their error, 
 sympathy was needed to assist synthesis. To the common 
 instinct of men the doctrines of Political Economy, as
 
 72 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 preached by Lord Brougham and McCulloch fifty years 
 ago, were as repugnant, as by the light of a deeper and 
 broader philosophy they were found to be unreal. 
 
 I will take yet one more illustration ; which, though it 
 be drawn from an abstruse subject, will not be found, 
 perhaps, so difficult of comprehension as it might at first 
 seem. I have quoted already from Comte's last work 
 left unfinished. The first volume was, as I have said, a 
 treatise on Mathematics ; to be followed, had he lived to 
 complete it, by a Treatise on the Theory and the Training 
 of Human Nature. This mathematical volume, penetrated, 
 strange as it may seem, with human sympathies from the 
 first page to the last, is a putting together of all the really 
 essential truths of the science, from arithmetic to the 
 transcendental calculus, in an orderly arrangement. It 
 sets forth that all the methods of reasoning used by man, 
 not merely deductive reasoning, but induction in all its 
 forms, from simple observation to comparison and historical 
 filiation, are available, and can be most usefully studied, 
 in this region of thought. The volume is, then, what he 
 himself called it, a Treatise of Logic. But Logic, with 
 Comte, had a wide meaning. It was much more than the 
 manipulation of dry and abstract symbols. 
 
 Now the greatest of all mathematical conceptions, and 
 the most fruitful both in scientific results and in its in- 
 fluence on the mind, is the dealing with curved lines as an 
 assemblage of infinitely small straight lines, the direction 
 of each of which shows the tendency of the curve at any 
 given portion of its course. The mode of handling these 
 infinitely small straight lines is a ^branch of science called 
 the differential calculus. And when we have analyzed the 
 curve by means of it, when we have, so to speak, dissected 
 it into its ultimate elements, by means of these abstract
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 73 
 
 and imaginary straight lines that we have called to our 
 aid, we then have to perform the opposite process : we 
 have to get rid of this artificial scaffolding, and to know 
 about the curved line itself as a whole ; how long it is, 
 what space it surrounds, and so on. This opposite process 
 is called the process of integration : and the modes of 
 doing it constitute the integral calculus. After the analysis 
 comes the synthesis; after the long wandering through 
 abstruse algebraic formulae, the mathematician comes back 
 in the end to the concrete practical problem which the 
 land surveyor, or carpenter, or tool maker, had handled 
 before him, though not with the same unerring precision. 
 
 Now, says Comte, in one of the most remarkable 
 passages * of the volume I am speaking of, this succession 
 of two processes is what we do throughout the whole 
 range of science. In the first six sciences, from mathe- 
 matics to sociology, we take partial views of human nature, 
 dissecting it into its various elements, a way which corre- 
 sponds to nothing real, but which is necessary to guide 
 us : in a word, we differentiate. 
 
 In the mathematical and physical sciences we find the 
 outward conditions of man's life ; his physical environ- 
 ment, the laws that regulate space, time, season, climate ; 
 the activities of matter, light, heat, electricity, chemical 
 action. Biology, dealing with man as an animal, tells us 
 of the nutritive life, of the life of sensation and motion, of 
 the life of rudimentary intellect and feeling, common to 
 man with dogs, elephants, or horses. Sociology deals 
 with man's social state, handling each aspect of it 
 separately, family life, property, government, language; 
 and showing the growth of each from century to century. 
 But each and all of these points of view are partial, 
 * Synthhe Subjective^ pp. 506-528.
 
 74 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 abstract, theoretical. There remains, after all this necessary 
 work of analysis is done, the final science, which is at the 
 same time the final art ; the science of human nature, and 
 the art of acting upon it. Here only do we reach the 
 reality, the whole of our subject ; here only do we Integrate. 
 This, then, is the central point of the synthesis. And 
 here, too, far more clearly than before, stands out the 
 relation between synthesis and sympathy. Here the 
 profoundest philosopher, at the ultimate stage of his long 
 circuit through the paths of thought, finds himself with 
 the same work to do that a poor peasant woman does 
 when she strives, with quiet good sense and loving firm- 
 ness, to keep her husband honest and sober, her children 
 brave and pure. 
 
 We have seen then these two things. First, the 
 subordination of analysis to synthesis is something widely 
 different from the suppression of analysis. Secondly, 
 what seems the unmeaning paradox of connecting this 
 with the subordination of egoism to altruism, is a very 
 real and deep truth. If in each science the worker could 
 penetrate himself with the thought that his own little 
 piece of dissecting work is but a small addition to what 
 has been done by past workers in the same subject ; and 
 yet further, that his science taken in its entirety is but 
 a part of a larger whole held together by the central 
 problem of man's life, there would be a wide-spread 
 agency at work for the subordination of egoism to altruism, 
 the like of which the world has not yet seen. This was 
 the subject of the appeal made by Comte as a young man 
 to the scientific world of his time, the appeal to which he 
 obtained so hostile a response. Those he addressed made 
 the mistake, wilfully or unconsciously, which I spoke of 
 before. They confounded the subordination of analysis to
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 75 
 
 synthesis with the suppression of analysis by synthesis. In 
 other words, they accused him, Comte, the admired friend 
 of Blainville, Broussais, and Fourier, of wishing to stifle 
 scientific inquiry. As well say what anarchists say about 
 the defence of Order : that it necessarily means hostility 
 to Progress. They could not see that subordination 
 meant, not subjection, but free play under the stimulating 
 influence of a large and noble purpose. 
 
 We come, then, to the third aspect of the threefold 
 problem, the most important of the three, to which the 
 other two may in the last resort be reduced ; the subordi- 
 nation of egoism to altruism, of self-love to social love. 
 
 So predominant is this over the others, that for the 
 mass of men and women it seems to eclipse them alto- 
 gether. Philosophy and Politics have nothing to do with 
 the real problem of man's heart, it may be thought. Let 
 us leave all else, we are tempted to say, and turn to this. 
 
 This is what the mystics of the first age of Christianity 
 did ; it is, indeed, what the mystics of all ages have done. 
 But we know what the result has been. Brahmins, 
 Buddhists, Christians, have gone into monasteries resolved 
 to stifle self, and have ended too often in indolent, self- 
 indulgent apathy. The nobler part of the religious world, 
 whether Christian or Mahommedan, have taken a different 
 course. They have not withdrawn themselves from men ; 
 they have striven to act upon them. But they have done 
 so by chaining the intellectual power, and making it the 
 slave of social and moral needs. Throughout long 
 centuries called, and not unjustly called, dark, although 
 the great and glorious work done in them deserves, and 
 will finally receive, the eternal gratitude of men, a creed was 
 forced upon men by the urgent moral necessities of the time 
 which, though it did not kill, did assuredly narcotize their
 
 76 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 intellectual life. The inevitable result followed. The 
 chains of the intellect were not gently loosened, but broken 
 in fierce anger ; and the intellect from being a slave 
 became a rebel. Positivism teaches us that the intellect 
 should be neither slave nor rebel, but a free servant. 
 
 To put the thing in plain words, the dream of a Reli- 
 gion apart from Polity and apart from Philosophy is a vain 
 one, and can only end in painful and wasteful disillusion. 
 Rich people with fine feelings who have no battles to 
 fight in the world, or monks in a convent who, though 
 nominally poor, are maintained at other men's cost often 
 without working can do without a creed, as they can 
 dispense with the life of citizens. I do not speak of the 
 sordid and rapacious rich, but of the gentler, kindlier sort, 
 to whom the free play of generous sympathy and poetic 
 enthusiasm supplies all they want Religion for many 
 people who are well-to-do in the world, means this and 
 little more than this. But the mass of hard-working 
 people, whether cultivated or ignorant, need a backbone 
 to their religion. They need the aid of strong conviction 
 and principle in those times when hard labour and sorrow 
 have wearied their heart, or when perilous temptations 
 have assailed them. Their sympathy must rest on a 
 Synthesis ; their Love must have the aid of Faith. 
 
 Nevertheless, of the three aspects of the life-problem, 
 the subordination of self-love to social sympathy, though 
 inseparably connected with the other two, is more impor- 
 tant than they. Philosophy, affecting as it does that small 
 minority specially charged with the spiritual destinies of 
 our race, exercises indirectly, through education, and in 
 other ways, a profound influence on life. But the influence 
 is indirect Polity again since all men are citizens and 
 all women the wives, mothers, or in any case, the daughters
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 77 
 
 of citizens, would seem to embrace the whole of life. 
 And it does indeed embrace the whole range of man's 
 activity. Nevertheless, the hidden sources of activity are 
 not reached by it. Greece and Rome show how the 
 widest thought and the noblest political action, separately 
 and exclusively pursued, may result in barrenness and 
 degradation. The source of action became tainted. The 
 heart grew corrupt. The opening paragraphs of Paul's 
 letter to the Roman Church, though faulty in their inevit- 
 able failure to own the immense debt due to Rome and 
 Greece, are yet true in their terrible denunciation of the 
 mass of Greco-Roman society in the first century. 
 
 We come, then, at last to this. We have seen in a 
 previous lecture* something of the multiplex nature of 
 man. His brain life, like that of other animals near him 
 in structure, is made up of desires, thoughts, activities. 
 With him as with other animal races the first of these 
 largely preponderate over the other two. We have seen, 
 too, that man's desires, not being one but many, range 
 themselves in two classes ; those which are concerned with 
 self-interest and ambition, and those which prompt the 
 satisfaction and well-being of others. The problem of 
 life then is to see that these diverse desires, thoughts, and 
 activities shall work, so far as it may be possible, in 
 harmony. And harmony implies neither democratic 
 equality on the one hand, nor servile subjection on the 
 other. It implies orderly arrangement, subordination, 
 precedence. The ideal type towards which to strive is 
 this : Action guided by Reason : Reason inspired by 
 unselfish Sympathy ; Self-love kept under control, but no 
 
 * This discourse was the conclusion of a course of lectures on the 
 Positive study of Human Nature; and the lecture alluded to was on 
 Comte's theory of the Brain.
 
 78 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 wise crushed. The soldier in the intervals of battle 
 provides duly for bodily wants ; the greatest of heroes is 
 not insensitive to the respect of his fellows ; the loftiest 
 saint can love the lilies of the field, or listen to the song 
 of birds, or breathe with delight the fragrance of a summer 
 morning. Asceticism effacing the narrower circles of love 
 on the pretext of ranging more freely over the wider, is no 
 object of our admiration. The health of the soul, as of 
 the body, implies such energy of each part as promotes 
 the energy of the whole. 
 
 But though the elements of the problem came before 
 us in dealing with the brain of man and of animals, the 
 problem itself is not within the compass of Biological 
 science. That there is indeed a moral life in animals, 
 even in those far removed in the scale of life from man, a 
 life which, short-lived though it be, is yet coherent and 
 harmonious, the lines of Dante quoted so admiringly by 
 Comte are enough to show : 
 
 E'en as the bird who midst the leafy bower 
 Has in her nest sat darkling through the night 
 With her sweet brood, impatient to descry 
 Their wished looks, and to bring home their food, 
 In the fond quest unconscious of her toil : 
 She of the time prevenient, on the spray 
 That overhangs their couch, with watchful gaze 
 Expects the sun : nor ever till the dawn 
 Removeth from the East her eager ken.* 
 
 Yet in such life, beautiful as it is, there is no continu- 
 ance. The brood grow up and are scattered, and forget 
 whose care sheltered them from hunger and cold. For 
 most of them some violent death, from the elements or 
 from some stronger bird or beast of prey is at hand, and 
 all is to begin again. 
 
 * Paradiso, Canto xxiii.
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 79 
 
 To found a social state capable of long continuance 
 and wide extension, has been the privilege of man. Far 
 back in the recesses of time, other societies perhaps strove 
 with his on no unequal terms ; * and as they succumbed 
 in the struggle, either fell back into precarious solitary 
 life, or became associated with man's toil and triumph. 
 In any case, the continuity of the social state brings wholly 
 new conditions into the study of Life. The study of Life 
 means the study of the relations between the organism 
 and the environment. But for the social animal the word 
 environment comprises not merely relations with the 
 physical world, not merely relations with others of the 
 same species round him, but relations with bygone 
 ancestors who have handed down traditions, institutions, 
 and results of every kind, material and moral, by which 
 his whole life is transformed. Thus the continuity 
 of the social state forms the subject-matter of a new 
 Science dependent upon Biology, but distinct from it, and 
 requiring its own methods of study. 
 
 Let us briefly consider the questions of which this 
 Science treats. They fall under two heads. First, there 
 are the permanent institutions of the social state, found in 
 every stage of its growth. Secondly, there are the pro- 
 gressive changes of Society. The first may be called the 
 anatomical side of the subject, or if we prefer an analogy 
 from another science, the statical side. Under the second 
 head, which we may call the functional or dynamical side, 
 we study the various parts in their free play, and examine 
 the laws of growth and change. In a word, we consider 
 first the Order of Society, secondly its Progress. 
 
 Under the first head fall the four subjects of Property, 
 
 * This hypothesis was developed by Comte in the first volume of 
 his Positive Polity; see pages 508-17, Eng. Trans.
 
 8o ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 Family Life, Language, Government. Under the second 
 head, the progress of society, in Asia and elsewhere, from 
 Fetichism to Theocracy ; and the transition in Western 
 Europe from Theocracy to Positivism. Here, then, are 
 seven subjects with which Sociology has to deal. A 
 sentence or two upon each of them will mark out the field 
 of thought more precisely, and save us from the danger 
 of vagueness and verbiage in what follows. 
 
 i. Property. All animals that build a dwelling, or that 
 have, as is often the case, a defined range within which 
 they seek their food, show the institution of property in 
 the germ. Families of swans on a river own a given 
 portion of it. Troops of dogs in Constantinople ranging 
 the streets with freedom, and belonging to no masters, 
 have invisible barriers, rigidly defined by their own con- 
 vention, which they never transgress nor allow dogs 
 belonging to other troops to overpass. Many animals 
 collect some slight store of food, and conceal it for 
 future use. 
 
 But man alone of the vertebrate animals accumulates 
 from generation to generation. That accumulation is 
 called Capital ; and its formation depends on two laws 
 apparently simple, yet first distinctly formulated by Comte : 
 (i) Man produces more than he consumes : (2) The pro- 
 duct can be preserved for a longer or shorter time, but in 
 any case beyond the time necessary for its reproduction 
 when consumed. If corn and roots could not be stored up 
 through a winter the formation of capital would have been 
 impossible. 
 
 Without pursuing the subject further it is easy to see 
 the two consequences which are of most importance for 
 our present purpose. First, that capital in its various 
 forms of stored-up food, tools, clothing, houses, etc., gives
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 81 
 
 leisure, as it grows, for new forms of activity, such as 
 decorative art or religious ritual, and other modes of 
 spiritual life. Secondly, that capital is the creation of no 
 one man ; not even of one generation, but of the whole 
 succession of generations. This last conclusion disposes 
 promptly both of the Economic and of the Communistic 
 view of Property. On the one hand Property, being 
 social, not individual, in its source, ought to be social, not 
 individual, in its application. On the other hand, no 
 one generation, either by universal suffrage or otherwise, 
 is entitled to dispose at its pleasure of the wealth of the 
 community. In other words Capital is the creation of 
 Humanity, and should be used for her benefit. 
 
 2. Family Life. With many animal races the family 
 tie is strong ; and Leroy,* who observed animals with the 
 combined instincts of a philosopher and a sportsman, has 
 left striking pictures of it. Of the two instincts on which 
 the first origin of domestic life depends, one, the maternal, 
 is as strong in many animals widely removed from man 
 as in the human race. The sexual instinct, resulting in 
 some cases in promiscuous communism, leads in others to 
 ties of singular permanence. But in man alone the con- 
 tinuity of social life from generation to generation has 
 made the family the centre of a code of rites, ceremonies, 
 and duties, reacting in the strongest way on the develop- 
 ment and the training of his moral life. For many 
 thousand years the religions of the world have taught 
 respect for parents, and have fenced the marriage tie with 
 
 * Georges Leroy, the friend of Diderot, a contributor to the Ency- 
 clopaedia, and Ranger of the Parks of Versailles and Marly, published 
 his profoundly philosophical Lettres sur les Animaux between 1762 
 and 1781. A new edition (1862) has been published in Paris by Dr. 
 Robinet, and an English translation a few years ago was edited by 
 Dr. Congreve. 
 
 G
 
 82 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 the strongest sanction which they could give. The Deca- 
 logue of Moses is still recited in modern churches ; and 
 Moses was but the repeater of precepts and duties taught, 
 as we now know, for centuries before him by the Egyptian 
 priesthood. 
 
 3. Language. If the social races of animals, as can 
 hardly be doubted, communicate by voice and gesture the 
 few thoughts necessary for combined action, it seems 
 probable that, as with certain tribes revisited by Humboldt 
 after an interval of many years, such language is short- 
 lived, and has to be formed again when new occasions for 
 it arise. In any case, the need for continuity of social 
 life is more evident here than in any other case. As every 
 motion is followed by expression, that is, by movement of 
 the muscles of voice or limb, emotions felt in common lead 
 to common signs, and become inseparably bound up in 
 the common activity. So soon as the activity becomes 
 continuous, the signs connected with it become so like- 
 wise, and language, in the human sense of the word, 
 originates. It embodies for each new member of the 
 Society the work done by the head and heart of foregoing 
 generations. The tongue taught to each of us by our 
 mothers is the voice of the past. 
 
 4. Government. Government is the mode in which a 
 Society brings its combined force to bear upon each 
 member. It has been spoken of as a necessary evil ; but 
 not much thought is needed to see that it is as much a 
 part of the notion of society as the diameter is of the 
 notion of a circle. A group of passengers assembled at a 
 railway station is not a Society. The most enlightened 
 republic and the most primitive African despotism agree in 
 the one essential that the chief officials of both represent 
 for the time being the will of the community.
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 83 
 
 As man is governed partly by fear, partly by the wish 
 to find himself in sympathy with his fellows, it follows that 
 the mode in which the community acts on the individual 
 is of two kinds ; force and opinion. In other words, there 
 are always two kinds of government, temporal and 
 spiritual, which tend as time goes on to become more 
 completely separate. The influence of Continuity in this 
 matter, that is to say the preponderance of the Past over 
 the Present is sufficiently obvious. The most marked 
 feature of a civilized community is the existence of a body 
 of Law. And Law is the mass of Governmental acts in 
 past generations, so far as they have been unrepealed. 
 
 These four subjects, with all that ramify from them, 
 make up the Order of Society. But we have further to 
 consider its Progress. The principal factor in Progress 
 has been the change in man's conception of the world 
 around him. 
 
 i. His hopes and aspirations are first coloured by the 
 belief that the forces of the world around him are like the 
 storms of anger, joy, and love in his own heart. All 
 nature is peopled by the savage with human impulses. 
 Ancestral worship is but one among the many forms of 
 this stage of thought ; totemism, the adoption of special 
 animals as objects of reverence, is another ; and most 
 important in its results of all, is the worship of the planets 
 and of the sky ; the first mode of faith capable of welding 
 different tribes together by objects of adoration common 
 to all. Here, then, we have the source of the primitive 
 religion of mankind : seen in its ruder forms in Africa, 
 Polynesia, and traceable in the earliest life of every civilized 
 community : in its most highly developed form still govern- 
 ing the vast empire of China. This form of faith, and the 
 institutions connected with it, are best known under the
 
 84 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 name of Fetichism ; * an influence in the world never wholly 
 suppressed, and entering largely into the most beautiful 
 and sublime creations of modern poetry. 
 
 2. The worship of heavenly bodies, tending to unite 
 scattered tribes into communities, was the chief factor in 
 the great intellectual and social revolution, which sub- 
 stituted gods for fetiches, invisible agents guiding and 
 moulding nature for the visible objects themselves. Hence 
 grew priesthoods, the interpreters of gods' will to men ; 
 and round the priesthood, that highly organized fabric of 
 society called Theocracy, which proved so durable in 
 Egypt and India, and which, but for European invasion, 
 would have established itself over both the American 
 continents. To Theocracy we owe not merely the 
 hereditary aptitude implanted by caste for various forms 
 of industry, but also what is of infinitely greater moment, 
 hereditary instincts of social discipline. Murder, theft, 
 and adultery had been held in check by the Egyptian 
 priesthood for a long range of centuries before the 
 Decalogue of Moses. 
 
 3. Western Europe is passing from Theocracy to Posi- 
 tivism ; from the reign of Gods to the reign of Humanity, 
 by a long series of transitions ; beginning with the Greek 
 settlements on the Mediterranean, carried on by the 
 Roman Empire, and by the feudal society of the Middle 
 Ages, and culminating in the modern revolution which, 
 from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century has been 
 transmuting every aspect of private and public life. 
 
 * This name, adopted by Comte from De Brosses' remarkable work 
 Les Dieux Fetiches (published 1760), is better fitted to describe the 
 whole system of thought and feeling characteristic of primitive religious 
 belief than the words Animism, Totemism, Ghost-worship, which later 
 writers sometimes substitute for it, but which give too specialist a view 
 of the matter.
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 85 
 
 Arnold was right in saying that modern history began 
 with the Greeks. From Homer, Thales, Aristotle, and 
 Caesar, to Shakespeare, Descartes, Frederic, and Comte, 
 the transition, spite of all oscillations, has been continuous : 
 the substitution of Humanity for Divinity has gone on 
 unceasingly. The Mediaeval Church, commonly regarded 
 as the obstacle to this change, was in truth, one of its 
 chief, though unconscious agents. The Christ of St. Paul, 
 and the Virgin of later centuries, were prototypes of 
 Humanity. 
 
 And remark that as this series of changes from 
 Fetichism, through Theocracy and Revolution to Positivism 
 has proceeded, a wider and deeper sense of man's union 
 has been going along with it. Solidarity, to use the 
 Socialist phrase, has increased with Continuity. Under 
 Fetichism Family life was organized, as we see in Africa, 
 in China, and in the primitive history of all civilized 
 nations. Under Theocracy we get the wider union of the 
 Caste, joining families who followed the same occupation. 
 Greco-Roman history developed the conception of the 
 City or State. Catholicism, and to a large extent, Islamism 
 also, united many states by the one bond of a common 
 Church. And finally the scientific discoveries, industrial 
 inventions, and wide commercial intercourse of modern 
 times has brought man to feel the ties that bind all the 
 inhabitants of this planet together. 
 
 Such then is the order and progress which form the 
 subject-matter of this science of Sociology. We learn 
 from it to recognize the existence of Humanity as a power 
 exercising invincible control over each individual life. As 
 little as we can place ourselves on another planet, can we 
 alter our subjection to this power. We are born in a 
 certain family ; we have a particular language ; we are
 
 86 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 taught certain duties ; prejudices, customs, principles are 
 instilled into us ; we are the children of one nation and of 
 one century ; and all the efforts of our will cannot make 
 us other than this, any more than we can leap away from 
 our shadow, or add a cubit to our stature. 
 
 There is no question then as to the reality of this 
 power. No one thinks that when he mentions the word 
 England or France or Germany, he is talking of a ghost 
 or a phantom. Nor does he mean a vast collection of so 
 many millions of men in the abstract ; so many million 
 ghosts. Man in the abstract is of all abstractions the 
 most unreal. By England we mean the prejudices, customs, 
 traditions, history, peculiar to English men, summed up 
 in the present generation, in the living representatives of 
 the past history. So with Humanity. The very language 
 in which a man might seek to deny that he is the creature 
 of humanity, is Humanity's creation. 
 
 Humanity is then the central reality for us ; the central 
 point of thought, of activity, of devotion and sympathy. 
 But to have a central meeting-point for thought, action, 
 and sympathy, is to have a religion. Religion has no 
 other meaning than the union of thought, activity, and 
 sympathy in subjection to a power governing our indi- 
 vidual life. 
 
 Is such a religion Self-worship ? It is strange that it 
 should be necessary to answer such a question. Yet as 
 two friends of mine in the course of the last month have 
 asked it, and indeed have answered it with full assurance 
 of conviction in their own way, it is needful to say a word 
 on the matter. The point of the objection is that because 
 we are members of the human race, therefore to worship 
 Humanity is to worship self. Let us see where the mis- 
 conception lies. It would seem clear on the face of it that
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 87 
 
 to live for others is not exactly the same thing as living 
 for self. Yet to live for others is what the religion of 
 Humanity bids us do. It would seem clear that to admire 
 a great poet, a great statesman, a great benefactor of men 
 in any department of life whatever, is not precisely self- 
 admiration. Yet this is what the religion of Humanity 
 encourages us to do. It is not very hard to see that true 
 patriotism, profound respect for the institutions and 
 heroes and brave and true men and women of your 
 country, and resolution to add your own small result to 
 the fabric which they have reared, is not exactly the 
 same thing as devotion to your own personal interests ; 
 yet such patriotism is an essential part of the life demanded 
 by the religion of Humanity. And when, passing outside 
 the limits of that country, you extend your sympathy and 
 your reverence to the good and the great of all times and 
 of all places, and bring your heart and your understanding 
 to feel and to see that the whole framework of your life is 
 due to what they have done for you, and that the sum of 
 your activities, concentrated on continuing this work, is 
 but the scantiest repayment, though it be the best in your 
 power, of the debt you owe, is all this Self-worship ? Or 
 would it be possible so to describe the religion of Humanity 
 with a greater capacity for inexactitude ? 
 
 What explains the error is the belief that by Humanity 
 we mean the same thing as the human race. We mean 
 something widely different. Of each man's life, one part 
 has been personal, the other social : one part consists in 
 actions for the common good, the other part in actions of 
 pure self-indulgence, and even of active hostility to the 
 common welfare. Such actions retard the progress of 
 Humanity, though they cannot arrest it : they disappear, 
 perish, and are forgotten. There are lives wholly made
 
 88 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 up of actions such as these. They form no part of 
 Humanity. Humanity consists only of such lives, and 
 only of those parts of each man's life, which are impersonal, 
 which are social, which have converged to the common 
 good. 
 
 Here, then, lies the subject-matter for the final science, 
 that which teaches how, by the clear perception of man's 
 relation to Humanity, to gather up the scattered fragments 
 of his nature and make them one, like the dry bones of 
 Ezekiel's vision which, at the Divine word, became a living 
 soul. And note that this final Science is at the same time 
 the final Art. It is the meeting-point of the profoundest 
 speculation and of the noblest practical effort. The philo- 
 sopher, as I have said before, after dragging the long chain 
 of abstruse speculation through science after science, finds 
 himself at last face to face with the practical problem 
 urged on all hard-working and true men and women inces- 
 santly, in every time and place, from birth to death : How 
 to guide our life ? What to do ? 
 
 No abstract and general solution is of much avail here. 
 We leave generalities and abstractions ; we have no longer 
 to do with men in the mass. Cosmology, Biology, even 
 Sociology are left behind. We have the problem which 
 artists and poets have to handle, and which touches the 
 heart of plain men and women and children, who have 
 neither time nor temper for deep speculation ; we have to 
 do with the infinitely varying phases of character, indi- 
 viduality, circumstance. Homer tells us nothing what- 
 ever of man in the abstract : but of this man and that 
 woman ; of Hector and Achilles ; and Helen, and Pene- 
 lope, and Odysseus. Of the thousand characters of Shake- 
 peare not one is the same. The whole art of Education, 
 which our modern machinery of schools and school boards
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 89 
 
 hardly seems to touch, starts from the recognition of these 
 differences. 
 
 How to establish a principle of unity amidst these infi- 
 nite differences ; how to make men at one with themselves 
 and at one with each other ; this is the final aim of man's 
 effort, his ultimate problem : and the solution is to be 
 found in bringing men to see and to feel by every agency 
 possible, by philosophy, by science, by art, by training of 
 every possible kind, their subordination to Humanity. 
 
 To go much further into the subject would be impos- 
 sible just now. I will only ask the question, does all this 
 teaching strengthen and enlighten man's sense of duty ? 
 That is the test question, by which every new rule of life 
 is to be judged. It is the question which we shall do well 
 to ask of all systems of thought, new or old. 
 
 What is duty ? I quote the definition given by Comte's 
 great disciple in Paris, and our teacher lately in this hall, M. 
 Pierre Laffitte. Duty is a function performed by a free organ. 
 
 The organs of the body are bound to it by indissoluble 
 ties ; they have no independent existence. But the organs 
 of the body politic, while subject to it, are not thus bound 
 to it ; they have a large measure of independent activity. 
 A slave, suppose his slavery to be pushed to the logical 
 extreme, can have no duty. An emancipated Russian 
 serf said to his employer, some years ago, " When I was a 
 serf I stole always ; it was my only right, my only way of 
 feeling free." Positivists, let me say in passing, attach as 
 great importance to freedom as any school of politicians 
 now living, and very much more than most. Only it is 
 not for them, as for some, the be-all and end-all of life. 
 A freeman freely acting foolishly is no object of admira- 
 tion. But without freedom there can be no true virtue, as 
 wise men have always told us.
 
 90 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 Duty then implies, first of all, the clear perception of 
 man's relation to Humanity, as a free organ performing a 
 definite function for the service of the body of which he is 
 a member. But it implies, secondly, the inward impulse 
 of love and reverence, urging man to forget self: and in 
 the third place, it implies energy to carry the action 
 through to the end. In other words, the whole of our 
 threefold nature, made up of Thought, Emotion, and 
 Activity, is concerned in an act of Duty. It is not merely 
 sound reasoning ; it is not merely blind benevolent im- 
 pulse ; it is not merely resolute activity : it is the union of 
 all three in one. It is the first step towards that complete 
 unity and harmony of our complex multiform nature 
 which it is man's highest effort to attain, and which when 
 attained, constitutes true happiness. The first step towards 
 the attainment ; but not as yet the final reaching to the 
 goal. An act of duty implies always at the first a bitter 
 fierce struggle between the higher and lower elements of 
 the soul ; it is long ere the victory is completely won. 
 And only when the act has become habitual, when the 
 victory is secure, when the lower passions, like subdued 
 rebels, have become at last willing servants, lending their 
 stores of force to the higher instincts whose rule they have 
 learnt to recognize, only then is there true unity, only then 
 is there inward peace, and such happiness as the good can 
 feel in a world where there must always be much pain and 
 sorrow. We come back then to Aristotle's lofty concep- 
 tion ; happiness is the state or habit of noble activity. 
 
 But then we are told, This teaching is well enough for 
 the few ; it will be listened to by those who already prac- 
 tise it, and therefore do not need it : but how about the 
 rest ? Where is the sanction for your Positive morality ? 
 
 I ask in return, what do you mean by sanction ? Do
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 91 
 
 you mean, where is the penalty for fear of which, or the 
 reward for the hope of which, you do this, and refrain from 
 doing that? If this be your meaning, I say first that 
 Pagan Stoics and Christian or Indian Mystics have always 
 told us that the Love of Virtue, or the Love of God, brings 
 its own reward with it. And if you reply (as you justly 
 may) that the mass of men, Mystic and Stoic included, 
 even though they rise once and again to such sublime 
 moods of devotion, yet in the daily round of life, and in its 
 bitterer trials, need more than this : then, more than this is 
 at hand. To the finer and purer natures in their hour of 
 weakness, the approving glance of those they love and 
 reverence is a source of strength. And if this be wanting, 
 yet the trust that work done honestly and bravely will tell 
 in the long run, will be valued by those they leave behind 
 them, will be added in unseen ways to the treasures of 
 Humanity, and will not be lost, is the strongest stimulus 
 of hope ; the fear of missing this is the greatest of terrors. 
 To "save the soul" means so to guide the life that this 
 shall be the result. To coarser natures the disapproval of 
 their fellow men is a moral force before which all but the 
 fiercest audacity breaks down, even when this blame is 
 vaguely expressed and felt ; and still more when distinctly 
 uttered by an authority recognized by all as competent 
 and valid, and where, as in the worst cases might be need- 
 ful, it might be pushed to the extreme limits of moral or 
 even physical isolation. Finally, for natures wholly rebel- 
 lious, there remain for the society of the future as for 
 societies of the past, the physical force of government, the 
 strong arm of the law. No ; the want of a due sanction to 
 morality in the religion of the Future is a criticism that 
 will not bear the shallowest examination : rather it might 
 be feared that the sanction would be too strong ; that it
 
 92 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 might be abused for tyrannical purposes, as the fear of hell 
 in past ages was abused by ambitious bigots ; were it not 
 that in our case the very strength, or at least the per- 
 manence of the sanction ceases so soon as it should be 
 used unreasonably. 
 
 Still again the objector argues: granted that free, 
 willing action, in subordination to the order of Humanity, 
 supplies a sure foundation of morality ; granted that those 
 who have been taught to understand this long, continuous 
 order of development that we call Humanity, will become 
 willing to fall in with it and adjust their lives to it ; yet is 
 not this conception very hard to reach for those who are 
 not historians, or philosophers, or scientific students ? 
 How touch the hearts of the vast mass of men with any 
 fire of enthusiasm for truths, real, no doubt, and certain, 
 but which it takes the deepest thinkers their whole lives to 
 fathom ? 
 
 The answer lies in looking at the widely different ways 
 there are of apprehending truth. Every day on the wide 
 seas at noon thousands of men are using their sextants 
 and finding out by looking at the sun and at their manuals 
 of navigation, the exact place on the surface of the planet 
 which their ships have reached. Yet these men are not 
 Galileos, or Keplers, or Newtons ; nor even are they, in 
 general, good mathematicians. They simply recognize the 
 competent authority of the astronomers of Greenwich, and 
 act accordingly. That is the way great truths get received 
 and permeate the world. They are largely accepted on 
 faith by men who find them square with their practical 
 experience. 
 
 And again, the mistake of the objector lies in supposing 
 that words and the abstract signs of reasoning form the 
 only mode, or the chief mode, of penetrating men with the
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 93 
 
 conception of their continuity with the Past. But this is 
 not so, or will not be so. Let us take a glance into the 
 Future, remembering Shakespeare's word that to look 
 after as well as before is the privilege of man. Let us 
 try to imagine some of the great public festivals that 
 Auguste Comte has foretold for the Future of Humanity, 
 so soon as by inward meditation, by careful training of 
 children by Positivist mothers, and by hard, continuous 
 work in propagating a broader and nobler standard of 
 thought and feeling throughout Society, a sufficiently 
 large public is prepared for them, to give them the 
 spontaneousness without which they would be empty 
 pageants. 
 
 Take the four festivals marked out for the month 
 dedicated to Fetichism ; the festivals of Animals, of Fire, 
 of the Sun, of Iron. Think of the splendid career opened 
 out to the Berliozes and Wagners of the Future, to painters, 
 sculptors, builders, decorators, as, in due subordination to 
 the poet, they celebrate each in their own way the painful 
 struggles of early man. What a subject for art is man's 
 rivalry with other races, his final victory, and the elevation 
 of the dog and horse from fierce enemies into willing and 
 noble servants ; or again, what scope for imagination in 
 telling of the humble unknown Prometheus, who brought 
 fire among men from the earth and from the sky, and by 
 the aid of this subtle spirit gained access to the hidden 
 virtues of plant and rock. What a theme for poet, artist, 
 and artificer, is the festival of Iron, celebrating the long 
 struggle between the ploughshare and the sword ; noble 
 rivals, each with their own great work to do, but the 
 nobler and the humbler finally victorious. And the festival 
 of the Sun ; how it would unite the earliest devotion 
 of Sun-worshippers with the most recent revelations of
 
 94 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 science ! since for modern no less than for ancient the sun 
 is the fountain of life and energy. Passing to another 
 theme, think what vividness and what reality the Feast of 
 Salamis would give to the splendid struggle which saved 
 for mankind the inestimable treasure of Greek science, 
 philosophy, and art ; without which Thales, Pythagoras, 
 ^Eschylus, Phidias, Aristotle, Archimedes, would be 
 unheard or unborn names for us. I give these as isolated 
 instances ; but imagine the time when the eighty-one 
 festivals, glorifying the most precious possessions of 
 Humanity and the noblest work of her servants, shall 
 bring the whole beautiful story before the hearts of men, 
 not in printed books or lectures, but in song and music, in 
 sound and colour and form, with all the resources of artist 
 and skilled artificer no longer wasted on luxurious decora- 
 tions of noblemen's and tradesmen's palaces, but devoted 
 to the public service of the whole united people ; and I 
 ask, would not the religion of Humanity call forth devotion 
 as real and as heartfelt as when the mystic veil was borne 
 by white-robed virgins to Athena's shrine, or when the 
 worshippers of Corpus Christi in the public squares of 
 Seville and Toledo listened and looked at the sacred 
 dramas of Calderon ? 
 
 It is needful to think of such things ; although we know 
 well that as we leave this room to-night we shall pass 
 within a few yards of many haunts of misery, and sorrow, 
 and degradation ; for we are bound to know this, and 
 never forget it, and do what we can to better it. Our work 
 lies in the present, not in the golden, glowing future. Yet 
 hope and heart would fail us were we not to feel that we 
 are one with that Future, as we are one with the glorious 
 Past 
 
 It is not then impossible, on the contrary it will be easy
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 95 
 
 in future times, even though now it be hard, to penetrate 
 all men, women, and children born upon this planet with a 
 vivid operative belief in Humanity as the power supreme 
 over human life. The belief will spread, because it is real 
 and true ; because it gathers up our scattered thoughts, 
 activities, and feelings, round a common centre ; because it 
 stimulates new effort for perfection without sacrificing the 
 Order which is our heritage from the Past : because by 
 reducing the warring elements of the soul to harmony, 
 not crushing the lower, but leading them to serve the 
 higher, it helps men to reach that inward peace which 
 passes understanding.
 
 IV 
 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE* 
 
 [EDITOR'S NOTE. The first portion of this lecture was not 
 written out in full. The notes show that the lecturer began by 
 taking the term "love" in the widest sense, in which we can 
 speak of " love of money," " love of fame," &c. This brings him 
 to the account of love given by Dante in the seventeenth canto 
 of the Purgatory.] . . . 
 
 ... IN that canto Dante led by Virgil had passed half- 
 way up the mountain of Purgatory. Of the seven sins 
 or infirmities to which man is prone he had been purged 
 of three Pride, Envy, Anger. There remained the three 
 final stages in which, first, Avarice, then Gluttony (in- 
 cluding, of course, indulgence in drink as well as meat), 
 and, finally, unlicensed sexual desire, were to be uprooted. 
 Pride, Envy, Anger, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust. But between 
 these two groups came one which completes the list of 
 seven ; Luke-warmness ; failure to love ; apathy : and 
 this one leads Dante to place in the mouth of Virgil a 
 long and most profound discourse on the nature of love, 
 a discourse in which the whole meaning and purpose of 
 this division of the poem is explained. 
 
 "Neither creator, my son, nor creature, lived ever without 
 love; love issuing from natural impulse, or from the spirit, 
 and that thou well knowest. That which is natural is always 
 
 * A lecture addressed to the Positivist Society, Oct. 14, 1888. 
 
 96
 
 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 97 
 
 true and unfailing. But the other kind may err either from a 
 wrong purpose, or from too little strength, or from too much. 
 So long as it is well guided towards higher things, and in lower 
 things is well measured, so long can it never be the cause of 
 evil delight. But when it is warped towards evil, or when it 
 turns towards what is good either with more zeal than is befitting, 
 or with less, then it is that the thing created works against him 
 that created it. From this mayest thou understand that Love 
 must needs be in you the seed of every virtue, and also of every 
 action that deserves punishment. Now, since Love can never 
 turn his face away from the welfare of him who is the subject 
 of it, from hatred of self all beings are free. And since no being 
 can be conceived as separate or standing apart from the Primal 
 Being, therefore from hatred of God all affections are shut off. 
 It remains, if rightly I measure my argument, that evil that is 
 loved is the evil of our fellow-man, and on your miry earth this 
 perverted love grows in three ways. [Note this very important 
 admission made by Dante. The sphere of wrong-feeling and 
 wrong-doing is the social sphere. Self is excluded, God is ex- 
 cluded. To hate self, to hate God, are two things incompre- 
 hensible and inconceivable.] Some there are who hope for 
 excellence by subduing their fellow-man, and for this reason 
 solely thirst to bring him down from his high seat; [/.<?. not 
 because they wish ill to their neighbour, but because they wish 
 power for themselves. That is the taint of Pride.] Some there 
 are to whom it seems as though power, grace, honour, fame 
 would be lost if another rose to a higher place, whereat they 
 grieve so that they long for his downfall; [the taint of Envy.] 
 And some there are that for wrong done them are so eaten by 
 shame that they make themselves gluttonous of vengeance ; such 
 a one must needs be eager for another's ill. Such is the love of 
 evil in its three forms; and for this penitence is done in the 
 circles of the mountain which lie beneath us. Now, I would 
 have thee understand the other kind of love, which tends towards 
 good, but in distorted ways. Each one of us darkly apprehends 
 some good in which the soul may find rest, and this he desires ; 
 this, therefore, each one strives to reach. If his love be sluggish 
 either in seeing it or in striving after it, on this fourth circle, if 
 
 H
 
 98 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 he have duly repented, penitence is done. Other good there is 
 which makes not man blessed. Blessedness it is not, it is not 
 the essential good, fruit and root of all other blessings. The love 
 that yields itself to these things too strongly is bewailed in the 
 three circles that yet lie above us : how it is divided between 
 them, I say not as yet, in order that of thyself thou mayest see 
 the matter." 
 
 These three circles were those given to avarice, 
 gluttony, including, of course, drunkenness, and lust. 
 
 Here, then, we have the scheme of Dante's Purgatory, 
 turning entirely upon some one of the perversions of Love. 
 Love of evil inflicted on our fellow-men, in Pride, in Envy, 
 in revengeful anger ; love of inferior good pushed too far, 
 taking one of the three forms of Avarice, Gluttony, or 
 Lust : and midway between these two groups we have 
 the sin of Accidia, love of the highest things grown 
 luke-warm, torpid, and cold. 
 
 I think this whole conception of Dante is full of the 
 deepest meaning. And without further comment on it 
 at present, I will call attention to this remarkable doctrine 
 of Accidia, slothfulness in high aspirations, as one of the 
 seven sins to be purged with purgatorial suffering, as 
 marking perhaps more sharply and decidedly than any 
 other thought to me, the new departure brought by the 
 Catholic Church into the Western world. I search the 
 writings of the great teachers of humanity, what remains 
 of the old theocratic teaching newly unburied from 
 Egyptian tombs and unravelled from Assyrian tablets. 
 I read the books that Confucius rescued from times long 
 before his time, and his own teaching as faithfully re- 
 corded by his disciples. I gather up the golden dust 
 of Pythagoras, and listen to Socrates as he talked to 
 philosophers like Plato, or to plain men of the world
 
 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 99 
 
 like Xenophon ; and in the works and words of all 
 these men I find incitement to duty, to discipline, to 
 forbearance, to courage, and to resignation. But not the 
 fervour of Love : not the enthusiasm of Humanity : not 
 the passion of Sacrifice. These other things lie at the 
 very root of the tree of life. That tree can bear no 
 noble fruit without them. There came a time when the 
 Christian Church took to disregarding them, when it could 
 allow such doctrine to be put forward as we see officially 
 recorded in the most authoritative way in the thirteenth 
 article of the Church of England namely, that works 
 done before the grace of Christ and the inspiration of 
 His Spirit are not pleasant to God . . . "yea rather, for 
 that they are not done as God hath willed and com- 
 manded them to be done, we doubt not but they have 
 the nature of sin." When the Christian Church sank into 
 a depth of bedimmed folly such as that, nothing remained 
 but such vehement onslaughts as Voltaire and his friends 
 hurled upon it. But it was not always so. It was not 
 so with Dante. In his wonderful vision of the procession 
 of the Church depicted as a triumphal car with Beatrice 
 as the impersonation of the true faith seated therein, four 
 maidens are described as dancing on the left ; three on 
 the right. The first are the four virtues commonly known 
 as Cardinal Wisdom, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance. 
 These are the Romano-Greek or pre-Christian virtues. 
 And the three on the right are the virtues commonly 
 called Christian Faith, Hope, Love ; " and the greatest 
 of these is Love." It is Dante's broad and deep con- 
 ception of Christianity, I would rather say of the Christian 
 Church, not as something wholly separate from the 
 ancestry of Greece and Rome, but as something built 
 upon the foundation of Greece and Rome, which raises
 
 ioo ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 him so far above other Christian writers either before or 
 after him. 
 
 I repeat then that infinite light is thrown upon the 
 word Love in the highest sense of the word, the sense in 
 which Plato did not use it, but in which St. Paul and St. 
 Francis and Auguste Comte did use it by this picture 
 in Dante of the fourth circle of his Purgatory in which 
 penance is done for Love grown cold. In each circle of 
 the Purgatory as many of you know, voices are heard and 
 images are seen which symbolize the special virtue and 
 the lapse from it. The spirits that are purifying them- 
 selves from the sin of slothful and lukewarm Love are 
 depicted as running eagerly to and fro lest time be lost 
 And as they go the voices cry. " It was in haste," they cry, 
 " that Mary fled to the mountains." And again the 
 miraculous energy of Julius Caesar is spoken of: especially 
 his energy after the battle of Pharsalia which seems to 
 have struck Dante's imagination peculiarly, as he recurs 
 to it again in the " Paradise." The voice cries, " Caesar to 
 subdue the African rebel, struck first at Marseilles, and 
 then rushed through Spain." No mystical quietism here, 
 you perceive ; no inert contemplation as of a hermit in the 
 desert, or Stylites on his pillar but highest ideal of 
 Desire followed with fierce energy. 
 
 And again, see this infirmity of slothful fulfilment of an 
 Ideal carried to the point of utterly hopeless stagnation 
 and apathetic despair, in the well-known passage of the 
 Inferno. When Dante has passed through the hopeless 
 gates of Hell, but before he has begun to sound its depths 
 his ears are bedinned by discordant cries and hideous 
 voices, shrill and hoarse ; and at last in the gloom he 
 discerns vast troops of naked forms, stung by gnats and 
 wasps, flitting aimlessly over the miry soil. And Virgil
 
 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 101 
 
 tells him that these are the wretched souls that in their life 
 on earth deserved neither blame nor praise. They are 
 mingled with that caitiff crew of angels who neither joined 
 the rebels nor yet stood faithful to God, but were for them- 
 selves. Heaven drove them forth not to be defiled by 
 their presence ; nor yet will deep Hell receive them, lest 
 her guilty ones should seem honourable by their side. 
 They mourn because they cannot die, nor hope to die : and 
 their blind life is so vile and low that they envy every 
 other lot. " They never were alive," he says again ; " they 
 are hateful to God and to the enemies of God ; speak not 
 of them any more ; look, and pass on." One only of this 
 miserable multitude is singled out, and even he is not 
 named ; but simply mentioned as the man who through 
 cowardice made the great abdication. There is little doubt 
 who is meant here. It was Pope Celestine V., a monk of 
 blameless life, the sort of man whom many would have 
 called a saint. He shrank from the strife, and abdicated 
 his office. The ambitious Boniface VIII. whom Dante 
 regarded as the traitor to whom the downfall of the 
 Catholic Church was due, rilled his place. Not because 
 Celestine was unambitious and desirous of leading a life 
 of piety and prayer, not for this is he blamed ; but because, 
 being placed by God and the Church in a post where he 
 was the sole bulwark against the Church's worst enemy, he 
 betrayed his trust, and deserted his post, for this it is that 
 he is withered by Dante's scorching scorn. 
 
 Now Love in this Christian or Dantean sense of the 
 word, this fervid striving after the Ideal, was something new 
 in the Western world. It came with the Catholic Church ; 
 and if I seek to trace its origin to the furthest point at which 
 it becomes visible, I have to go back to the prophets of 
 Judaea, who rose up so mysteriously in a little corner of
 
 102 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 the Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries 
 before Christ, to make their protest against a dull 
 mechanical and most unpromising ritual that only served 
 as a cloke for organized hypocrisy and corruption, and to 
 proclaim by word and deed their hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness. As a man may take dust and ashes and trans- 
 mute them in a fiery furnace to translucent crystal, so did 
 those men transmute their pitiful tribal god Jahvdh, the god 
 revelling in the smoke and the fat of roasted cattle, into the 
 God of purifying fire, hating iniquity, and loving mercy. 
 In Amos, the herdsman of Tekoa, in Hosea, the son of 
 Been, in the first and the second Isaiah, and in the name- 
 less singers that followed them in later centuries, that were 
 well content to let their mystical poems pass under the 
 name of David, the wild fierce chieftain who centuries 
 before had raised them from a tribe into a nation, in the 
 long succession of these remarkable men, ending with John 
 Baptist and Jesus of Nazara, I find something new, the 
 seed of a new growth, a new moral species so to speak, 
 unknown to Confucius, Pythagoras and Aristotle ; I find, 
 that is to say, not merely what Greek thinkers had taught 
 and Roman heroes practised, the stern determination to do 
 a man's duty, cost what it might, I find beside that the 
 fiery glow, the zeal for sacrifice, the craving thirst for 
 justice, which inspired the great Roman citizen of Tarsus, 
 which kept alive the practical energies of St. Benedict, St. 
 Bernard, St. Francis, and a countless roll of mediaeval 
 saints. It passed from them onward to modern heroes 
 who cared little or nothing and often far less than nothing 
 for the dogmas which the saints had held so dear. It 
 sustained the courage of Giordano Bruno at the stake, it 
 roused the splendid genius of Voltaire to redeem the 
 name and defend the family of Calas. It animated the
 
 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 103 
 
 unhappy yet noble aspirations of Russian nihilists, and 
 forced forth the cry of Vive FHumanite from Milliere's 
 dying lips.* 
 
 I think it very likely that those here present who have 
 either left the Christian Church, or who have never 
 belonged to it, and probably most of us belong either to 
 one or the other of these two classes, may have been 
 thinking that I am taking an exaggerated view of what is 
 due to Christianity, and that I am falling back into the old 
 way of regarding it as something unique, standing alone, 
 insurpassable, the central point in the world's history to- 
 wards which the future and the past alike converge. This, 
 however, is not my innermost feeling, is not at all what I 
 mean to convey. What we commonly call Christian 
 feeling, the Christian spirit, that which distinguishes the 
 Western world from the African and the Asiatic world, 
 is the result of a very large and complex assemblage of 
 influences, of which the whole series of Roman and Greek 
 traditions form the largest part. Roman patriotism enters 
 into it, Greek thought and imagination enter into it : the 
 temper of our ancestors in the physiological sense of the 
 word, the Celtic races, and the Teutons and the Norsemen 
 who followed them, counts also for something : but in 
 science, in art, in law, in social intercourse we are essen- 
 tially the children of the old Romans penetrated with Greek 
 culture during the centuries of the Empire. But while 
 admitting all this to the full, and zealous as I am that it 
 should be dwelt upon far more emphatically than it has ever 
 been dwelt on hitherto, yet it would be stone blindness to 
 ignore the remaining element without which neither the 
 Mahommedan nor the Christian world would be what it is. 
 
 * A French republican, executed after the fall of the Commune, 
 May, 1871.
 
 104 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 This mighty fabric of Romano-Greek civilization eighteen 
 centuries ago was pierced through and through, as by a 
 stream of continuous lightning, by the passionate fervour 
 of the Hebrew prophets, from Isaiah and Amos, and the 
 long chain of mystics who wrote the Psalms, to the Baptist 
 and the Jew of Nazareth ; the man who established the 
 contact between the Roman world and this electric stream, 
 being the Jew-Roman, Saul of Tarsus, the founder of the 
 Catholic Church. 
 
 We are so much in the middle of the tremendous 
 evolution, the greatest that can ever take place in the life 
 of man on this planet, involved in the transition from 
 supernatural to human religion, that, in judging of the last 
 phase of the old faith that in which we, most of us, have 
 been brought up, against which many of us revolted, and 
 then again which we found it hard to quit that very few, 
 perhaps none of us, are capable of holding the balance 
 fairly. I know hardly any of Comte's disciples for I 
 make no pretension to except myself who seem to me to 
 do so ; and I have to go back to Auguste Comte himself, 
 who always maintained that the Catholic defenders of 
 Catholicism had themselves fallen far short of the truth in 
 their appreciation of its services to mankind in the time 
 of its full vigour ; and who, while unsparingly denouncing 
 the hypocrites who played on superstitious prejudice for 
 selfish purposes, yet believed that the fragments of the old 
 faith still subsisting would long continue to give useful 
 shelter to those who were not in the front lines of human 
 progress, and yet further, to give to those who were in 
 those front ranks many a useful lesson for the building up 
 of the Church of the Future. 
 
 Do not let it be supposed that in speaking of the 
 Hebrew prophets and psalmists from Isaiah to Jesus, as
 
 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 105 
 
 something unique, exceptional, standing alone, I am there- 
 fore making any concession to the theological view of 
 human destiny which measures the course of events by 
 their nearness to or distance from the birth of Christ, 
 instead of looking forward to continuous progress. I 
 believe Judaism, or rather the Jewish prophets of the best 
 period, to be in some ways quite unique, unapproachable. 
 But then all the greatest things in the world seem to me 
 unique. The sculptures of Phidias and those about him 
 are unique. The poems of that extraordinary minstrel 
 whom we call Homer are unique. No other ballad- 
 maker before him or since has moulded the faith and 
 the ethics of a nation, and left his stamp on the forms 
 of artistic creation in all nations for tens of centuries. 
 Roman conquest, government, and law, as represented 
 by Scipio, Caesar, and Trajan, are unique also. Dante 
 is unique. Why, then, should we care to deny that the 
 fervid zeal for righteousness which kindled the lips of 
 Hebrew prophet and psalmist was, like Greek art and 
 Roman law, a new influence in the world, and like 
 them will abide, though under new forms, in the world 
 for ever ? 
 
 Having thus pointed out the part of Love, in 
 the Christian acceptation of the word, an influence 
 which, as Dante throughout his great poem sorrowfully 
 acknowledges, was unknown and unshared by Greek 
 thinker or Roman hero, we have now to ask in 
 what sense the Positivist uses the words, "Love is our 
 Principle." 
 
 Let us recall the various meanings of the word 
 Positive. They are seven in number seven notes of 
 Positivity real, useful, certain, precise, organic, relative, 
 sympatJietic. For a doctrine to be positive it must deal
 
 106 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 with real things ; it must deal with them in a useful way : 
 it must say true things about them ; it must present those 
 truths in a precise, definite shape : it must regard them 
 as parts of a whole, helping to build up a general faith as 
 deep and wide as human life itself: that means it must 
 be organic, constructive. It must not pretend to state the 
 truth absolutely : it must be capable of extension, of 
 growth, expanding as time goes on, and circumstances 
 change: that is to say, it must be relative. Finally, it 
 must appeal directly or indirectly to the hearts of men as 
 well as their heads. It must be capable of letting the 
 flame of enthusiasm play round about it : it must be sym- 
 pathetic. Those who know how Comte conceived of the 
 most abstract truths of mathematics, how his great disciple 
 Pierre Laffitte still teaches them, know that there does not 
 exist a truth in the whole range of Positive Science from 
 arithmetic upwards in which the teacher really worthy of 
 his subject cannot and will not transform it, infuse the 
 breath of life into it, and make the dry bones live, by an 
 appeal to human sympathies. Who, for instance, would 
 not be readier to understand and to retain the great 
 discovery of Archimedes that the sphere was two-thirds 
 of the cylinder of the same diameter and height, by the 
 recollection that it was engraved by his own desire on his 
 tomb, that tomb which two centuries afterwards a certain 
 highly cultivated Roman commissioner, Marcus Tullius 
 Cicero, found after long search, and reverently cleared 
 away the weeds that had overgrown it ? 
 
 Now, then, apply these sevenfold aspects of the word 
 to the matter in hand. Bear in mind what the problem 
 was which Auguste Comte set before him nearly seventy 
 years ago. Penetrated deeply with the two great intel- 
 lectual forces of our time the scientific spirit and the
 
 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 107 
 
 historical spirit with his moral nature glowing at every 
 pore with social sympathy, what he had to do was to 
 bring those three things into contact He knew, from 
 early training and from historical study, what Catholicism 
 had done to guide and control men's passions, from the 
 time of St. Paul to the time of St. Bernard. He saw why 
 Catholicism had failed : why the French Revolution had 
 failed. The first had had a coherent doctrine which had 
 decayed, the second had never had a coherent doctrine at 
 all. If any new method of controlling the aberrations of 
 passion was to arise, if the nobler forms of Love were ever 
 again to assert their supremacy over the lower forms, 
 whether natural or perverted, that method must be real, 
 useful, certain, definite, organic, relative, and sympathetic. 
 In other words, it must be positive. Observe that in all 
 this Comte stood utterly alone. Others before him had 
 tried more or less successfully to bring science into touch 
 with Politics. But none before him, and, so far, none after 
 him, have brought it into touch with a problem far deeper 
 and more intricate than the problems commonly called 
 political : the problem which the Catholic Church has 
 regarded as exclusively her own, of governing the passions 
 of the heart. 
 
 Let us test the result 
 
 Is the love of which Positivism speaks, Real? The 
 love of which Positivism speaks is simply that of which 
 all the world speaks, has spoken, and will speak till the 
 end of Time. The love that in one or other of its forms, 
 noble or perverted, fills the pages of every dramatist, 
 every poet, every novelist ; and does so because of the 
 part it plays in human life which these artists are striving 
 to portray more or less successfully. Read Cook's 
 Voyages, or the record of any other unsophisticated
 
 io8 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 tribe ; read the newspaper diaries of our police courts, 
 scratch the surface of civilization at any moment of its 
 long history, you find everywhere the seething cauldron of 
 human passions noble or ignoble, the passion called, in 
 the more special sense of the word, Love, not the least 
 prominent among them. It is not a product of civiliza- 
 tion : not peculiar to the human race : you find low down 
 in the scale of animal life the raw material of all these 
 passions : the passion that unites the sexes, the passion 
 that drives the mother to sacrifice herself for her young : 
 some rudiments you find also of the wider social instinct 
 that brings tribes together and creates nations. Love 
 then is real: some have said there is no other reality 
 in the world. 
 
 Is it useful? We may leave the Darwinians to answer 
 this. Long before Darwin's book appeared Comte had 
 spoken in detail of the immense advantage enjoyed by 
 the social races in the struggle for supremacy. So great 
 is this that among insects many of the solitary species 
 having outward covering similar to those of bees and 
 wasps, are believed by naturalists to profit by this 
 resemblance, and to survive by virtue of being mistaken 
 for their social neighbours. Throughout the whole history 
 of civilization the tribe that has the greatest fund of 
 comradeship, of loyalty, of patriotism, will have the 
 advantage over rival tribes where there is less of this 
 moral cement. On the utility of human Love I need not 
 enlarge. 
 
 Is the Positive doctrine as to Love certain : admitting 
 Love to be the most potent of real facts, is Positive 
 teaching with regard to it true ? That is too long a 
 question to answer here and now. We are concerned 
 to-night with one sole aspect of the matter, namely that
 
 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 109 
 
 affection, purified or unpurified, narrow or wide, is the 
 principle of action. Intellect is not the principle of action. 
 The Intellect is, has been, always must be, subordinate to 
 the Heart. The Intellect, as Aristotle long ago said, is 
 not a motive force. The Heart is. As to the different 
 kinds of affection, as to the subordination of the lower 
 kinds to the higher, not crushing the lower, but elevating 
 and strengthening the higher as to all this Positivism 
 must be left to speak for itself. I believe its teaching on 
 this matter to be certain. 
 
 Is it precise^ definite ? Contrast it with the teaching of 
 the theologian. In the Church Catechism, the child is 
 taught, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
 Heart." How well I remember the sense of dreary, 
 unutterable vagueness with which these words filled me 
 as a child ! How could I love a Being invisible, incompre- 
 hensible, infinitely wise, infinitely powerful, infinitely just, 
 and good ? Children strive and strain at this, and try to 
 persuade themselves that they succeed : but they fail, and 
 know that they fail. Whereas how clear and definite by 
 comparison, that is to say how positive, was the second table 
 of the Law. Thou shalt honour thy father and mother : thou 
 shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour : thou 
 shalt not covet : thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 
 I need not stop to say that in the old theocracies, as in the 
 old Fetichism, as in the old Polytheism, and in the Catholic 
 Church, Positive truth underlies the surface everywhere. 
 Positive truth was not invented, as some seem to suppose, 
 by Auguste Comte. It is just as old as Humanity herself : 
 only it is ever growing. 
 
 But the teaching of Auguste Comte goes much farther 
 in preciseness than the teaching of the old theocracies. 
 We are sometimes told by our critics that the word
 
 I io ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 Humanity is as vague as the old word God. And so it is, 
 if used in the superstitious way in which some disciples 
 of Auguste Comte (very mistaken disciples, as I think) 
 have used it. There have been invocations to Humanity 
 as a great power which read just like one of the Collects 
 out of the Prayer-book, with the word " God" left out, and 
 the word " Humanity " put in. This reminds me of the way 
 in which Gall's wonderful researches on the brain and 
 observations of living animals have been travestied by his 
 disciples under the title of phrenology, so that for half 
 a century Gall's name became a reproach in the ears of 
 most scientific men. With these invocations to Humanity 
 we here have nothing to do. This is not Comte's way of 
 looking at the matter. We do not mount all of a sudden 
 to this notion of Humanity. The child begins, as the race 
 began, with the simplest element of the collective organism, 
 the Family. We say Live for Others, the Family, the 
 Country, Humanity. Between the Family and the Country 
 there come many intermediate ties the neighbourhood, 
 the village, the county, the province. The Scotchman holds 
 his local patriotism untouched by his British patriotism. 
 So does the Welshman : so one day will the Irishman. 
 Again between the Country and Humanity there are 
 intermediate ties. There is for us in Europe, and the two 
 Americas, the common bond of Western civilization and 
 the Catholic Church. So that the Positive conception of 
 Humanity is extremely definite. It is the widest of a 
 series of concentric circles, of which the love of those 
 nearest and dearest to us is the central point. Bare 
 Cosmopolitanism is utterly alien to us. Citizens of the 
 world we are, but first we would be good citizens of our 
 state ; and before that we strive to be true to the 
 instincts and the sacred traditions of home. I say, then,
 
 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE in 
 
 that the Love of Humanity has the fourth Positive note : 
 the note of precision. 
 
 What shall we say of the last three of the seven notes ? 
 Is it not organic ? It is no vague mawkish sentimentality 
 of which I have been speaking to-night. I claim for the 
 Positive conception of Love that it is something solid, 
 substantial, fit to build upon : or rather, to change my 
 metaphor slightly, it is something to build with : it is the 
 moral cement which holds together a mighty fabric. We 
 want other things besides Love in our life : we want 
 Light, we want Energy. Light for Order; Energy for 
 Progress : but Love is the starting-point. The Positivist 
 doctrine as to Love is therefore organic : it is edifying : 
 it helps to build up. 
 
 Again, our teaching is Relative : i.e. it holds out no 
 pretence to absolute perfection. This is so in the case of 
 the Family; parents, children, wife, husband, brother, 
 sister, are loved and honoured without the slightest illusion 
 as to their being blameless. 
 
 It is so in the case of the State. Those who love their 
 country best are often those who are most keenly alive to 
 their country's faults : most unsparing in denouncing them. 
 No one doubts Dante's love for Florence : yet how bitter 
 are the onslaughts on her shortcomings throughout his 
 poem. 
 
 Finally, it is so with Humanity. As with the Family, 
 as with the State, so with the highest object of our 
 reverence, Humanity the assemblage of all lives, both in 
 the past, present and future, who have in any way 
 contributed towards the Service of Man. There is no 
 absolute perfection here. This is no bar to our reverence 
 and Love. Here, as in every other department of Positive 
 thought, our teaching is Relative not Absolute.
 
 ii2 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 We come lastly to the final note of Positive doctrine ; 
 it is instinct in every part of it with human sympathy. 
 We have been dealing to-night with the central point 
 of the Positive Synthesis, which is sympathy itself, 
 sympathy with the past and future destiny of Man. 
 Round this central point all the other truths which we 
 care to know range themselves in natural order. All the 
 artistic creations, all the scientific discoveries in the last 
 three thousand years are for us so many facts in the life of 
 Humanity. It is impossible to avoid contrasting our way 
 of looking at Life and the world with that known as the 
 Evolution - philosophy. In one sense Positivist and 
 Spencerian are alike Evolutionist. We believe in no 
 miraculous vicissitudes ; evolution, as Comte said long 
 before Darwin or Spencer began to write, has finally and 
 for ever taken the place of creation. But the difference is 
 this : and it is a very vital one. We make no pretence to 
 know the evolution of the Universe, we care only to 
 know the Universe in its relation to Man. Note this also. 
 To the Darwinian the history of life on this planet is the 
 history of internecine war, of eternal hate. Love for the 
 Darwinian evolutionist is a sort of happy accident, which 
 gave some advantage in the struggle for existence to those 
 families and tribes who first acquired it. This is their 
 hypothesis, one which from its nature is utterly impossible 
 to prove or disprove : for no man will ever enter into those 
 inscrutable abysses of time when Love is first found. In 
 such obscurity we for our part prefer to trust rather to the 
 imagination of the poet than to the unstable and un- 
 demonstrable conjectures of the Savant ; to trust rather to 
 the beautiful inspirations of Shelley's Prometheus than 
 to a crude application of Malthusianism as a complete and 
 sufficient explanation of facts of which we have not, and
 
 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 113 
 
 never can have any direct knowledge ; we accept the 
 sublimer conception of Comte's latest work, that the 
 principle of Love has been ever in the world, brought 
 through much painful struggle to become incarnate in the 
 latest birth of Time, Humanity.
 
 V 
 
 SOME GUIDING PRINCIPLES IN THE 
 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY* 
 
 MY purpose in introducing this subject is not that I should 
 bring it before you as a set of complete dogmas ; on the 
 contrary, I wish to bring it before this Society as an object 
 of study, for which there is a mass, not merely of detailed 
 information, but of principles which are not yet fully 
 worked out, and which will progress exactly in the same 
 way as those of the other sciences, physical or biological, 
 in the course of the next hundred or two hundred years. 
 I use the expression "Philosophy of History" as the 
 equivalent of the expression social dynamic, as opposed to 
 social static. And I begin, for the sake of clearness, by 
 quoting Stuart Mill's definition of these two branches of 
 research, as given in the tenth chapter of the sixth book of 
 his System of Logic (p. 501, 3rd ed.) " Social dynamics 
 is the theory of society considered in a state of progressive 
 movement, while social statics is the theory of the con- 
 sensus .... as existing among the different parts of the 
 social organism ; in other words, the theory of the mutual 
 actions and reactions of contemporaneous social pheno- 
 mena ; making provisionally, as far as possible, abstraction 
 
 * A lecture delivered to the Sociological Society, May, 1905. 
 Reprinted from Sociological Papers, vol. ii., by kind permission 
 of the Council of the Sociological Society. 
 
 114
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 115 
 
 for scientific purposes of the fundamental movement which 
 is at all times gradually modifying the whole of them." 
 
 Though for the purposes of abstract theory these two 
 aspects of sociology must be looked at separately, yet they 
 have in practice to be used in combination. " We have to 
 combine," I again quote from Mill, "the statical view of 
 social phenomena with the dynamical, considering not only 
 the progressive changes of the different elements, but the 
 contemporaneous condition of each, and thus obtain 
 empirically the law of correspondence not only between 
 the simultaneous states, but between the simultaneous 
 changes of those elements." 
 
 He thus proceeds to point out that we are much helped 
 in this difficult process of observation and comparison by 
 the fact that there is one element in the complex existence 
 of social man pre-eminent over all others as the prime 
 agent of the social movements. That element is the state 
 of the speculative faculties of mankind, including their 
 beliefs concerning themselves and the world by which they 
 are surrounded. To speak of man's speculative faculties 
 as the most influential agent of social movement seems at 
 first sight a paradox. Of all the functions of the brain, 
 the intellectual functions are intrinsically the feeblest. 
 Speculative processes appear to hold a very secondary 
 place in the lives of the mass of mankind. Affections, 
 practical activities, fill a far larger place in each man's 
 individual life ; are more continuous and more strenuous. 
 Yet the paradox is soon resolved. Though men may not 
 desire knowledge yet they desire the gain, fame, comfort 
 and power which knowledge may bring. And passing 
 from individual to collective life, the case is much stronger. 
 Men are united by common convictions and beliefs. 
 Thinking together, they act together ; acting together, they
 
 116 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 are stirred by the same emotions. The word of command 
 issuing from a single source spreads from general to officer, 
 from officer to men ; and thus determines the explosion of 
 gigantic social forces. So it is that in a philosophy of 
 history we have to consider, first of all, the changes in the 
 opinions and modes of thinking of society. 
 
 Mill admits, of course, as every one must admit, that 
 the speculative element does not stand alone as the 
 initiator of social change. There is action and reaction. 
 But on the whole, at each successive period, he thinks it 
 may be shown that the social change was mainly an 
 emanation, not from the practical life of the period, but 
 from the previous state of belief and thought. The 
 order of human progression in all respects will mainly, 
 or at least very largely, depend on the order of pro- 
 gression in the intellectual convictions of mankind, that 
 is on the law of the successive transformations of human 
 opinion. 
 
 Supposing this to be granted, the question remains : 
 Can this law be determined ? 
 
 Mill gives a qualified approval to Comte's well-known 
 law of the stages through which all our conceptions tend 
 to pass ; observing that it has that "high degree of scien- 
 tific evidence which is derived from the concurrence of the 
 indications of history with the probabilities derived from 
 the constitution of the human mind." He further remarks 
 that it sheds a flood of light upon the whole course of 
 history, by connecting these three states, and the modifi- 
 cations of each of them with the correlative condition of 
 the social phenomena. Briefly stated, the law is that 
 man's views of the world in which he lives begin with 
 anthropomorphic fictions and end with scientific laws; 
 begin with explanations of external nature, or of such
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 117 
 
 parts of it as interest him, based on attribution to it of the 
 passions and affections of which he is conscious within 
 himself, and end ultimately by studying the natural order 
 according to which the processes of the world go on. Of 
 the various intermediate stages of this evolution we need 
 not speak at present. Nor need we discuss whether the 
 first insight into this law was due to Vico, to Hume, or to 
 Turgot. It is enough that overwhelming evidence has 
 been accumulating in its favour since the time when Mill 
 wrote of it. 
 
 I have spoken of the distinction between social static 
 and social dynamic. We must bear in mind that the 
 second, though it has to be looked at and studied 
 separately, is yet entirely dependent on the first. Progress 
 is the development of order. Each of these two depart- 
 ments of the science brings into prominence special 
 methods of its own. Much has been said of the importance 
 of classification as a method of sociological research. Our 
 secretary has already called attention to an important 
 paper by Steinmetz in the third volume of Durkheim's 
 Annte Sociologique, in which many systems of classifying 
 human societies are set forth. The vast subject of anthro- 
 pology, for instance, restricting this word in accordance 
 with present usage to the study of primitive man, can but 
 be studied in this way. Such classification, proceeding on 
 the plan of grouping objects according to their natural 
 affinities, is like that of the botanist or zoologist, in two, or 
 indeed three dimensions. 
 
 I allude to it only for the purpose of emphasizing the 
 point that social dynamic the philosophy of history 
 studying filiation ; that is to say, the mode in which each 
 generation follows from the preceding has to follow a 
 somewhat different course. Studying continuity, we have
 
 ii8 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 to limit ourselves to the field where a continuous historic 
 record is to be found. 
 
 At first sight it might seem that there were several 
 such fields, and that much might be gained by comparing 
 them. There is the history of India, the history of China, 
 the history of Egypt, of Babylon and Assyria ; these last 
 now in the very act of revelation by the researches of the 
 last half- century. No member of a sociological society 
 can seek to underestimate the far-reaching significance of 
 these and similar researches. As affecting our judgment 
 of the initial stages of historical evolution, they are of the 
 greatest moment. Nevertheless, to the problem imme- 
 diately before us, the study of social continuity, they can 
 only be of subsidiary importance. For in these cases 
 either there are vast breaks in the record ; or else from 
 various causes, some assignable source at present unknown, 
 the development has been arrested ; or if not arrested, has 
 been so slow that the stage reached is not comparable with 
 the most advanced stages of Western civilization. This 
 last case is well illustrated by China. 
 
 Our principal attention, I do not say as sociologists, 
 but as students of that department of sociology entitled 
 Philosophy of History, has thus to be concentrated on the 
 recorded history of Western civilization during the past 
 twenty-five centuries. We have to trace the line of this 
 civilization in direct descent, the ortliogenic line to employ 
 a word of which our chairman has made admirable use. We 
 may follow that line downwards in the order of time, from 
 older to more recent ; or, on the other hand, beginning 
 with what we know best, our own time, and analyzing its 
 elements, we may trace them upwards so far as may be 
 possible. Both processes will be necessary. But in either 
 case our first endeavour must be to grasp the series as a
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 119 
 
 whole, or so large a portion of it as we may; postponing 
 for the present minute examination of the parts. This 
 seems to most historians a paradox, and a very distasteful 
 paradox ; especially at the present time when division of 
 labour in all departments, and not least in historic studies, 
 has been carried farther than ever. It would ill become a 
 student of the philosophy of history to underrate historical 
 specialities. Nor is it needful to enlarge on the exceedingly 
 obvious truism that without history there can be no 
 philosophy of history. History needs no defence. Apart 
 from philosophy of any kind, the dramatic splendour of the 
 record, the clash of vivid personalities, the tragedy of 
 human life that it unfolds will always carry history far 
 beyond the need of apologists. It has been the source of 
 the best poetry in the past. It will give rise to yet nobler 
 poetry in the future. 
 
 But to return to our graver theme. Without deprecia- 
 ting specialities, it may be pointed out that there is room 
 for a new speciality in [the study of history, which is to 
 bring the specialities together, and range them, so far as 
 this can be done, in a continuous sequence. It is as 
 though a geographer should turn to the globe, instead of 
 discussing the map of any particular country. When 
 Eratosthenes of Alexandria was studying the spherical 
 nature of the earth, and all that followed from it, he 
 would not have been helped much by a student of geo- 
 graphy who offered information as to mountain ranges 
 and river valleys. For his purpose a mountain range was 
 a negligible quantity that encumbered his thought ; yet 
 Eratosthenes had no disregard for geography : he was one 
 of its principal founders. 
 
 Let us take a provisional glance at this historical 
 series, as I am now conceiving it. Beginning then with
 
 120 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 our own era, we trace it back through Revolution, through 
 Reformation, through feudal institutions, barbarian inva- 
 sions, Roman conquests, to a time antecedent to the Greek 
 communities of the Mediterranean coasts, when rival 
 theocratic monarchies, Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, came 
 into hostile conflict. Passing beyond these, we come to 
 social states more or less akin to the barbaric or savage 
 communities of our own time as we see them in Africa or 
 Australasia. What we gain from this first rapid glance is 
 this : we find initial stages common to a great number of 
 communities, the state known roughly as fetichism, 
 common to all. We find some form of theocratic civiliza- 
 tion, a government of kings or priests, or of both, shared by 
 very many. From this common stock issues a stream, 
 peculiar to Western Europe, which we may speak of as 
 the stream of modem civilization, beginning with the 
 Greeks, continuing with the Romans, prolonged through 
 the middle ages to our own times ; ever growing wider 
 and deeper, and tending, as we now see, to embrace the 
 whole planet 
 
 Now it has been objected to this view of the subject 
 that since Western civilization, as presented in the history 
 of the last two millenniums, is one and not many, it cannot 
 form the subject of scientific investigation. Science seeks 
 for unity in the midst of variety, endeavours to grasp 
 general facts as a means of colligating special facts. 
 " Comte," it has been said (I quote from Messrs. Durkheim 
 and Fauconnet's paper in the first volume of our Trans- 
 actions), "did not admit a plurality of social types. 
 According to him, there existed only a single society, 
 that is human association considered generally ; and the 
 particular states merely represent the different moments 
 in the history of the single society. Sociology thus
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 121 
 
 occupied a strange position among the sciences, since it 
 had for its subject a being unique of its kind." 
 
 Let us admit at once that the objection, so far as it 
 goes, is valid. Western civilization, taken as a whole, is 
 a unique phenomenon. It took place once, it will not, so 
 far as we can foresee, be repeated. Yet, even so, it 
 presents itself to us as a series of sixty or seventy genera- 
 tions, each term being in strict affiliation to the term 
 preceding. It is at least conceivable that the law of this 
 series may be discovered, that the final term towards 
 which it converges, may be assigned. In biology it is 
 possible to concentrate attention on a single organism, 
 and to compare the various stages of its life-history from 
 the earliest embryonic form to adolescence, adult life and 
 old age. Not more than this, but not less, need be 
 claimed for the history of Western civilization to entitle it 
 to be considered as the subject of scientific investigation. 
 The solar system was studied scientifically many centuries 
 before there was a suspicion of the existence of more solar 
 systems than one. 
 
 A very little consideration is enough to show that no 
 other mode of proceeding is really applicable to the matter 
 in hand. What in a word is the problem before us ? It 
 is to examine the process by which men have passed from 
 a social state guided by early forms of belief, fetichistic or 
 theological, to a state guided by modern forms of belief, 
 commonly spoken of as scientific or positive ; to see what 
 has remained stable, and what has been changed during 
 this transition ; how far the disturbances which have 
 occurred during the process were inevitable ; how far wise 
 intervention may modify them in the case of retarded 
 nations. 
 
 This being the special business before us, it would seem
 
 122 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 obvious that we must begin by directing attention to the 
 region where alone the phenomena which we are to 
 investigate are to be found : that is to say, the history of 
 those nations who have passed from primitive stages to 
 the most advanced stages. Whatever light may hereafter 
 be thrown on our problem by the study of nations like 
 India or China who have accomplished a smaller portion 
 of this advance, we cannot in the first instance take account 
 of these. Our attention must be focussed on the final 
 stage of progress, and on the connection of this final stage 
 with the first beginnings. The process of recorded history 
 of the most advanced nations is in fact the story of the 
 transition from theocracy to sociocracy ; that is to say, 
 from a social state in which men's lives were governed by 
 the will of superhuman agencies, whether these were 
 inseparable from visible material objects (fetichism), or 
 were unseen powers governing various departments of 
 nature (polytheism), to a state in which scientific inquiry 
 into the world and society laid bare the laws by obedience 
 to which man is at last rendered capable of modifying 
 human life. 
 
 We learn from social statics that there is a certain 
 harmony or consensus between the various aspects of the 
 social organism as seen in each stage of its evolution. 
 Side by side with the law of intellectual change, we have 
 to consider the law of practical change ; the transition 
 from the state in which war is the dominant occupation 
 of mankind to the final state of peaceful industry. The 
 large organized communities that we find established in 
 Egypt or West Asia, when recorded history begins, were 
 the result of long internecine war followed by conquest ; 
 that conquest being welded together by a highly developed 
 priesthood. The local and tribal gods were not uprooted ;
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 123 
 
 they were slowly effaced by the splendour of the god 
 of the victorious city. Marduk became the chief god of 
 Babylonia, not merely of Babylon ; Asshur the chief god 
 of the Assyrian power, not merely of Nineveh. So it is 
 that we are compelled to recognize that war, ending in 
 conquest and accompanied by slavery, has proved to be 
 one of the most potent engines of civilization. This brings 
 us face to face with one of the most fundamental and 
 characteristic features of dynamic sociology I mean its 
 relative character. To condemn war as a social curse in the 
 twentieth century after Christ, and to appreciate its immense 
 civilizing value in the twentieth century before Christ ; to 
 respect Julius Caesar and to condemn Napoleon, is an 
 elementary lesson in sociology which professed students of 
 the science have not always very well learnt. Here as 
 elsewhere we have to make it clear that relative does not 
 mean arbitrary. Change governed by caprice or chance is 
 one thing ; change in accordance with a fixed law is quite 
 another. Be this as it may, we shall make but little 
 progress in understanding history (and a philosophy of 
 history, as I understand it, means much the same thing as 
 understanding history) unless we realize that war, at a 
 certain stage of the world's history, was one of the chief 
 promoters of civilization. In its earliest and rudest forms 
 it was a school of character ; of courage, caution and 
 endurance ; when prosecuted on a larger scale, it became 
 a school of discipline and obedience. It kept every faculty 
 on the strain, it stimulated all the arts metallurgy, for 
 instance, the arts of constructing and besieging fortresses, 
 of wielding and applying mechanical forces. The anthro- 
 pologist will tell us that the bowstring was one of the first, 
 perhaps the very first of our musical instruments. But 
 above all there was the effect of war upon social life ; its
 
 124 ESSAYS IN POSIT1VIST DOCTRINE 
 
 potent stimulus to social cohesion. By war large groups 
 of men were brought to work together in harmonious 
 co-operation. 
 
 With war went slavery as its inevitable complement. 
 Here an even greater demand is made on our recognition 
 of the relative spirit, so essential to sociological judgment. 
 We have to let our minds dwell, not exclusively on the 
 state of free labour that ultimately succeeded to slavery, 
 but rather on the state of things that went before it, when 
 death and cannibalism awaited the vanquished. We have 
 to look on slavery as the necessary forerunner of free 
 industry, as the necessary training-school in which the 
 otherwise incurable indolence of the savage and his repug- 
 nance to continuous labour are finally overcome. We have 
 to look also at its alleviations at the share allotted to it, 
 often a large share, in the moral affections connected with 
 domestic life. For the slave was after all a member of the 
 family. 
 
 Yet another shade must be added to the picture. In 
 these primitive theocracies it was usually the case that 
 professions of all kinds were hereditary : the son followed 
 the calling of his father ; hence the establishment of caste. 
 The reasons for it were obvious enough, and their force 
 has by no means wholly disappeared. Apprenticeship, 
 whether in politics or in shoemaking, is by no means the 
 worst training in the practical pursuits of life. Every one 
 knows of medical families that have continued their pro- 
 fession for generations. In ancient days there was no 
 scientific teaching, and that for the best of reasons there 
 was no science. The arts of life had to be learnt by 
 practical apprenticeship or not at all. And as each art in 
 these ancient polytheisms was under the tutelage of a 
 special deity, jealous of any change as deities are apt to
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 125 
 
 be, it is easy to conceive that the institution of caste 
 became, if not irksome to the individual, a fatal bar to 
 wholesome social evolution. 
 
 Here then, in ancient theocracy, we have a social state 
 combining many institutions offensive to the modern mind 
 kings by divine right, priestly guilds regulating the 
 details of life, the whole system based on war, slavery, and 
 caste. To complete the picture, we must remember that 
 there was no separation, as was the case in our own middle 
 ages, between the kingly and the priestly power. This we 
 shall see to be a very fundamental point when we come to 
 the mediaeval transition. The ordinary view of Western 
 Catholicism is wholly vitiated by misunderstanding it. 
 At any rate, in this, ancient theocracies, church and state, 
 were in the strictest sense one and indivisible. 
 
 And yet with all their compressive and repressive 
 forces at work, we have to recognize that in these theocratic 
 polytheisms the foundations of the most precious of human 
 possessions, social morality, were laid down, maintained, 
 and carried forward to our own time. A hundred years 
 ago we knew little about them. We had read Herodotus 
 and the Hebrew Bible. We had seen pictures of Indian 
 and Egyptian temples ; we had listened for what they 
 were worth to Spanish stories of Mexican and Peruvian 
 monarchies. And this was nearly all. Now very large 
 portions of the veil have been lifted. Comte used to 
 lament the necessity of taking Moses as the sole historical 
 type of theocracy. It is but yesterday that we have learnt 
 of the great Babylonian theocrat Hammurabi, whose code 
 is far more elaborate, and far more accurately preserved, 
 than that of Moses, and much more than a thousand years 
 older. We have the Egyptian Book of the Dead, with the 
 trial of the Spirits in the Hall of Truth ; we have countless
 
 126 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 psalms of praise and psalms of penitence to Assyrian gods 
 and goddesses. Above all, India has at last become 
 intelligible to us. Postponing for the moment the question 
 as to how far, and at what period, the tribal god of Israel 
 began to supply signs of an exceptionally high moral 
 standard, no one can reject the evidence of affinity in 
 these older polytheistic religions in their glorification of 
 supreme power, in their cries for succour in distress, in 
 their recognition of justice and mercy with readings from 
 the Hebrew Bible which for many centuries have echoed 
 through our churches. 
 
 Whatever the merits of theocracy, it very obviously 
 did not solve the problem of reconciling personal freedom 
 with social cohesion. Not merely did theocracy not solve 
 the problem, but it became intolerably repressive of any 
 attempts to solve it To think freely, to disseminate any 
 knowledge that would lead to a change of customs, would 
 have been to invite the fate of Prometheus who stole fire 
 from heaven for the benefit of mankind. It may be that 
 some such thought as this lay in the heart of ^Eschylus 
 when he composed his mighty drama. 
 
 How was the ancient order to be made compatible 
 with progress while preserving what was essential to its 
 existence ? That was the problem presented to such a 
 man as Pythagoras, five hundred years before Christ. It 
 has remained the problem for the five-and-twenty centuries 
 that have followed. It is the essential problem for us at 
 the present time. The only difference is that its solution, 
 or some approach to it, becomes every day more urgent. 
 Modern history, if we look well into it, did not begin with 
 the Revolution, nor yet with the Reformation or the 
 Renaissance ; nor even with the rise of the Catholic 
 Church : it began with the Greeks.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 127 
 
 The initial steps of freedom and progress could hardly 
 be expected from the case-hardened and worn-out civili- 
 zations of Egypt, Assyria, or Babylonia. But it was 
 otherwise with smaller polytheistic communities, of whom 
 there were very many throughout the West Asiatic and 
 Mediterranean world. In these the theocratic condition, 
 the uncontested dominion of an organized state-priesthood, 
 had not been reached. They were, more or less, in the 
 stage of development which, as Indian scholars tell us, the 
 Aryan invaders had attained when they had occupied the 
 valleys of the Indus, and had not yet settled in the richer 
 regions of the Ganges and the Jumna. 
 
 It is easy to exaggerate the influence of climate, soil, 
 physical geography. Montesquieu and his followers have 
 done this ; so I venture to think have a more recent school 
 of sociologists, that of M. LePlay. On the other hand, it 
 is an equally mischievous error to ignore such influences, 
 and especially in the earlier stages of a nation's history. 
 We are not now considering the concrete case of any one 
 nation, but the abstract conditions under which the 
 emancipation of the Western world from theocratic fetters 
 took place. Take tribes at the state of evolution I have 
 spoken of, when the warrior caste was not yet dominated 
 by the priest caste, when the Rig-Vedas were spoken or 
 sung, and the other Vedic scriptures had not as yet been 
 elaborated, and plunge them into another kind of environ- 
 ment from that of Northern India regions of temperate 
 climate in which land and sea were intimately mixed 
 and you have at least many of the required conditions for 
 progressive polytheistic communities like those of the 
 Mediterranean coasts in the second millennium before the 
 Christian era. It would be easy to dilate on those physio- 
 graphic conditions in much greater detail, were this the
 
 128 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 time for doing so ; and to point out how the physical 
 structure of the Grecian mainland and coasts was adapted 
 to Greek history, that of Italy to the history of Rome. 
 Many writers on the philosophy of history have done this ; 
 Comte has done so in the 5 3rd chapter of his Positive 
 Philosophy with a warning, however, that in the present 
 state of our knowledge such speculations were perhaps 
 premature. I take this opportunity of advising students 
 of Comte to read this chapter, and indeed most other 
 chapters of the sociological part of his work in the original, 
 and not in Miss Martineau's very imperfect abbreviation. 
 
 In any case, the problem now before us is not the 
 explanation of the concrete facts of Greek and Roman 
 history, but to set forth, if we can, in a very general and 
 abstract way the conditions under which that unique thing, 
 Western Civilization, arose. I have already explained 
 that uniqueness is not necessarily a bar to scientific 
 treatment. 
 
 We begin modern history, as we have said, with the 
 Greeks and Romans. We pass, that is to say, from 
 theocratic polytheism to progressive or military polytheism. 
 The issue from the fetters of theocracy begins with com- 
 munities animated by nature worship and god-worship, 
 but not as yet hardened into sacerdotalism, with activities 
 stirred by warlike conflict in fact, resembling in very 
 many ways the Aryan invaders of India at the early 
 stages of their Indian life. We have to imagine such 
 communities placed in conditions favourable to change, 
 favourable to the predominance of the warrior caste over 
 the priestly, and yet not favourable to rapid and easy 
 conquest 
 
 We see two such communities, or rather groups of 
 communities, bearing evidence in language and beliefs of
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 129 
 
 some, though not complete, community of stock one 
 achieving astounding intellectual greatness, the other 
 accomplishing political results hardly less astounding, and 
 of equal, perhaps of even greater, importance. We see 
 Greek culture and Roman government intimately inter- 
 fused, and issuing in the establishment of a vast peaceful 
 empire based on slavery ; otherwise well governed, with 
 many centres of culture, extremely tolerant, fusing the 
 various polytheisms of the incorporated nations into a 
 common state-system. We see the meeting of Hebrew 
 prophets and Greek thinkers giving rise to a new spiritual 
 power, fundamentally differing from any that had appeared 
 before in that it was wholly disconnected from the state, 
 often hostile to it, always transcending its boundaries ; and 
 that it made its appeal to the inward emotions of men 
 rather than to their outward actions. We see the structure 
 of Roman empire threatened, and at last partially ruined, 
 by the invasion of barbaric races of very varying degrees 
 of social evolution. In the struggle between those that 
 had partially assimilated Roman civilization and inherited 
 ! ts traditions against those that were wholly alien to it, 
 the state of society called Catholic Feudalism arose. The 
 spiritualizing and moralizing influence of the Catholic 
 Hierarchy combined with the nobler characteristics of all 
 defensive war to generate a new type of character, of whom 
 Theodoric, Charlemagne, Alfred, the Cid, Godfrey, and 
 St. Louis may be taken as examples. Mediaeval Catholi- 
 cism measured its forces against the rival forces of Islam ; 
 with the result that an armed truce was established which 
 has lasted till the present day, with little hope of victory 
 to either side. Each hoped to become the universal 
 religion, and each failed. In the fourteenth century the 
 decline of the Papal powers began, with the exile' of 
 
 K
 
 130 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 the Popes to Avignon, the long schism that followed, the 
 stormy and discordant councils of Constance and Pisa. 
 In the sixteenth century, the assault upon the Catholic 
 system became systematic, and after the thirty years' war 
 it became clear that even in Western Europe it was not 
 to exercise uncontested sway. The peace of Westphalia 
 divided the West into Protestant and Catholic. The 
 revolutions of the eighteenth century raised the question 
 whether any form of theology was to receive public recog- 
 nition from the state. In the United States, in the 
 self-governing colonies of the British Empire, and in the 
 Republic of Mexico, that question appears to be decided. 
 In the French Republic, where the question was first raised, 
 the answer is being given at the present moment. So far as 
 the state is concerned, theological doctrine has no existence. 
 Every citizen is free to hold his own form of belief. 
 
 The point on which I have been insisting all this time 
 is that the history of Western civilization during the last 
 twenty-five centuries is a passage from theocracy to socio- 
 cracy from a social state in which the dominant principle 
 is the government of mankind by unseen and arbitrary 
 powers, in whose hands we are as clay in the hands of the 
 potter to a social state in which, however various indi- 
 vidual beliefs may be, the governing considerations in 
 public life are not theological and mystical, but scientific 
 and human. There were positive beliefs in the earliest 
 ages of the world ; there was never a god of weight, as 
 Adam Smith remarked ; and so there will be such at 
 least is my conviction theological beliefs in a very distant 
 future. But the question for the sociologist is Of what 
 nature at each period are the dominant, the governing 
 beliefs, those which determine the collective action of 
 mankind ?
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 131 
 
 In this rapid review of twenty-five centuries, represent- 
 ing the transit from theocracy to sociocracy, one objection 
 meets us at the outset. Is there, it will be asked, any true 
 continuity between Graeco-Roman and modern history? 
 Was not the progressive movement of civilization arrested 
 for the thousand years between the fourth century of our 
 era and the fourteenth ? Is Vice's theory of history, that 
 the world moves in cycles, after all the true theory ? That 
 it moves with oscillations is too painfully apparent to us, 
 as the years and the decades move on ; but is there on the 
 whole what may be called an orthogenic line of evolution, 
 a trajectory which, if not a straight line, is yet not a closed 
 curve ? In a word, did Western civilization come to an 
 end with the fall of the Roman Empire and begin again 
 with the Renaissance ? The student of the philosophy of 
 history, at whatever point of view he may stand, is forced 
 to form for himself some explanation, some theory, as the 
 French would call it, of the middle age in the history of 
 Western civilization. 
 
 The theory which appears to me most intelligible is as 
 follows, stated in the fewest words. 
 
 Greece and Rome developed each one side of our three- 
 fold nature intellect and the arts of speech in one case, 
 practical activity in the other in so exceptional and 
 exclusive a way as to need special and long continued 
 efforts to restore the balance, and promote the culture of 
 the inward life the life of affections, impulses, emotions ; 
 in other words, the culture of the heart. 
 
 In art, in philosophy, in science, the Greeks did great 
 things, of which it is not needful to say more than one 
 word here. The eternal worth to humanity of such work 
 as was done by Homer, ^Eschylus, Phidias, Aristotle, 
 Archimedes, and Hipparchus has not even now been
 
 132 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 adequately recognized : for full recognition it awaits the 
 moment when the obscurantist superstition of u compulsory 
 Greek " has been finally uprooted from our schools and 
 colleges. But the Greeks, except during two brief 
 moments of their history, were not politically great, were 
 indeed often politically contemptible ; and in the second 
 century, B.C., subjection to Rome, as advised by the great 
 Polybius, was their sole means of salvation from bar- 
 barism. The Greeks had to manage their public life with 
 but small assistance from their greatest men. Fine lite- 
 rary culture was theirs ; but literary culture, as the history 
 of the Italian Renaissance shows, is the flimsiest of all 
 foundations of national greatness. It may be even, as in 
 the case of Nero and Alexander Borgia and their sur- 
 roundings, a special agent of corruption. 
 
 Turn now to Rome. It is not needful for our present 
 purpose to consult the great specialists on Roman history. 
 There is an almost complete consensus as to the type of 
 character resulting from the succession of generations in her 
 long history. Shakespeare, Corneille, Bossuet, Mommsen, 
 have described it for us. Nowhere is it so powerfully 
 painted as in the 6th canto of the " Paradise " of Dante, 
 where the whole story of Rome from its foundation to the 
 establishment of the empire is told in forty lines. First over 
 the area of a small English county, then over the Italian 
 peninsula, finally over the Mediterranean coasts and the 
 lands of Western Europe, this dominion was established. 
 Peace came to the world peace with universal toleration 
 and widespread culture and refinement. 
 
 We have then in Greece and Rome an astounding 
 development of two sides of our nature, intellect and prac- 
 tical activity, with no corresponding culture of the heart. 
 The Greek religion in those latter days was what Renan
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 133 
 
 calls it a toy-religion, in which no one pretended to 
 believe. The Roman religion was bound up with Roman 
 patriotism, but it consisted of formal precise ceremonies, 
 very much like the Shinto religion of Japan. And as 
 Japan, early in her history, modified Shintoism by the 
 more human faith of Buddha ; so Roman men and women 
 took refuge in the passionate and fervid theocracies of the 
 Eastern world. Of these there were more than one. As 
 Professor Dill has recently shown us in his remarkable 
 work on Roman Society from Nero to the Antonines, 
 there was the worship of Mithra traceable in the track of 
 the Roman soldiers from Africa to Hadrian's wall ; there 
 was the cult of Isis and Serapis. Finally, there was the 
 theocracy of Judea, with its long line of prophets, culmina- 
 ting in the man who was at once a Hebrew prophet and a 
 Roman citizen ; from which, with the help of Platonist, 
 Pythagorean and Stoic, issued the Christian Church. The 
 struggle between these elements was for a long time more 
 doubtful than is commonly thought. The fittest survived 
 as the fittest, in one sense of that word, always survives. 
 In this case, and it is not always so, the fittest was the 
 noblest and purest ; though the victory was not without 
 grievous pain and irreparable loss. 
 
 Looked at from this point of view, we shall find that 
 the middle age was far from being the period of stagnation 
 and retrogradation that is supposed by many. Granted 
 that the work to be done was to create a moral environ- 
 ment in which men should be trained, as Aristotle had 
 urged, from infancy to control baser passions, and should 
 breathe an atmosphere of love and reverence, the Catholic 
 Church achieved in what are called the dark ages a large 
 measure of success. A spiritual power wholly independent 
 of the state forming opinion and moulding character, but
 
 134 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 quite disconnected, in principle at least, from temporal 
 power, arose for the first time in the world's history. 
 Mediaeval attempts to teach were not what we should now 
 think advanced ; but before the middle ages there was no 
 teaching at all except for the cultivated few. The Greeks 
 and Romans had no teaching for the masses of their 
 slaves. Apart from the Church catechisms, the early Bene- 
 dictine monasteries formed a vast system of industrial 
 schools. And when we look at the vast sphere opened in 
 the middle ages to the spiritual activities of women ; when 
 we remember that in the middle ages the greatest of all 
 social revolutions was effected the passage from servile 
 to free labour and when we think of the effects of this 
 emancipation on arts, commerce, and industry centuries 
 before the days of the Reformation and the Renaissance, 
 we shall be slow to endorse the view that Western Europe 
 retrograded in the so-called dark ages. 
 
 The truth is, that monotheism as compared with poly- 
 theism was in the highest degree stimulating to intellect. 
 I am not speaking of its moral but of its mental action. 
 It raised new and terrible problems, which may be summed 
 up in one, the origin of evil. But for that very reason it 
 stimulated thought in ways unknown before. From 
 Origen and Augustine in the third century, to Scotus 
 Erigena in the ninth ; from Erigena to Abelard and the 
 pre- Arabian schoolmen, from these to the great schoolmen 
 of the thirteenth century Aquinas, Albert, Roger Bacon 
 stirred by the influx, through Arabs and Jews, of Greek 
 philosophy and science, we have proof enough that the 
 intellectual stagnation attributed to these dark ages has 
 been grossly exaggerated. They illustrate more than any 
 other time the metaphysical stage in Comte's law of social 
 evolution. The metaphysics of the schoolmen directed to
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 13$ 
 
 the defence of the established doctrine were in the end 
 active agents of its decay. 
 
 Of the downfall of the mediaeval system, partly seen, 
 partly foreseen, by Dante, something has been said already. 
 It began with the disruption of the Papacy nearly two 
 centuries before Luther ; it was carried on through reforma- 
 tions and revolutions to our own day, and it is not yet 
 ended. It is of more importance to recognize the germs 
 of the new order to which mankind is tending, the socio- 
 cratic order resting on scientific convictions embracing the 
 highest interests of mankind, and reached by methods 
 which all mankind may accept and approve. 
 
 Here again we have to remind ourselves that modern 
 history begins with the Greeks. The newest thing that 
 Greece gave the world I do not say the greatest was 
 neither her poetry nor her metaphysical philosophy. In 
 these she was boundlessly superior to other ancient nations; 
 still, other nations, India for instance, had vast collections 
 of poetry, and a long series of metaphysical thinkers. 
 Her most original achievement was the detachment of 
 abstract science in its humblest form mathematics from 
 the concrete mass of empirical knowledge to which the old 
 theocracies had been limited. 
 
 History, as commonly taught, does not include the 
 history of science ; or at best devotes to it here and there 
 a casual paragraph. Even then it is apt to be looked on 
 as a speciality peculiar to some particular country. We 
 are only now beginning to look on great scientific dis- 
 coveries as great sociological events to be ranged in their 
 proper place, the evolution of man's destiny. From Thales 
 and Pythagoras to Eudoxus, from Eudoxus to Archimedes, 
 from Archimedes to Hipparchus and Ptolemy, the chain 
 of discovery in geometry and mathematical astronomy is
 
 136 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 complete. Held fast and extended by the Arab schools 
 of Bagdad and Cordova, from the eighth century to the 
 twelfth, it was handed on by them to the best Western 
 intellect of the thirteenth century men like Grosseteste, 
 Roger Bacon, Leonard of Pisa, and Jordan, the second 
 General of the Dominican order. It is this continuity that 
 gives its great sociological value to the history of science, 
 a subject unappreciated as yet in British universities. 
 Yet it should never be forgotten that in the great renova- 
 tion and enlargement of geometrical method initiated 
 by Descartes in the seventeenth century, to which mathe- 
 matics owes its value as an instrument of physical research, 
 Descartes began by taking up a problem which Pappus, a 
 Greek geometer of the second century A.D., had left 
 unsolved. Between the astronomy of Hipparchus and 
 Ptolemy and the astronomy of Copernicus there was, 
 mathematically speaking, no such chasm as is popularly 
 supposed. The language of Ptolemy is still used in our 
 observatories. Of the economic value of such abstract 
 researches as those of the Greek geometers it is not need- 
 ful to say much. A tribute is rendered to them every time 
 a sailor uses his navigation tables to find his place at sea. 
 What is more essential to our present purpose is to note 
 the obvious fact that during the last five or six centuries, 
 and most markedly during the last hundred years, the 
 range of phenomena amenable to scientific treatment has 
 been steadily and rapidly increasing. Let us glance for an 
 instant at the salient facts. Galileo's death coincides with 
 the birth of Newton ; within the century and a half covered 
 by these two lives the foundations, and much of the super- 
 structure, of the science which still bears the name of 
 physics had been laid. Before the end of the eighteenth 
 century, Lavoisier, with many others, had created scientific
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 137 
 
 chemistry, and had made it for the first time possible, not 
 indeed to explain life, but to form an intelligible theory as 
 to what constituted life. Early in the nineteenth century, 
 biology under Bichat, Lamarck and others, detached itself 
 from the common trunk of knowledge, and became 
 recognized as a distinct science. In the generation that 
 followed, Auguste Comte, issuing of course from a long 
 series of labourers in the same field among whom Vico, 
 Turgot, Kant, Condorcet, may be named drew the out- 
 lines of the science to the prosecution of which this society 
 is devoted the science of social structure and movement. 
 
 We have thus before us Comte's well-known series of 
 the abstract sciences ranged in accordance with the 
 diminishing generality and increasing complexity of the 
 facts dealt with. This is not the time to discuss it in 
 detail. For my present purpose, I will assume it as given, 
 and will regard it as condensed into a series of three terms : 
 Cosmology, Biology, Sociology the second term dependent 
 on the first, and including animal psychology; the third 
 dependent on the second, and including the study of 
 human nature as modified by the historic process. 
 
 Now there is a " mathematical millennium " (I use an 
 expression of the late Dean Milman) towards which Comte 
 has been, strangely enough, blamed by one set of his 
 opponents for aspiring. It consists in regarding the third 
 of these terms as nothing but a deduction from the 
 second, the second as nothing but a deduction from the 
 first. It is, I say, strange that Comte should be accused 
 of this tendency, considering that a great part of his life 
 was occupied with strenuous resistance to it. Its result, 
 when pushed too far, is to blind men's eyes to the truths 
 which are specially characteristic of each science, and 
 concentrate attention exclusively on the truths which are
 
 138 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 deducible from the preceding science. In a word, the 
 statue is sacrificed to the pedestal ; or to use another 
 illustration, the study of the plant is limited to the study 
 of its cotyledons. 
 
 Instances of this aberration abound in the history of 
 science, and often in connection with scientific discovery 
 of the highest importance. Harvey's discovery of the 
 circulation of the blood is an example. Attention was for 
 a long time concentrated, and not unnaturally, on the 
 mechanical forces impelling the blood through its course, 
 and the subtler phenomena of life were disregarded. It 
 is true that these subtler and more complicated facts the 
 series of chemical metabolism, the reaction of nerve cells 
 on nutrition, and of higher nerve centres on lower were 
 not known, or at least not scientifically handled in Harvey's 
 time ; but wise physicians had instinctively and empirically 
 taken account of them ; and this wise empiricism was for 
 a long time after Harvey's discovery often disregarded, 
 with bad results sometimes for medical art. Instances of 
 the same kind abound in the history of biology during the 
 last century. 
 
 And so we find it in sociology, both in the relation of 
 the science as a whole to the science of biology, on which 
 it is immediately founded, and in the relations of the parts 
 of the science that relate to simpler social states to those 
 that are higher, in the sense of relating to more complex 
 social states. Altruism is not to be explained in terms of 
 egoism, any more than in terms of chemical metabolism. 
 The higher facts stand on the lower as a temple on its 
 foundations, or as a tree rising from its roots ; but they 
 are not mere deductions or corollaries from them. But 
 there is the less need to labour this point, as it is so 
 admirably illustrated in one of the chapters of our
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 139 
 
 Chairman's recent book on Democracy and Reaction. The 
 error in question is that to which Comte gave the name 
 of Materialism, extending the common usage of the word 
 to every case in which deductions from the lower sciences 
 tend to occupy an undue place in the cultivation of the 
 higher, and thus discourage the inductions on which the 
 progress of the higher must principally depend. There is, 
 of course, an opposite error to which by the same kind of 
 extended use the word Spiritualism may be applied. The 
 higher science dissevered from its connection with the 
 lower is the stem of the plant cut off from the root ; it 
 perishes from inanition. 
 
 On social science thus conceived, holding an even path 
 between materialism and spiritualism, the sociocracy 
 towards which we are tending, and which indeed we have 
 already begun to enter, must rest as its foundation. The 
 passage from theocracy to sociocracy, from the ancient 
 order as depicted in the code of Hammurabi to the new 
 order now in process of establishment around us, is, I take 
 it, the central fact in the philosophy of history. 
 
 The history of Western civilization is a sequence of 
 social states, each of them following from the one preceding, 
 each giving birth to a successor, but also each knit together 
 by its own consensus, its own passions, affections, customs, 
 thoughts, prejudices, social ties of every kind. Choose 
 from the seventy-five past generations any two you please, 
 you will find the permanent elements of humanity in each 
 of them ; some kind of government, some form of religion, 
 some condition of family life, some phase of collective 
 activity. To study the consensus of these various aspects 
 is the aim of social statics. The present paper is an 
 invitation to this society to study the laws of change, of 
 social movement, in other words, social dynamic. I have
 
 140 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 
 
 called attention to the altered mode of conceiving man's 
 relations to the world and to society which follow from the 
 slow and gradual substitution of scientific law for arbitrary 
 decisions of superhuman powers. What theocracy has 
 been we know. We revere its results, and yet rejoice to 
 have escaped its bondage. What the sociocracy is to 
 which we are now tending, we are less clearly aware. 
 Dimly we see it to be a state in which holders of every 
 theological creed, or of none, can take an equal share ; 
 that its foundations will rest on scientific examination of 
 the laws of social concord and of social progress ; and 
 that the superstructure will be a fabric of justice, freedom 
 and mutual service, towards the full achievement of which 
 continual approaches will be made.
 
 PART II 
 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 ILLUSTRATING THE POSITIVIST CALENDAR 
 OF GREAT MEN
 
 ^HEROES OF THOUGHT 
 
 THALES * 
 
 I SHALL speak in this and in the three following lectures 
 of the first founders of the Positive philosophy. We have 
 been prepared by the foregoing lectures to see what a 
 fundamental change was begun in the world by the growth 
 of Greek civilization. We can see now, although no one 
 could see then, that Greek art, Greek poetry, Greek repub- 
 lican society laid the axe to the root of the old theocracies. 
 Poetry and art no longer took for their subjects the lives 
 and doings of the gods, but the lives and doings of men. 
 What a contrast between the Hebrew psalms, the songs of 
 the Vedas, or the ancient Hindoo Epics, and the poems of 
 Homer. The first are full of the power and might of the 
 gods, of their Empire over sea and land, over mountains 
 and forest and storm, of their miraculous working among 
 men, in human or superhuman shape. Man, in those early 
 poems, is the slave of the gods. All this we have in 
 Homer too, but the real interest of Homer's poems lies 
 wide apart from this. It lies in the portraiture of human 
 character and human life, of the fortitude of man, of the 
 passion and tenderness and faithfulness of woman. Con- 
 trast the breastplate of Aaron, or the cherubs that spread 
 * Part of a lecture belonging to a course delivered in 1889. 
 143
 
 144 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 their wings above the Ark in the Holy of Holies, with the 
 Shield of Achilles, presenting in a wonderful series the 
 whole drama of man's life : the ploughing, the vintage, 
 the harvest, the hunting, the marrying and giving in 
 marriage, the games, the meeting in assembly, the law- 
 making, the awful decisions of the judge. In Homer, and 
 yet more in the great dramatists of Athens, the service of 
 God was being superseded by the service of Man. Our 
 reverence is taken away from Zeus the omnipotent God, 
 and given to Prometheus, the friend and saviour of Man. 
 
 Now while this long slow process was going on under- 
 ground through the Greek world, the Greek cult of the 
 gods went on, and was destined to go on for many 
 centuries. Religion is to most men and women a matter 
 of habit, custom, association, penetrating and intertwining 
 with all the actions and practices of daily life, and not to 
 any great extent a matter of prolonged thought. People are 
 shocked at any visible sudden outward change, but if this be 
 avoided they take their religion as it comes every day and 
 ask no questions. And thus it comes about that in the 
 long course of generations the words used in religious 
 exercises have grown obsolete, and no longer correspond in 
 the least to the real facts of life that surround the 
 worshipper. For centuries the Brahmins of India went on 
 using prayers of which they did not even understand the 
 language till European scholars came to explain them. 
 So it is that men read the Sermon on the Mount, or repeat 
 the Lord's Prayer, while they are in the act of righting 
 their enemies, and utterly refusing to forgive their 
 trespasses. 
 
 But though this is the case with the unthinking practical 
 many, it is not the case with the theoretical and thoughtful 
 few. To these men a change in ideas and opinions means
 
 THALES 145 
 
 sooner or later a change in practical life ; in men's ways of 
 living together and acting towards one another. And 
 when men like Thales and Pythagoras five or six centuries 
 before the Christian era saw that faith in the old creeds 
 was silently waning, that there was no longer the same 
 absolute belief in the gods coming down from the 
 mountains or the sky, and putting on human shape, that 
 kings were no longer to be looked on as incarnations of 
 the god-head, that on the contrary they were but very poor 
 specimens of manhood, to be fought and resisted, and got 
 rid of, and that laws instead of being as heretofore direct 
 inspirations from the sky, were just the outcome of fellow- 
 citizens meeting in assembly and debating what should 
 be law, and what should be renewed or repealed when 
 Thales, and Anaximander, and Heracleitus and others saw 
 these things, they began to ask themselves what were to 
 be the guiding principles of manhood in the future ? where 
 then was a firm footing, where truth, certainty, conviction 
 were to be found ? 
 
 The first thing they set themselves to do was to try to 
 explain the visible universe around them. It was a scene 
 of constant change, movement, up-building and destroying. 
 The conception of Nature arose in their minds. They saw 
 one region of the world growing out of another. The 
 rocks were the dried-up sediment of the sea-water. The 
 mists and clouds formed themselves from the seas and 
 rivers. The plants and trees grew from the moisture of 
 the soil. In this principle of growth, Becoming, Evolution, 
 Nature, for all these things are different words for the 
 same thing, these early thinkers of Greece sought for some 
 principle of certainty on which convictions as to man's life 
 could be built up. 
 
 We have heard very much talk about Evolution in our 
 
 L
 
 146 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 own century, and especially during the last thirty years. 
 But when we sura it all up, we cannot say that it has led us 
 to very sure and stable convictions. I remember saying to 
 a friend a month or two after the appearance of Darwin's 
 Origin of Species, thirty years ago, that his theory of 
 Natural Selection would be a most efficient means of 
 supplanting Paley's Theory of Final Causes : that is to say 
 that whereas all the arrangements in the structure of the 
 eye, of our joints and every part of our fabric were looked 
 on by Paley as proofs of divine wisdom, it would henceforth 
 be possible to say that these mechanisms giving the 
 animal an advantage in the struggle with its competitors 
 for existence, had gradually established themselves by the 
 law of heredity. But though Darwin and his fellow- 
 workers proved clearly enough that Paley's theory of the 
 Origin of Species was very doubtful, it cannot be said that 
 they have established their own. At the present moment 
 the Evolutionists of Europe are divided among themselves 
 in a very remarkable way as to the process by which 
 Evolution has come about : some attaching more im- 
 portance to the competitive struggle, some believing in 
 internal forces which have guided the process of develop- 
 ment in certain definite directions. So that all that has 
 really been done, so far as the public are concerned, is 
 that a gradual process of slow growth has been sub- 
 stituted for sudden interventions of a creator. But as 
 to the forces that underlie that slow growth we remain 
 still in very deep ignorance. And considering that the 
 action of these forces requires a vast succession not merely 
 of centuries but of millenniums to become visible to us, 
 considering that the evolution of a new species requires 
 many thousand years, and that by far the largest number 
 of species now surrounding us were formed probably
 
 THALES 147 
 
 millions of years ago, it is exceedingly likely that during 
 the lifetime of man upon this planet of ours this ignorance 
 may never be dispelled. 
 
 Therefore the philosophy of Evolution is no quarry 
 from which foundation-stones of firm conviction can be 
 hewn. Evolution, Natura, Physis, is another word for the 
 sum of changes that take place in the world around us. 
 The word tells us very little about the law of those 
 changes, the permanent element that abides in them, that 
 measures them, that enables us to foresee their future 
 course. 
 
 Such a source of certainty Thales found in the science of 
 measurement of magnitude. The power of measuring space 
 grew up with the arts of building, and of agriculture. Given 
 a wall so many feet long, high, and thick, men no doubt 
 had found out many centuries before the time of Thales, 
 how many bricks would be needed for the building of it. 
 Mosaic pavement had taught them elementary truths about 
 areas, for instance, that the square of the hypotenuse of a 
 right-angled triangle was equal to the squares on the other 
 two sides. But innumerable problems of a practical kind 
 presented themselves which artisans and builders and land 
 surveyors were quite unable to solve. The word Geometry 
 is the Greek for land-measurement. Herodotus tells us 
 that this problem of land-measurement pressed with 
 peculiar urgency on the ancient Egyptians, because after 
 the inundations of the Nile boundaries between farms were 
 swept away, and needed resettlement. 
 
 Throughout the whole history of science we must never 
 lose sight of the pressure of practical necessities, which 
 concentrated attention on particular problems. Any one 
 who looks closely at the history of electrical discovery in 
 the present century will see what strong light has been
 
 148 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 thrown on the theory of the subject by the attempt to 
 solve practical problems connected with the electric 
 telegraph or electric illumination. The attempt to solve 
 the practical difficulty has led to the discovery of new 
 principles, new general facts or laws of the science, and 
 from these laws again new inventions have been deduced. 
 This has been shown over and over in the history of 
 Physics and Chemistry in our own time. And so it was 
 with Geometry in the time of Thales. The practical 
 problem of measuring an irregular plot of ground was only 
 one of many that presented themselves in the course of 
 daily life. There was the problem of calculating the 
 amount of available timber in the trunk of a tree. This 
 was a matter of pure guess-work to men in primitive 
 civilization. There were such questions as finding out the 
 amount of grain that could be stored in a given barn ; 
 finding again the height of a mountain or a tower ; or the 
 breadth of a river which could not be crossed. And over 
 and above all these earthly problems there was the infinitely 
 important problem of the Sky, with its revolving stars, 
 those that were fixed, and, above all, those that had 
 independent motions of their own ; the Sun, the Moon and 
 the planets. On the motions of the Sky depended the 
 succession of Day and Night : on the separate motion of 
 the Sun, followed winter and summer, sowing-time and 
 harvest. 
 
 These were some of the most prominent questions 
 which the inquisitive minds of the early Greek thinkers 
 set themselves to answer. The answers which they found 
 led them to the first foundations of Positive Science, the 
 first conceptions of Abstract Law, governing the shifting 
 appearances of the universe. For observe, the concrete 
 appearances of Nature would not of themselves lead to this
 
 THALES 149 
 
 conception of Law. The Chinese, Assyrians, Babylonians, 
 Egyptians had observed for centuries the motion of day 
 and night, the annual motion of the sun, the succession of 
 eclipses, and so on. But all this had not led them to the 
 conception of Law. All these things were simply dependent 
 upon the will of the gods. They were divine institutions 
 just as the conduct of a man's daily life, his hours of sleep, 
 meal-time, work, and play were human institutions. But 
 Thales and those who worked with him now began to look 
 on the matter in a very different way. He began to 
 consider the general facts, or laws governing all Space, 
 laws admitting of no variety, no divine caprice. 
 
 In order to do this, Abstraction was necessary. There 
 was no possibility of measuring a solid body, or the surface 
 of a field, except in the accidental cases where these solids 
 or surfaces happened to be of extreme regularity, as in the 
 case of the brick wall or the mosaic pavement. The first 
 step was therefore to abstract the simplest phenomena from 
 the rest, and to find out the laws of these. These simplest 
 phenomena were the line and the angle. It is a little 
 difficult for us now to realize the enormous importance of 
 this step of abstracting the line which bounded the shape 
 of an object, and regarding it separately. The result, as 
 expressed by the old geometers, was that the Line was 
 length without breadth. It was an ideal existence, 
 abstracted from the facts of nature, though having in 
 reality no existence. As to lines, it was soon seen that 
 only one kind need be considered, those that went straight 
 from one point to another. Curved lines were soon seen 
 to be the same as a series of very short straight lines, each 
 following a slightly different direction ; so that the 
 boundaries of all figures could be looked on as straight 
 lines.
 
 ISO COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 The other great abstraction was the Angle, the way 
 in which one straight line leaned upon, or was bent upon, 
 another. If one line stood straight up on another, leaning 
 neither to the right nor the left, it was said to be perpen- 
 dicular to it, or to make right angles with it. If otherwise, 
 there was a sharp corner or acute angle on one side, and a 
 blunt corner or obtuse angle on the other. On the making 
 of these two abstractions, the angle and the straight line, 
 depended the whole future progress of geometry, the 
 wonderful science which enables men to measure where 
 they cannot touch nor handle : to calculate the motions of 
 the sun, to tell the size, and distance, and weight of the 
 moon and the planets ; also to make accurate charts of 
 the earth's surface, and thus make navigation possible. 
 
 It was then found that the simplest figure was one 
 bounded by three straight lines : the triangle, having three 
 sides and three corners or angles. Into this simplest 
 assemblage of straight lines all other figures could be 
 reduced. A figure with four sides and four corners could 
 be divided into two triangles : with five sides into three 
 triangles, and so on. Therefore the chief subject for the 
 consideration of Thales was the triangle. And here it 
 was that he made the greatest and most fruitful of all his 
 discoveries. 
 
 It is evident that triangles may be of every conceivable 
 size and shape. With regard to the size, that clearly did 
 not affect the angles : the angles might be of the same 
 size, whether the sides of the triangle were long or short. 
 But triangles might be of innumerable shapes : the three 
 angles might be all equal, or one might be very blunt, a 
 second very sharp, and the third might be a right angle. 
 There is no end to the different shapes. Now Thales 
 found a law or general fact common to all these shapes.
 
 THALES 151 
 
 In every possible triangle, he found that the three angles 
 were equal to two right angles. 
 
 What is a law of Nature ? It is the dependence of one 
 quantity upon another so that when the second is given 
 we can infer the first. Or, to put the thought in another 
 form, a law is the measure according to which the varia- 
 tions of one phenomenon are governed by the variations 
 of another. 
 
 Take, for instance, the relation between the radius of 
 a circle and the circumference. Varying the radius the 
 circumference will vary in a certain fixed proportion : and 
 in that fixed proportion of variations consists the law. 
 
 A falling body passes through spaces in each successive 
 second varying as the uneven numbers I, 3, 5, etc. So 
 that it falls one space in the first second : four times that 
 space in two seconds, nine times that space in three 
 seconds, and so on. Hence there is a fixed relation 
 between the distance fallen, and the time occupied by 
 the fall. 
 
 A law of Nature supposes that we have abstracted 
 the various properties common to many different objects, 
 and that then, taking these properties two and two, we 
 have found a constant relation between them. Each 
 object in nature, say a stone, a tree, a horse, consists of a 
 collection of properties, qualities, attributes, each of which 
 is common to a great number of objects. It is by 
 abstracting these properties, considering them separately 
 and finding fixed relations between any two of them that 
 we arrive at the conception of a law of nature. There can 
 be no law discoverable in the motions of a single object. 
 For instance, a mass of metal is exposed to a strong heat 
 and it is found to expand : it also undergoes many other 
 changes, its colour alters, its consistency alters, it rusts or
 
 152 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 melts, and so on. But leaving out all these other facts, 
 and fixing attention solely on the facts of change of 
 temperature, and change of volume, and showing those 
 facts in a great number of other bodies, we reach the 
 constant relation, that is to say the law of dependence of 
 volume on temperature. If we looked at all the properties 
 or phenomena of any body as they exist in a mass, no law 
 of Nature could ever have been discovered. It is only by 
 this process of analyzing, abstracting, these properties, and 
 then finding out the fixed relations between each pair of 
 them, that we get these general facts, or laws, which we 
 have gradually found out to govern the world. Take, for 
 instance, the great work of Cabanis on the formation of 
 moral feelings by physical conditions. The environment 
 of any one of us is infinitely complicated. There are the 
 influences of age, of sex, of climate, of constitution, etc. 
 Taken altogether these things form an inextricable tangle 
 out of which nothing can be made. What Cabanis did 
 was to analyze this mass into the separate influences that 
 composed it. He considered separately the influence on 
 moral feelings of temperament, of age, of sex, of climate, 
 and so on ; and in each class of conditions taken separately 
 sought to establish laws, that is to say fixed relations 
 bearing on the formation of character. We hear much 
 about synthesis, and synthetic philosophies. But it is of 
 no use to be synthetic till you have first been analytic. 
 We have seen that the measurement of such an apparently 
 simple body as a cylinder or a sphere is wholly impossible 
 until it has been analyzed into something still more simple : 
 till it has been reduced to an assemblage of the simplest 
 possible figure that can be enclosed by straight lines, the 
 triangle. Then, by handling these simplest elements, with 
 them you can again begin to build up a synthesis. From
 
 THALES 153 
 
 the triangle you can pass to the polygon : from the 
 polygon to the circle : from the circle to the cone, cylinder, 
 and sphere. 
 
 The second great conception of Thales, one of the 
 greatest moment for the future of science, was that of 
 Similarity of two figures of unequal sides. This could 
 only be examined, in the first instance, by taking the 
 simplest figure, the triangle, and by showing that if the 
 sides of the largest figure were inclined to one another in 
 the same way as the sides of the smaller figure, i.e., made 
 equal angles with one another in the two cases, then the 
 figures were of the same shape ; and that the relations 
 between the sides that were true of the smaller figure 
 were true also of the larger. Herodotus tells us that 
 Thales taught the Egyptians how to measure the heights of 
 their pyramids by observing the length of the shadow cast 
 when the sun was half-way between the zenith and horizon 
 half-way up the sky. At that moment the shadow of a 
 stick placed upright in the ground would be equal to the 
 length of the stick itself. Now what would be true of that 
 small scale figure would be true of a greater figure of the 
 same shape. The height therefore of a tower at that 
 moment would be equal to the length of the shadow : so 
 that by measuring the shadow you arrive at the height 
 of the tower. This is as good an instance as could be 
 given of Comte's definition of mathematical science as the 
 indirect measurement of magnitude. 
 
 From this conception of figures of different size, but 
 similar, that is to say, drawn to the same scale, there soon 
 followed the important law that the space enclosed by the 
 smaller figure was to the space enclosed by the larger as 
 the square of their corresponding sides. Thus, of two 
 triangles, one of which stood on a basis an inch long, and
 
 154 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 the other on a basis a foot long, the second was twelve 
 times twelve as large as the first. And this discovery soon 
 led to the further one, that similar solid figures, say pyra- 
 mids, cones, or cylinders, were to one another as the cubes 
 of their corresponding sides, so that if the side of one 
 pyramid was an inch, and the side of the other a foot, the 
 second pyramid would be 1728 times as large as the first. 
 And thus it is that the comparison of two solid bodies, 
 say two spheres like the Earth and the Moon, is reducible 
 to the comparison of two straight lines, the diameter or the 
 radius of each of those spheres. 
 
 Now the effect of these simple discoveries of Thales 
 on the whole subsequent history of science was immense. 
 Our knowledge of the solar system was dependent on 
 it. Without it there could have been no astronomy, no 
 mechanics, no navigation, no measuring of the compli- 
 cated physical forces, the mastery of which is the founda- 
 tion of modern civilization. But this is not the only 
 reason it is not even the principal reason of the pro- 
 minence given to the mathematical discoveries of Thales 
 in the Positive Philosophy and Polity. We started from 
 the fact that the decay of Polytheism, while Greek art 
 and Greek thought were coming into existence, meant a 
 loosening of the whole fabric of conviction and custom, on 
 which social life depended. The early Greek thinkers put 
 forth hypothesis after hypothesis about the universe as 
 to how it arose, how it changed, how it evolved from some 
 simple principle like Moisture, or Heat, or Fire, into the 
 complicated fabric that men saw around them, and which 
 the old beliefs in superhuman gods no longer sufficed to 
 explain. These new metaphysical explanations came up 
 one after another, and were just as impossible to prove as 
 the divine beliefs had been. Each contended hopelessly
 
 THALES 155 
 
 with the one that followed, and so there seemed no issue 
 but barren scepticism. 
 
 But it was quite otherwise with the researches made by 
 Thales and Pythagoras into the laws of number and space. 
 Here, at least, convictions were reached that, when once 
 arrived at, were firm, immutable. Here was a groundwork 
 for the Faith of the future, ultimately to issue in the 
 demonstrable religion of Positivism. 
 
 All that I have been saying helps to explain the very 
 great importance which Auguste Comte attributed to 
 mathematics in the Positive system of education. Double 
 the number of lectures was to be given to mathematics 
 that was given to any other of the seven sciences. Comte 
 spent the last year but one of his life in composing a 
 mathematical treatise, intended more for teachers than for 
 pupils, in which all the conceptions in this science which 
 he considered to be of permanent value were arranged in 
 systematic order. He did not consider that any one was 
 properly qualified to teach his doctrine who had not sub- 
 jected himself to the discipline of mathematical training. 
 He speaks reproachfully of the influence claimed in the 
 teaching of the most complicated phenomena of social and 
 moral life by teachers who have never clearly grasped the 
 difference between a cubic inch and a cubic foot. 
 
 The reason for this view is very clear. Positivism is 
 the state of belief in which the reign of Law has been 
 substituted for the reign of arbitrary Gods. Now, it is in 
 the simplest phenomena of space and number that the 
 clearest conception of the meaning of the word " Law " is 
 to be formed. We have seen that law means the depend- 
 ence of one variable quantity upon another, so that when 
 you know one of the two variable quantities, you can 
 forthwith find the other. A scientific law, therefore, implies
 
 156 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 prevision. Science is quite a different thing from know- 
 ledge. Take, for instance, a discourse on the history of 
 the Roman empire, or of France during the Revolution. 
 That may be very interesting, but it is not science. It is 
 a description of a particular set of facts. But it does not 
 lay down any fixed relation between them which enables 
 you to say, " Given this fact, the other must necessarily 
 follow." When you read a description of the death of 
 Caesar, the story does not in the least help you to tell any 
 other event that will come after it. In the same way, a 
 description of an unknown animal, of an unknown country, 
 of an unknown star, however interesting these may be, 
 does not by itself give you any fixed relation between one 
 of the things described and another, so that when you 
 know the one, you can foretell the other. On the other 
 hand, when an anatomist, examining a bone brought by a 
 sailor from the other side of the globe, finds that the bone, 
 though as large as the leg bone of a horse or an ox, yet 
 has an internal structure like that of a bird, and from this 
 and other details infers that the country from which this 
 bone came was once inhabited by gigantic birds, and 
 makes a picture of such a bird, which is afterwards verified 
 by travellers in that country, who find other bones belong- 
 ing to similar animals, the procedure in this case is 
 strictly scientific. Owen, the man I am referring to, was 
 aware of certain fixed relations between the bony structure 
 of an animal and its outward covering and other organs. 
 He applied these fixed relations to the case in hand, and 
 was thus enabled to foresee what he could not touch or 
 handle. In the same way, if we come across a nation or 
 tribe in a primitive condition, living by fishing or hunting, 
 wandering over the soil, at war with neighbouring tribes, 
 and with women in a state of slavery and so on, we expect
 
 THALES 157 
 
 to find their theories about the universe to be of a very 
 fictitious and fabulous kind ; we expect to find spirit 
 worship, ancestor worship, worship for the powers of nature 
 fetichism, in fact, in all its forms. We start with the 
 fixed relation discovered by Auguste Comte of the law of 
 the three stages, and we apply this relation to the case in 
 hand This is a scientific process. 
 
 It is, of course, clear that these fixed relations are far 
 more difficult to disentangle in such complicated subjects 
 as biology and sociology than in such subjects as arith- 
 metic and geometry. We cannot put them before us in so 
 precise and so clear a way. We cannot measure them so 
 exactly. Here, then, lies the logical value of mathematics 
 as the groundwork of Positive education. It supplies in 
 its clearest, most certain, most precise form, the type of 
 scientific law. 
 
 But there is another reason for the prominence given 
 to mathematical teaching in Comte's Polity, a reason 
 affecting not merely the intellect, but the character. It is 
 the readiest and most direct road to conscious submission 
 to the supreme Order which we recognize as the foundation 
 of our life. It is impossible for us to appreciate this Order 
 rightly in the more complex branches of knowledge till we 
 have seen its meaning in the simpler. Take the moral 
 nature of man, with all its caprices, passions, revolts, 
 struggles of every kind, how impossible at first sight to 
 recognize any permanent order established there! No 
 doubt the Poets have always instinctively recognized that 
 such an Order existed. They painted the hero as acting 
 heroically, the traitor treacherously ; the influence of 
 temptation, of sorrow, of passionate love showed itself in 
 actions which more or less conformed to a common type. 
 But the uniformities were hidden under such wide
 
 158 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 diversities that it would have been vain to seek there, in the 
 first instance, for the foundations on which life was built. 
 Hardly less violent and shifting are the agitations of 
 politics ; so much so that men have imagined it possible to 
 build up social and political constitutions at their own will 
 and caprice, as though there were no limiting conditions 
 whatever to overrule the will of man. Even in the struc- 
 ture and movements of living bodies the existence of Law 
 is very hard to detect. When Harvey first saw the heart 
 beating in a living animal, the complication and apparent 
 disorder of the movement were such that it seemed to him 
 for a long while hopeless to reduce it to any principle of 
 Order. The outer world of land and sea was, no doubt, 
 less subject to caprice. But here, too, were the winds and 
 tides, the volcanoes and the earthquakes, to indicate divine 
 caprice and miraculous intervention. How short a space 
 separates us from the time when the variable motion of the 
 planets in the sky were supposed to mark the course of 
 each human destiny. Zadkiel's almanack is not out of 
 print yet. So that we come back to the laws of number 
 and of space, as revealed to us by the labours of these 
 early mathematicians of Greece, as giving us the first 
 immutable foundation of Order on which to build up the 
 structure of human life.
 
 II 
 
 ROGER BACON* 
 
 IN 1594 the dramatist Robert Green published his play 
 entitled, The honorable history of Friar Bacon and Friar 
 Bungay. It was founded on a popular story-book written 
 a few years previously, reprinted in the second volume of 
 Mr. Thoms's Early Prose Romances, entitled " The famous 
 Historic of Friar Bacon : containing the wonderful things 
 that he did in his life, also the manner of his death with 
 the Lives and Deaths of the two conjurers, Bungay and 
 Vandermast." A full account will be found in this romance 
 of the construction by Bacon and Bungay of the Brazen 
 Head ; of their invocation of the Devil to teach them how 
 to make the Head speak ; of the oracular utterances of 
 this Head, and of its destruction while the friars were 
 asleep ; of their rivalry in magic with a German conjurer, 
 Vandermast, in the presence of the King of England and 
 the French ambassador ; of the German's discomfiture ; of 
 the mystical glass which enabled Bacon to "behold any- 
 thing that he desired to see within the compass of fifty 
 miles round about him." Finally, the story tells how he 
 repented of the sin of magic, broke his mystic glass, burnt 
 his books, locked himself in a cell, dug his own grave, and 
 died a true penitent and an anchorite. 
 
 Into the tempting literary question of the relation of 
 Robert Green's play with a more noteworthy drama, 
 
 * A Lecture given before the University Extension Students at 
 Oxford, August, 1903. 
 
 159
 
 160 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 Marlowe's Faustus, written perhaps a year earlier, I am of 
 course not proposing to enter. Those who are curious on 
 the subject may be referred to Professor Adolphus Ward's 
 careful study of the two plays. My present purpose is to 
 note the fact that three hundred years ago, and three 
 centuries after Roger Bacon's death, he survived in popular 
 memory as a wizard and thaumaturgist, whose tardy 
 repentance barely saved him from destruction in this world 
 and the next. It may be useful later on, not merely for 
 those who are interested in the man, but also as a problem 
 of European history, to inquire how those things could be. 
 But before we do this, let us escape from the region of 
 legend, and plant ourselves on a solid foundation of 
 authentic facts of the thirteenth century, the century in 
 which the Papacy culminated and began to show its first 
 symptoms of decay ; in which the Empire passed into the 
 hands of a cultivated free-thinker ; in which the two great 
 mendicant orders were founded ; in which the universities 
 attained, if not their greatest prestige, yet their fullest life ; 
 in which Greek science through Arabic channels streamed 
 into the Western world. Finally, it was the century in 
 which Dante began to think how these things would issue. 
 He was thirty years of age when Bacon died, an old and 
 worn-out man. The two lives never touched. 
 
 The life of Roger Bacon has been often told of late. 
 The details of it which rest on contemporary evidence are 
 very few, and may be condensed into a short space. I 
 will allude to these as our subject may call for them. 
 That he was born in the West of England, possibly at 
 Ilchester, a Somersetshire town near the Dorsetshire 
 boundary, early in the second decade of the thirteenth 
 century, is probable. As a young man he came under 
 Grosseteste's influence at Oxford, just in the years when
 
 ROGER BACON 161 
 
 that remarkable personality was at the height of his 
 influence as an intellectual force, and was not as yet 
 absorbed in the practical problems of Church government. 
 
 Grosseteste, the Suffolk peasant, was twenty-five years 
 old when the century began. In Bacon's student days he 
 was in the full vigour of manhood. The details of his 
 early life are not very precisely known to us. We know 
 little more than that he received his early training in the 
 Oxford schools, for at Oxford there was already a studium 
 generate ; in other words, a University. Probably it was 
 in the first year of the new century that he went to Paris, 
 and took his master's degree. How many years he spent 
 there we do not know ; but shortly after his return we find 
 him occupying the highest place in Oxford, as Regent of 
 the Schools or of the Scholars, practically its Chancellor, 
 a title which at a later date was formally bestowed on him 
 
 Grosseteste fills so important a position in Bacon's 
 early life that it is impossible to pass him by. Putting 
 together the various passages in which Bacon speaks of 
 him, and these are many, we find the language used that 
 of a grateful pupil speaking of a revered master. On two 
 fundamental points Bacon is never tired of insisting, 
 Grosseteste's knowledge of science, and his recognition of 
 the value of Greek and Hebrew philology, not indeed as an 
 instrument of mental training (that was not thought of in 
 those days), but as the means for acquiring accurate and 
 authentic knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, 
 and of the scientific works of Aristotle and the mathemati- 
 cians and naturalists who followed him. In the admirable 
 work recently published on Grosseteste by Mr. Stevenson 
 will be found (page 49) an account of his Compendium 
 Scientiarum, a classification of all departments of know- 
 ledge then explored. In point of comprehensiveness it 
 
 M
 
 162 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 amply justifies the statement of his great disciple. The 
 Lord Robert Grosseteste, said Bacon, novit scientias, was 
 acquainted with the sciences. Grosseteste's Compendium 
 was not merely an Encyclopaedia. Of these miscellaneous 
 collections of knowledge there was more than one in the 
 thirteenth century. The De Proprietatibus of Bartholo- 
 mew, for instance, had a wide circulation, and was known 
 to Bacon. So too was the Speculum of Vincent of 
 Beauvais, a work rivalling in bulk and weight that encyclo- 
 paedic work of our own time which has found such favour 
 with the managers of the Times newspaper. Grosseteste's 
 researches in mathematical and physical science covered 
 less ground than these, but were far more real and fruitful. 
 He had profited by that great initiator of modern science 
 early in the twelfth century, Adelhard of Bath, the first 
 translator of Euclid's geometry into Latin. Adelhard had 
 been followed later in the twelfth century, and early in 
 the thirteenth, by a series of mathematicians, among whom 
 Alexander Neckham, Alfred Sershall and John of Holy- 
 wood or Halifax may be mentioned. Of the two greatest 
 mathematicians of that time, Leonard Fibonacci, the 
 merchant of Pisa, and Jordan of Saxony, the second 
 general of the Dominicans, Grosseteste probably knew 
 nothing. 
 
 But Grosseteste was more than a mathematician. He 
 was a great moral teacher and he was a good social 
 reformer. We are not surprised to find in his Compendium 
 Scientiarum one section devoted to Ethics, for we know 
 the attention which he gave to translations of the Ethics 
 of Aristotle ; and another section appropriated to agri- 
 cultural and domestic economy, for on both these subjects 
 he left us works of great historical interest, notably his 
 Rules for the management of an estate made for the
 
 ROGER BACON 163 
 
 Countess of Lincoln to guard and govern her Lands and 
 Hostel. Summing up all that we know of Grosseteste's 
 many-sided life and work, we may be sure that so large 
 and rich a nature counted for very much in the direction 
 of Roger Bacon's career. 
 
 We pass by a natural transition to the second of the 
 great formative influences that moulded Bacon's genius. 
 In the lutumn of the year 1224, two years before the 
 death of St. Francis, two members of the mission which 
 he had sent to England, reached Oxford and hired a small 
 house in the parish of St. Ebbes, from Robert the Mercer. 
 They had already some weeks before constructed their 
 humble cabins within a house in Cornhill, stuffing the 
 partitions, as Eccleston tells us, with grass. The whole 
 mission consisted of nine persons, only one of whom was 
 in priest's orders : the head of the mission, brother Agnello, 
 was a deacon ; there was an acolyte, a novice, and five 
 laymen. Their numbers increased rapidly. Young men 
 of standing and recognized ability joined their ranks. 
 Within thirty-two years they had forty-nine settlements 
 in England. In the Oxford settlement William of Essen- 
 try the novice, was the first warden. Robert Grosseteste 
 instructed them in theology. 
 
 Let it be said at once that it was a long time before 
 Roger Bacon joined them. If he was born as far back as 
 1210, his coming to Oxford would nearly coincide with 
 theirs, for students were admissible far younger then than 
 now. We have seen that he was a pupil of Grosseteste, 
 and Grosseteste retired from active teaching duty three 
 years before his appointment in 1235 to the bishopric in 
 Lincoln. We shall perhaps be not far wrong if we place 
 the moment of his entrance at Oxford in the year of the 
 death of St. Francis in 1226. He tells us in 1266, a date
 
 164 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 which we are able to fix with absolute certainty, that he 
 had been a student for forty years. In my introduction 
 to the Opus Majus I have given reasons for thinking that 
 Bacon did not join the Franciscan order till between 1240 
 and 1 245 ; so that perhaps nearly half of those forty years 
 would have been spent in independent study. 
 
 The thirteenth century is incomprehensible to those 
 who neglect the study of St. Francis and St. Dominic ; 
 and it is apt to be neglected by those historical schools 
 who concentrate attention too exclusively on the growth 
 of national institutions, be they French, English or German. 
 What is best and strongest in both of the Mendicant 
 orders is that they were not national but international 
 forces, working with the Papacy in holding the nations 
 back from internecine conflict, and in maintaining their 
 allegiance to a spiritual life. Dante, as all students of 
 the eleventh and twelfth cantos of the Paradiso are aware, 
 did what he could to reconcile the two orders by idealizing 
 their common purpose. The great Dominican, Aquinas, 
 sang the praises of St. Francis ; a great Franciscan, Bona- 
 ventura, glorified St. Dominic. Nevertheless I do not 
 think that Dante in his own heart placed them on the 
 same level. Among the petals of the mystical White 
 Rose, of which the thirty-second canto tells us, it is 
 Francis, not Dominic, who takes his place with Benedict 
 and Augustine. Dante is thought himself to have belonged 
 to the Third Order of St. Francis. 
 
 Why did not the young Roger join the band of 
 enthusiastic comrades to whom Francis was nothing less 
 than a new Revealer, come into the world to bring about 
 that Reign of the Spirit of which Joachim the mystic of 
 Calabria, had prophesied a few years before ? There was 
 much in Roger Bacon's nature] that would respond to the
 
 ROGER BACON 165 
 
 call. He too was mystical, he was ardent, and capable of 
 self-sacrifice. 
 
 But there are many ways of leading a noble life, and 
 Bacon for the time had chosen another. Paul Sabatier 
 has recently told us in minute detail the tragic struggle 
 that went on year by year from the first foundation of the 
 order between St. Francis and his disciples. It began 
 many years before the death of the founder; it lasted 
 longer than the century. In the earliest of the many 
 biographies of Francis, written by Brother Leo his 
 intimate friend within two years of his death, we are told 
 of a novice who had been allowed by his superiors to retain 
 possession of his psalter, but wished the permission to be 
 confirmed by St. Francis himself. He could not obtain it- 
 " Charles and Oliver and Roland and the holy martyrs 
 fought for the faith and died for it. Now we have those 
 among us who wish to win honour and renown, not by 
 their own deeds but by talking of the deeds of others." 
 "The only knowledge a man possesses," he would say 
 often, " is that which he uses. The tree is known by its 
 fruit. There are so many who tread the path of knowledge, 
 that blessed shall he be who has made himself barren for 
 the love of our Lord God." 
 
 The sublime unwisdom of St. Francis was followed by 
 a few ; but even of those whom he had touched with his 
 sacred fire there were many who discarded it. Elias, one 
 of his most reverential disciples took a wholly different 
 course which led him at last into very devious paths. 
 Alexander of Hales, who joined the order four years 
 before the death of St. Francis, was for many years one of 
 the most distinguished doctors of theology in Paris. But 
 for the most part the Franciscans of the first generation 
 in Oxford were so far faithful to their master as to lead
 
 i66 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 very simple lives, fulfilling their vows of poverty and 
 obedience, and troubling themselves little with human 
 learning. With theology no doubt they cumbered them- 
 selves far more than their master would have approved. 
 "The rules of these two orders (as Mr. Little observes) 
 forbade their members to take a degree in arts." "In 
 heathen books and practices of philosophy they are not to 
 study," such was the Dominican rule in 1228. With the 
 Franciscans it was the same. Men joined the orders, Bacon 
 says, "at any time between the ages of ten and twenty. 
 They know nothing that is of the slightest service to them 
 as theologians ; thousands of them cannot read the Psaltery 
 or Donatus (i.e. know nothing either of music or grammar) ; 
 they join the order, and then at once begin their course 
 of theological study. Now theological study needs for its 
 pursuits the whole sum of human wisdom. Naturally 
 they made no progress, and especially since they took no 
 trouble to receive instruction in philosophy after joining the 
 order. . . . They became masters in philosophy as well as 
 in theology before they were disciples." These words 
 were written in 1271, forty years after the time of which 
 we are now speaking, the end of the third decade of the 
 century. Enough has been said to make it clear why this 
 eager young student who had been trained by Grosseteste 
 in the love of every kind of knowledge, should pause 
 before he joined an order whose Founder, as I believe, 
 stirred his deepest personal sympathies, but whose future 
 hung yet in the balance. 
 
 It is time to pass to the third of the great influences 
 that were brought to bear on Bacon's life and work. In 
 the year 1230, a great thing happened in Oxford, though, 
 so far as I know, no one but Roger Bacon tells us anything 
 about it.
 
 ROGER BACON 167 
 
 In 1230, Bacon tells us, in the thirteenth chapter of the 
 second part of the Opus Mq/us, " Michael Scot appeared 
 on the scene, bringing with him certain portions of 
 Aristotle's works on Natural Science and Metaphysics, 
 with authentic comments. From this time the philosophy 
 of Aristotle has been magnified throughout the Western 
 world (inter Latinos)." Michael Scot, born perhaps near 
 Durham in the latter third of the twelfth century, had been 
 brought early in his life into the intellectual movement 
 that centred round the court of the young King of Sicily, 
 who in 1215 became Emperor Frederic II. For authentic 
 details of his life I must refer you to Mr. Wood Brown's 
 careful study, published in Edinburgh six years ago. 
 Enough now to say that after spending some years at the 
 young king's court at Palermo, Scot went thence to Spain, 
 and between 1210 and 1223 joined the celebrated school 
 of Oriental translators founded in the middle of the 
 twelfth century by Don Raymon, Archbishop of Toledo. 
 With Don Raymon were associated Dominic Gundi- 
 salvi, his archdeacon, and John Avendeath, a Jew, often 
 spoken of as John of Spain. The work was continued 
 throughout the twelfth century by men like Gerard of 
 Cremona, who translated the Alhazen's great work on 
 Optics. 
 
 Gerard died in 1187; and the work of translation was 
 carried on by his son or nephew and many others. It was 
 in full vigour when Michael came to Toledo. Bacon in 
 other parts of his writings gives good reason for thinking 
 that Michael's knowledge of Arabic was very superficial, 
 and that he was very poorly equipped with scientific 
 knowledge. But for our immediate purpose it is enough 
 to say that his advent in Oxford was for Roger Bacon the 
 startling event which turned his attention to the study of
 
 168 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 the scientific writings of Aristotle and his successors in the 
 Greek and in the Arabian world. 
 
 It is a safe conjecture that the impulse thus given 
 turned Bacon's mind away for a time from the Franciscan 
 order, and inclined him ultimately to Paris, where the 
 most active part of his long and chequered career was 
 undoubtedly spent That Paris from the middle of the 
 twelfth to the close of the thirteenth century was the 
 principal focus of intellectual life in Europe hardly needs 
 demonstration. Then as now it was the most international 
 of cities ; then as now it was the region in which thought 
 was most swiftly transmuted into deed. Abelard's duel 
 with St. Bernard in 1 140 had left permanent traces, which 
 prepared the next generation of students for willing 
 reception of the new light coming over the Pyrenees from 
 Toledo. It was seen that the Aristotle of the Mahommedan 
 world, the Aristotle of Avicenna and Averroes, contained 
 a world of new knowledge about man, about natural 
 history, about the constitution of the universe, of which 
 the student of Aristotle's Logic (and nothing but his Logic 
 had hitherto been known) had never dreamed. And now 
 began the series of strange vicissitudes in the reputation 
 of Aristotle described in John de Launoy's interesting 
 book. In 1210 the study of Aristotle's Physics and Meta- 
 physics was prohibited by the Council of Paris, and the 
 prohibition was confirmed five years afterwards by the 
 Papal Legate. In 1543 Peter Ramus was criminally prose- 
 cuted by the University before the Parliament of Paris 
 for the impiety of maintaining Aristotle not to be infallible. 
 Returning to the thirteenth century, the condemnation 
 of Aristotle by the Papal Legate in 1215 was much 
 mitigated by Pope Gregory IX. in 1231, and by the middle 
 of the century, at the time when Albert, Thomas Aquinas
 
 ROGER BACON 169 
 
 and Bacon were in Paris, there was no longer any difficulty 
 in studying Aristotle or his Arabian commentators. 
 Aristotle was at the height of his legitimate power ; the 
 pedantifying process that was ultimately to explain, 
 though not to justify, his depreciation by the second 
 Bacon, had not yet begun, or at least was only visible to 
 the prophetic eyes of Roger. 
 
 I think it probable that Roger Bacon began his career 
 in Paris about 1240, and that in a year or two afterwards 
 he joined the Franciscan order. He saw by this time that 
 it offered him a boundless sphere of spiritual activity. 
 Dominicans and Franciscans had now become thoroughly 
 organized as two divisions of a Papal Militia, maintaining 
 the international character of the great spiritual govern- 
 ment of the Western world. But beyond the Western 
 world lay the Byzantine ; beyond the Byzantine the 
 Mahommedan ; beyond the Mahommedan was the dark 
 and ominous cloud of invasion. 
 
 At the Council of Lyons in 1245 it was decided by Pope 
 Innocent IV. to send a mission to the Tartar Khan 
 (Kuyuk, grandson of Chinghis). Carpini of Perugia, one of 
 St. Francis's earliest disciples, was chosen to conduct the 
 mission. He reached the Khan's headquarters in Siberia 
 in the following year, and he has left us a full record of 
 his travels. Eight years afterwards a similar mission was 
 sent by Louis IX., and entrusted to a Flemish Franciscan, 
 Rubruk, often spoken of as Rubruquis. His account of 
 Central Asia and its inhabitants is even more full of life 
 and incident than Carpini's. I dwell upon these missions 
 because of the deep impression which they made on the 
 mind of Bacon, who makes repeated references to them in 
 the fourth and the seventh sections of his Opus Majus. 
 As these references will throw some light on Bacon's
 
 i;o COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 method and purposes, which are still very much misunder- 
 stood, we will look at them more closely. 
 
 The fourth section of the Opus Majus is devoted to 
 Mathematics. What can Mathematics and missionary 
 societies have in common? This. As the ruler of Christen- 
 dom, destined soon, it was hoped, to be the spiritual 
 governor of the whole world, the Pope should possess, said 
 Bacon, a complete survey of his domain. He should know 
 the precise position of every important city in the world, 
 its distance from European centres, its latitude and longi- 
 tude, its climate, the character of its population, and above 
 all, the nature of their religion. Now much of this needful 
 knowledge, Bacon goes on to explain, is available for us 
 through the great astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, 
 whose works have been preserved to us in the schools of 
 science instituted four hundred years ago by the successors 
 of Mahommed in Bagdad, and by the offshoots of that 
 school which in later times have been brought to Spain. 
 
 How carefully Ptolemy's Syntaxis, or, as Arab scholars 
 called it, Almagesti, and his Cosmographia (Geography) 
 founded upon it, had been studied by Bacon, the Geo- 
 graphical sub-section of his Opus Majus shows clearly 
 enough. Bacon saw very clearly that between Ptolemy's 
 determinations of latitude and those of longitude a great 
 distinction was to be made. To find the latitude of a 
 place is a comparatively easy problem. All that is needed 
 is to observe the angular distance of the sun from the 
 zenith on the longest day of the year, the day called the 
 summer solstice, when the sun mounts highest in the sky. 
 When Eratosthenes of Alexandria, two centuries before 
 Christ, observed that on the summer solstice the sun shone 
 at Syene into a deep well, that is, was directly above the 
 observer's head, whereas at Alexandria on the same day
 
 ROGER BACON 171 
 
 the sun was the fiftieth part of a circumference (in other 
 words, 7 12') short of the zenith, it was easy to measure 
 the distance between Syene and Alexandria, and in this 
 way to determine the geographical length of a degree, 
 assuming the earth to be a sphere. In this way the 
 position of places north and south of the equator was 
 fairly well known to the Greeks, and was still better 
 known to the Arabs, whose instruments were far more 
 accurate than those of the Greeks. 
 
 But the case was wholly otherwise with regard to 
 distances east and west. This required the power of 
 accurately measuring time ; and in time-measurement the 
 ancient world, and even the modern world, was very 
 deficient till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
 
 Ptolemy's maps give four parallels of south latitude 
 and twenty of north latitude. His degrees of longitude 
 are measured along the equator, starting from Ferro in 
 the Canary Islands, regarded as the farthest known land 
 to the West. The positions assigned to each place depend 
 in very few cases on accurate astronomical observations. 
 Most of them are inferences derived from the statements 
 made by travellers. Bacon was, I believe, the first of 
 Western thinkers to be fully aware of their fallacy. The 
 whole work, as he insists repeatedly, needed to be done 
 over again by accurate astronomical survey of the known 
 world, and especially of the Far East, which in his time 
 was gradually coming into view. Such a survey could, 
 Bacon observes, only be carried out (Op. Maj., i. p. 300) 
 " by papal or imperial authority, or by the help of some 
 great king lending his aid to philosophic inquirers." 
 
 Meantime accurate geographical information being, as 
 considered, urgently necessary both for the study of 
 human nature as affected by the influence of climate, and
 
 i;2 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 also for the spiritual government of the world, and for 
 the direction of missions aimed at bringing barbarous 
 nations within the pale of Christian civilization, Bacon did 
 the best he could under the circumstances. He compiled 
 his geographical treatise from such sources as were avail- 
 able, taking for his basis the mathematical geography of 
 Ptolemy, and collating Ptolemy's conclusions with all the 
 information he could get from Aristotle, from the Scrip- 
 tures, from Pliny, from Seneca, from Jerome, Orosius, 
 Isidore, and other writers accessible to him. But he never 
 lost an opportunity of obtaining first-hand information 
 from travellers who had themselves seen the countries he 
 describes. 
 
 " Especially in the northern regions of Asia," he says, " I shall 
 follow the account of Brother William, whom the Lord King 
 Louis of France sent to the Tartars in the year of our Lord 1253. 
 He travelled over the regions of the north and east and the lands 
 leading to them, and he wrote of what he had seen to this 
 illustrious king. I have carefully studied his book, and have 
 conversed with its author and also with many others, who have 
 explored countries of the east and south." 
 
 Remember that all this was half a century before the time 
 of Marco Polo. 
 
 In the seventh section of the Opus Ma/us, published 
 for the first time in my edition, repeated reference is made 
 to these travels of Rubruquis. In this part of his work, 
 Bacon attempts a survey of the religions of the world, the 
 first, as I believe, that had ever been made. For this 
 purpose the Franciscan traveller supplied a mass of 
 interesting material. In and round the Tartar court at 
 Kara Korum there was a strange mixture of religions. 
 Nestorians, Christians, Jews, Mahommedans, Shamanists, 
 and Buddhists were all to be found there. On one
 
 ROGER BACON 173 
 
 occasion, as Bacon, quoting Rubruquis, tells us, the Tartar 
 Khan assembled representatives of all of them for material 
 discussion. It was a true parliament of religions. 
 
 But Bacon's geographical labours, important as they 
 were, and intensely characteristic of the man, must not 
 detain us too long. I can only refer in passing to the 
 celebrated passage (vol. i. p. 290) in which he insists that 
 the habitable portion of the globe extends much farther 
 to the east, and also much farther to the south than is 
 commonly supposed ; and that the interval between the 
 west of Spain and the eastern extremity of Asia is far 
 smaller than Ptolemy imagined. This is the passage 
 quoted by Columbus in a letter written October, 1498, to 
 Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus knew nothing of 
 Bacon ; but he quotes the passage from Pierre d'Ailly's 
 Imago Mundi ; and Pierre d'Ailly, writing 130 years after 
 Bacon's death, had copied it from the Opus Majus without 
 acknowledgment. We must pass now to other aspects of 
 Bacon's many-sided work. Many sided and various it 
 assuredly was, yet it was animated by one informing 
 principle. What he aimed at from the first, and to the 
 end, was such a reform of education in the schools of 
 Western Europe as should enable the West to hold its 
 own in its struggle with the East, and thus prepare the 
 way for the ascendency of the Catholic faith throughout 
 the habitable world. 
 
 Much has been said of late of what we owe to the 
 Arabs, in other words to the Mahommedan world, in the 
 period when scientific study was non-existent, or, if that 
 word be too strong, at any rate non-progressive and 
 stagnant, in the schools of Christendom. Much has been 
 said, but I think not nearly enough. 
 
 From the institution of the school of Bagdad early in
 
 174 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 the ninth century to the capture of Bagdad by the Tartar 
 general Houlacou in 1258, a period of more than four 
 centuries, scientific culture was carried on throughout the 
 East with restless energy. All that had been done by the 
 Greeks in Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Chemistry, 
 Natural History, the structure of the human body, became 
 accessible in Arabic. Even now there are many sections 
 of Galen's works that are only known to us through 
 translations from Arabic into Latin. The best part of 
 the work of Apollonius, the greatest after Archimedes of 
 Greek geometers, has come to us through the same source. 
 And it would be an utter mistake to suppose that all this 
 Arabic learning was mere dead erudition. It was alive, 
 and grew. The Arabic instruments of observation were 
 more precise and accurate than those of the Greeks. We 
 owe to them the adoption if not the discovery of decimal 
 notation. Albatani (Albategnius) gave new life to the 
 science of Trigonometry, and determined with nearer 
 approach to accuracy than Hipparchus the precession of 
 the equinoxes. Mahommed ben Musa laid the foundations 
 of modern Algebra ; Alhazen of Optics. To tell of Arabic 
 researches in chemistry and medicine, would need a 
 volume. 
 
 It was dimly seen by a few men in the twelfth century, 
 and by more in the thirteenth, that if Christendom were 
 to triumph over Islam it must be by spiritual not by 
 military force. Not merely in arms but in wisdom the 
 West must show itself equal and superior to the East. 
 Of such men Bacon was the foremost. His Opus Majus 
 is an appeal to the Pope to reform education, to promote 
 the new learning, and thus give efficiency to his attempts 
 to civilize and moralize the world. 
 
 Let us follow his life from the time that he left Oxford
 
 ROGER BACON 175 
 
 for Paris, shortly after 1240. In Paris he joined the 
 Franciscan order, and he obtained the degree of doctor in 
 theology. To show himself capable of taking part in 
 scholastic discussion was the first condition of obtaining a 
 hearing. In some of these scholastic controversies he 
 took a keen personal interest. In resisting all tendencies 
 towards belief in the eternity of matter and the consequent 
 identification of matter with God, he showed zeal and 
 originality. In other questions, again, notably in the 
 controversy between Nominalist and Realist, he took a 
 very moderate interest. His heart lay elsewhere in the 
 region of realities and human interests, in the study of 
 language, in mathematical research, above all in experi- 
 ment. In Paris he came into contact with Peter Maricourt, 
 known as Peter Peregrinus, an obscure enquirer into 
 nature, whom he rated above all the celebrities of his time. 
 Let us see what Bacon thought of him ; it will throw light 
 on Bacon. 
 
 " One man," he says, " and one only there is who can be 
 praised for his achievements in experimental science. Of dis- 
 courses and battles of words he takes no heed. He follows the 
 works of wisdom, and in these finds rest. What others strive to 
 see dimly and blindly he gazes at in the full light of day, because 
 he is a master of experiment. Through experiment he gains 
 knowledge of natural things, medical, chemical, indeed of every- 
 thing in the heavens or earth. He is ashamed that things should 
 be known to laymen, old women, soldiers, ploughmen, of which 
 he is ignorant. Therefore he has looked closely into the doings 
 of those who work in metals and minerals of all kinds : he knows 
 everything relating to the art of war, the making of weapons and 
 the chase ; he has studied agriculture, mensuration, farming work ; 
 he has even taken note of the remedies, lot-casting and charms 
 used by old women and wizards, and of the deceptions and 
 devices of conjurers, so that nothing which deserves enquiry should 
 escape him, and that he may be able to expose the falsehoods of
 
 1/6 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 magicians. If philosophy is to be carried to its perfection, and is 
 to be handled with utility and certainty, his aid is indispensable. 
 As for reward he neither receives nor seeks it." 
 
 Bacon goes on to say that he was engaged in the con- 
 struction of concave mirrors capable of producing com- 
 bustion at a given distance. From the one writing of 
 Peter Peregrinus that has survived, his letter to Sygermus 
 of Fontancourt, we know that his speculations on magne- 
 tism had great influence on those of Gilbert three centuries 
 afterwards. While talking to this obscure experimenter, 
 Bacon was breathing a very different atmosphere from 
 that of the schools of Paris and Oxford. We can under- 
 stand the outburst which we find very early in Opus 
 Majus (i. 10). 
 
 " The wiser men are," he says, " the more humbly will they 
 submit to leam from others : they do not disdain the simplicity of 
 those who teach them: they are willing to lower themselves to 
 the level of the husbandmen, of poor women, of children. Many 
 things are known to the simple and unlearned which escape the 
 knowledge of the wise. I have learnt more important truth 
 beyond comparison from men of humble station who are not 
 named in the schools than from all the famous doctors. Let no 
 man therefore boast of his wisdom or look down on the lowly, 
 who have knowledge of many secret things which God has not 
 shown to those renowned for wisdom." 
 
 There spoke the true son of St. Francis ! 
 
 Bacon's years of work were spent between Oxford and 
 Paris : we cannot tell precisely in what proportions. We 
 know that he was in France in 1251, when the leader of 
 the Pastoureaux passed from Picardy through Paris and 
 Orleans. After then he spent : probably a few years in 
 Oxford ; and there we may imagine him observing the 
 stars, using his astronomical and mathematical knowledge
 
 ROGER BACON 177 
 
 to "correct the Calendar, making chemical and physical 
 experiments, learning Hebrew from Jews, and Greek from 
 the foreigners who had come to England on Grosseteste's 
 invitation, striving to inspire young students with his own 
 thirst for knowledge, and listening always to the talk of 
 plain men and women about their ways of life. 
 
 His reputation grew rapidly ; too rapidly for his 
 personal comfort. In 1257 Bonaventura became general 
 of the Franciscans, succeeding John of Parma, as to whose 
 orthodoxy there had been many doubts. It may well be 
 that those doubts extended to Bacon. In any case it seems 
 that Bacon was removed from Oxford at this time, and 
 placed under some degree of supervision in the Franciscan 
 house at Paris. He speaks of it ten years afterwards as 
 an exile; though the restrictions on his personal liberty 
 do not seem to have been severe. Either in England or 
 in France he came into contact with Guy de Foulques, 
 Cardinal Bishop of Sabina, who was sent, in 1264, by 
 Pope Urban IV. on a fruitless mission of meditation 
 between Henry III. and his barons. In 1265 this Cardinal 
 became Pope Clement IV., and in the following year a 
 letter reached Bacon from the Pope requiring him to send 
 him a fair copy of his writings, all orders to the contrary 
 from his superiors notwithstanding ; ordering him at the 
 same time to set down in writing what were the remedies 
 proposed for the dangers of which he had spoken. From 
 this letter, which is preserved in the Papal archives, where 
 I have myself seen it, it appears that Bacon had already 
 put himself in communication with Clement, both before 
 and after his elevation to the Papacy. 
 
 We owe to it the Opus Majus ; and also the supple- 
 mentary treatises edited in 1859 by Professor Brewer. 
 Till that message reached him Bacon had written very 
 
 N
 
 i;8 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 little. He had no money ; and he could only write when 
 his superiors were willing to supply him with parchment. 
 On this occasion, being fortified by the supreme authority 
 of the Pope, he applied to his family for money ; but they 
 were on the King's side in the Civil War, and were ruined 
 or banished. How he overcame the difficulty we do not 
 know ; it is very likely that friendly Jews supplied the 
 money. By hook or crook the expensive writing material 
 was obtained ; and within the space of a little more than 
 a year from the receipt of the Pope's letter, the Opus 
 Majus and its supplements (known as Opus Minus and 
 Opus Tertium) were written and preserved for ever to the 
 world as inestimable documents for the history of Science. 
 Whether they ever reached Clement IV. and what reception 
 they met with, we do not know. Clement died in 1268. 
 There was a long papal interregnum. We have not the 
 original MSS., but paleographists tell us that of the two 
 MSS. now extant, one was written in Bacon's lifetime, 
 and one a very few years afterwards. 
 
 During the seven or eight years that followed, until the 
 death of Bonaventura in 1274, it would seem that Bacon 
 was unmolested. He passed them in preparing a much 
 larger work of which he often speaks in the Opus Majus 
 as Scriptura principalis. It was an encyclopaedia of 
 philology and science of which important fragments have 
 come down to us, but which was probably never finished. 
 In 1271 he wrote the preamble to this work, published by 
 Professor Brewer under the title Compendium Studii. It 
 contains a reiteration of much that he had said before in 
 the first, the third, and the seventh sections of the Opus 
 Ma/us, with even fiercer denunciations of the corruptions 
 of the Church, and bolder assertions of the connection of 
 intellectual darkness with moral degradation. The four
 
 ROGER BACON 179 
 
 causes of error with which the Opus Majus begins are 
 again indicated blind deference to authority ; popular 
 prejudice ; the influence of habit ; and worst of all, the 
 false conceit of wisdom, involving presumption of know- 
 ledge, and concealment of ignorance. He points out in 
 detail how each of the seven deadly sins pride, envy, anger, 
 avarice, sloth, lust, gluttony, intensifies these intellectual 
 evils. 
 
 Throughout his discourse there runs a tone of something 
 like despair. The gleam of hope that shone upon his 
 life and work when Pope Clement had sent his stimulating 
 letter was lost in the clouds. Clement died in 1268, and 
 for nearly three years the world had been left without a 
 Pope. In the very year in which he was writing, prominent 
 teachers of theology had been expelled from Paris for 
 infamous offences. 
 
 His thoughts go back longingly to the teachers and 
 comrades of his youth, Grosseteste, Adam Marsh, Thomas 
 of St. David's, William Sherwood. But none such are now, 
 he says, to be found among the secular clergy ; they have 
 been wrangling for the last twenty years with the regulars ; 
 and even these are not much better. Mere boys are 
 allowed to enter the two mendicant orders, and without 
 any scientific preparations become doctors of theology. 
 The moral standard of Christians has fallen far below 
 that of heathen philosophers, as any one may see for him- 
 self who reads Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Avicenna or 
 Alfarabrius. 
 
 Throughout the first half of the thirteenth century, there 
 hovered over the spiritual world a marvellous dream that 
 a new period in the history of man was at hand ; and that 
 as the reign of the second Person of the Trinity had 
 followed on that of the first, so now the reign of the Spirit
 
 i8o COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 was to come. But the year foretold for the first beginnings 
 of this new time, 1260, had long past, and no sign of it 
 appeared. A sterner and darker future loomed before 
 Bacon's vision : the coming of Antichrist. 
 
 " So far has the Church wandered from the truth," he says, not 
 once but many times, "that needs must that Antichrist shall 
 come, who with those who belong to him will be destroyed by the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, and truth shall again shine upon the world." 
 
 " Punishment may be long delayed," he says elsewhere (Brewer, 
 p. 403), " but it comes at last. As the Jews when their cup of 
 iniquity was full were uprooted by Titus, so with the Christian 
 Church. Either a Great Pope and a great Emperor will unite the 
 spiritual and temporal power to purge the Church, or Antichrist 
 will come, favoured by the discord of Christian princes and the 
 invasion of Tartars and Saracens ; in one of these ways the church 
 must be purged, though in which we cannot tell." 
 
 In 1274 Bonaventura died, and Jerome of Ascoli, a very 
 different man, became general of the Franciscans. Four 
 years afterwards, when Jerome was in Paris, Bacon was 
 brought before him for judgment. We learn from the 
 chronicle of the twenty-four Generals preserved at Assisi 
 that Jerome 
 
 " by the advice of many of the brothers condemned and denounced 
 the doctrine of Roger Bacon the Englishman, master of theology, 
 containing certain suspicious novelties ; for which the said Roger 
 was condemned to prison, with order given to all the brethren 
 that none should hold his doctrine, but avoid it as reprobated by 
 the order. He wrote moreover to the Lord Pope Nicholas III. 
 so that by his authority this perilous doctrine might be altogether 
 silenced." 
 
 Which were the novelties thought worthy of condemnation 
 we cannot tell. There were plenty to choose from. His 
 reprobation of the false conceit of knowledge was the real 
 grievance, as it was with Socrates.
 
 ROGER BACON 181 
 
 Bacon's career was at an end. He was released pro- 
 bably in 1292, fourteen years afterwards; when Raymond 
 Gaufredi became general of the order. In that year we 
 know, for he gives us the date, that he was writing a 
 theological treatise. There is a flash or two of the old 
 fire, as in his denunciation of the pedantic scholasticism 
 of Richard of Cornwall ; but on the whole we must call 
 it telum imbelle sine ictu. The fourth cause of error, " false 
 conceit of knowledge," outweighing in its noxious qualities 
 the other three, is conspicuous by its absence. He is said 
 to have been buried in the Franciscan church in Oxford. 
 Somewhere in St. Ebbes we may hope that some day a 
 statue will be raised to him. 
 
 But it is time to go back to the main purpose of Bacon's 
 life, and sum up its results. His purpose, as we have seen, 
 was to institute under papal authority a school of scientific 
 and progressive culture that should enable the West to 
 hold its own against the East, and thus promote the work 
 of the Church in civilizing and evangelizing mankind. We 
 should wholly misconceive him, such at least is my firm 
 belief, if we supposed that his language on this matter 
 was a veil beneath which heterodox speculation might be 
 allowed to pass. He was not merely orthodox in the 
 common acceptation of the word, but intensely papal. 
 The Popes of his time, and of the century before him, 
 were great spiritual rulers; and such harmony between 
 the Western nations as existed was preserved by their 
 authority. Bacon did not live to see Boniface. With the 
 downfall of an independent papacy in the fourteenth and 
 fifteenth centuries, a wave of barbarism and darkness 
 swept over North-Western Europe. One of its results 
 was the hundred years' war. Nobody thought then of 
 studying Greek in Oxford, or in Paris either.
 
 i82 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 We have to look on Bacon, not as a pure speculative 
 thinker following obscure and special lines of research for 
 the intellectual satisfaction which they conveyed, but as 
 an orthodox and enthusiastic Catholic, convinced that the 
 limits of orthodoxy needed and were capable of enlarge- 
 ment, that Catholic truth and scientific truth were alike 
 revelations proceeding from the same source, and con- 
 verging to the same end ; that scientific truth was always 
 growing ; and that the worst enemies of the human race 
 were those who thought they possessed the whole of it. 
 This is the essential purport of the first two sections of 
 the Opus Majus. Of the four great obstacles to wisdom, 
 undue deference to authority, custom, popular prejudice, 
 were bad enough ; but they were as nothing to the fourth, 
 unwillingness to confess ignorance, false conceit of the 
 knowledge we happen to possess. To this it is due that 
 all new truth coming into the world meets with obstinate 
 resistance. Moses found it so with the Egyptians ; so it 
 was with the Apostles, with Jerome, with Gregory. And 
 with philosophers it has been the same thing. Aristotle 
 was never recognized till Avicenna and Averroes revealed 
 his greatness ; and even in our own time, he remarks, we 
 have seen all three of them condemned in Paris. Let us 
 never be afraid of knowledge. What we know will always 
 be the smallest fraction of what remains unknown. " None 
 is so wise in natural things as to tell all the truths as to 
 the nature and qualities of one poor fly, to explain why it 
 is of such a colour, why its limbs are what they are, and 
 not more nor less." 
 
 In pursuing his purpose of advancing the studies of 
 Western Europe, Bacon relied on three instruments : 
 Philology, Mathematics, Experimental Research. To those 
 subjects the third, fourth, fifth and sixth sections of the
 
 ROGER BACON 183 
 
 Opus Majus are devoted. By Philology Bacon meant the 
 study of languages other than Latin ; and, notably, Greek, 
 Hebrew, Arabic. He had no notion of recommending 
 the study of languages as a mental discipline. That 
 theory, be it good or bad, is of far later date. Possibly 
 indeed some of its developments might have been classed 
 by Bacon under his fourth Cause of Error. He simply 
 observes that the original sources of our knowledge are in 
 no case Latin, but always Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic. If 
 the study of the Scriptures and of philosophy is to advance, 
 it must be carried on not in Latin translation, but in the 
 original. He fills this section of his work with illustrations 
 of the blunders made by Aristotelian and Biblical com- 
 mentators who knew nothing of Greek or Hebrew. To 
 stimulate his reader, he supplies a copy of the Greek and 
 Hebrew alphabets. Ultimately he wrote a grammar of 
 both languages, of which the fragments that remain were 
 published in 1902 by the Cambridge Press. It was not 
 merely for the sake of Biblical and philosophic culture 
 that he advocated the study of language. It was needed 
 for our commerce in the Mediterranean, where the want 
 of it involved our traders in heavy losses. It was needed 
 still more for foreign missions, and for papal diplomacy 
 with the East When the Sultan of Babylon sent a letter 
 in Arabic to Saint Louis, not a single man, he tells us, 
 could be found in the University of Paris to decipher or 
 answer the letter. 
 
 The fourth and fifth sections of the Opus Majus con- 
 taining Bacon's work on Mathematics and Optics occupy 
 about half the work. There is but little that I can say 
 about them usefully in the short space that remains. 
 Mathematics he tells us is the key and the entrance-gate 
 of science. It is the type of certainty, the touch-stone
 
 1 84 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 which distinguishes knowledge from ignorance. Of his 
 application of Mathematics to Geography I have already 
 spoken. Another large sub-section relates to the reform 
 of the Julian Calendar, which as he shows made the year 
 too long by the T of a day, and therefore in the thirteenth 
 century was ten days wrong. This part of his work 
 endured. Paul of Middleburg copied much of it, though 
 without acknowledgment, two centuries afterwards ; and 
 through him it passed to Copernicus. Three centuries 
 after Bacon's death the reform was accomplished ; though, 
 alas ! not in this country, which, owing to antipapal contro- 
 versies, had to wait for it yet another two centuries. 
 
 More important than any special discoveries or in- 
 ventions are his conceptions of the radiation of force 
 through space, some of which seem not indeed to antici- 
 pate, but to possess kinship with the most striking achieve- 
 ments of our own time. I have shown in the notes to my 
 edition of the Opus Majus that in his view the propagation 
 of force consisted not in emission of particles, as in 
 Newton's theory of light, but in setting up a disturbance 
 in the medium successively transmitted to new portions 
 of it. In other words, light and heat were not emissions 
 of substance but a train of undulations. He gave con- 
 clusive reasons for believing that passage of light through 
 space was not instantaneous, but occupied time ; though 
 by man's imperfect sense the time was inappreciable. To 
 the second Bacon, this supposition seemed monstrous. 
 Further he conceives of many radiations of which the 
 senses of man unaided were unable to take cognizance. 
 But all these mathematical conceptions of force, however 
 valid, were to be controlled and tested by direct observa- 
 tions and experiment. To experimental science the sixth 
 section of the work is devoted, though it had, of course,
 
 ROGER BACON 185 
 
 been abundantly illustrated by the previous section on 
 Optics. It is this combination of mathematical with 
 experimental method that marks the difference between 
 Roger Bacon and the more famous author of the Novum 
 Organum. Francis Bacon speaks of mathematics as he 
 speaks of Aristotle, with scornful irony. Roger Bacon 
 believes mathematics to be absolutely necessary for sound 
 views of nature, and at the same time to be by itself 
 utterly insufficient. Aristotle and the mathematicians, he 
 said, may supply certain general principles of research. 
 But their verification must be sought in special sciences 
 (scientia particularis), in optics, in chemistry (alkimia 
 speculative^, in the study of plants and animals (agrwtltura), 
 and generally in experimental research. Without this the 
 natural philosopher will be midus, he says: unequipped. 
 His work will be a mere collection of deductions from 
 a few abstract, remote, and undeveloped principles. (See 
 Opus Majus, vol. iii. pp. 184-5.) 
 
 Something should be said of his anticipation of the 
 physical and mechanical discoveries of later centuries. 
 Bacon did not invent the telescope any more than he 
 invented the steamboat or the locomotive or the flying- 
 machine. But his scientific imagination gave him an 
 astonishingly clear forecast of all these things. What may 
 be said of him is that he set the world upon the right track 
 towards their discovery ; experiment and observation 
 combined with mathematics, when mathematics were 
 available and when they were not available, then experi- 
 ment and observation pursued alone. Much of what he 
 says on these things was learnt in the workshop of Peter 
 Peregrinus. 
 
 The seventh section of the Opus Majus is the crowning 
 of the work. Its entire omission from the first printed
 
 1 86 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 edition has entirely vitiated the popular conception of 
 Bacon. Let us see what he says of it in the opening 
 sentences. 
 
 " I have dealt," he says, " with the study of languages, with 
 mathematics, optics, and experimental science, and have shown 
 how necessary they are in the pursuit of wisdom. I now proceed to 
 a fourth science of greater value than these, the science of human 
 conduct. We leave the region of theory, we enter the domain of 
 practice. For though many of the foregoing sciences deal with 
 practical operations, yet they do so in subordination to theoretical 
 reason. This science deals with practical reason. It is the 
 practicable science par excellence (autonomatice) which teaches us 
 the ways of good and evil." 
 
 This section consisted of six parts, of which only the 
 first four have been preserved. In the first he discussed 
 the relation of Moral Philosophy to Christian Theology. 
 Anticipations of Christian doctrine of non-Christian philo- 
 sophers form the main subject. This line of thought had, 
 as we know already, been taken by Augustine, and was 
 familiar to the schoolmen of the thirteenth century, notably 
 to Aquinas. But it was carried on by Bacon much further 
 than by others. Not merely are Greek and Latin thinkers 
 pressed into the service, such as Socrates, Democritus, 
 Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Porphyry, but the 
 same use is made of Mohammedan philosophers such as 
 Algazel, Albumazar, and above all of Avicenna. 
 
 The second treats in a very brief way of the bonds of 
 social life. There is nothing at all corresponding to 
 Aquinas's admirable discussion of the virtue of justice. 
 
 The third part is devoted to individual morality, and is 
 extremely full. Here as elsewhere he dwells at length on 
 the value of heathen writers, and to the shortcomings of 
 his own time from their standard.
 
 ROGER BACON 187 
 
 " In the virtues of faith, hope and charity much," he says, " is 
 open for us of which they knew nothing. But in the virtues which 
 are needed by all of us for nobleness of life, and for intercourse of 
 man with man, we are inferior to them in speech, and we are less 
 effective in deed. This is deeply disgraceful to us and deserves 
 our scorn." 
 
 His chief authorities on this branch of the subject 
 are Aristotle's Ethics, Cicero, and Seneca. He shows 
 successively how each of the seven deadly sins had been 
 condemned by these moralists. The discussion of Anger, 
 on which Seneca had dilated so largely, leads him to speak 
 at great length of the moral states opposed to anger: 
 resignation under calamity, and forgiveness of personal 
 injury. Here again he takes Seneca for his guide, adopt- 
 ing the mediaeval legend that between Seneca and St. Paul 
 there had been friendly intercourse. 
 
 The fourth part of this section presents Bacon's survey 
 of the religions of the world, and his reasons for preferring 
 Christianity. He refers as I have already said, to the 
 parliament of religions held in Siberia by Mangu Khan in 
 which the Franciscan Missionary Rubriquis bore a part 
 
 Let us sum up in a word the scheme proposed in the 
 thirteenth century by this extraordinary and neglected 
 thinker to the ruler of Christendom. It included a school 
 of Greek and Oriental philology, mathematics in its 
 broadest acceptation, experimental science : the whole in 
 subordination to the highest ethical purpose known to 
 mankind. Surely a large and comprehensive scheme of 
 study. When was this vision realized ? Not in the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries : for the downfall of the 
 papacy left the Western nations free to wrangle, and 
 England and France were darkened by a hundred years 
 of war. Not even in the brilliant revival of scholarship
 
 188 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 and science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
 was their social purpose so fully recognized as Roger Bacon 
 would have hoped. Immense strides have been taken 
 in our own days towards the accumulations of linguistic 
 and scientific knowledge. The increasing speciality of 
 scientific research opposes a formidable barrier to the 
 synthetic scheme, toward which Bacon aspired. Never- 
 theless I retain the firm conviction that the barrier will be 
 passed ; and that Bacon's vision will be realized in the 
 twentieth century, though not perhaps in the precise way 
 which he had imagined.
 
 Ill 
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS* 
 
 WITHIN a few days of Shakespeare's death William 
 Harvey, physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, opened 
 his course of lectures as Professor of Anatomy and Surgery 
 at this College. f The rough notes used by him in these 
 lectures were published a few years ago by the College in 
 facsimile, and few documents of greater importance for the 
 history of European science have been given to the world 
 in the present century. For not merely do we find in it 
 clear proof of the completeness of Harvey's great discovery 
 
 * The Harveian Oration, delivered at the Royal College of 
 Physicians, October 18, 1892. Reprinted by kind permission of 
 Messrs. Macmillan and Co. 
 
 fit were to be wished that Shakespeare's appearance were as well 
 known to us as Harvey's ; for there are many portraits of the great 
 biologist besides that which faces the Harveian orator in the library 
 of the College. These represent him at a somewhat advanced age. 
 The two at Merton College or, at least, that in the Warden's house 
 show him, probably, as he was in 1645-6, during his year of 
 Wardenship. He was then sixty-seven years old. Of the fine portrait 
 in the possession of the Master of University College, Oxford, inherited 
 from his father, Dr. Richard Bright, I have the following description, 
 kindly sent to me by its owner : " It represents Harvey with iron-grey 
 hair, with a small, drawn, pointed face, with good strong brow and 
 forehead, and rather delicate mouth : no sign at all of roundness. It 
 is a remarkably thoughtful, almost suffering, face. The hands are 
 singularly delicate, most beautifully painted, and with a good deal of 
 character." 
 
 But in 1616 we may well believe that Harvey had the raven-black 
 hair, vivid eye, and animated gesture, though not the " round face " 
 of which Aubrey speaks. (See Willis's Life of Harvey^ ed. 1847, 
 p. Ixxv.) 
 
 189
 
 190 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 twelve years before the accepted date of its publication, 
 but it opens a window through which we may watch the 
 workings of a powerful and most original mind, and appre- 
 ciate the breadth with which at a most critical period of 
 scientific history he handled the problems of life. 
 
 In appreciating the life of a great man, as in that of 
 the humblest protozoon, we have to bear in mind the 
 essential fact of life first propounded by Comte, and subse- 
 quently illustrated with such fulness by Herbert Spencer, 
 that it is a mutual action, ever tending to adjustment, 
 between organism and environment. The environment of 
 higher organisms, no longer limited to the contact of sur- 
 rounding particles, embraces all the social and intellectual 
 influences to which a highly organized brain may be 
 sensitive. Estimated in this sense, what was the environ- 
 ment of Harvey ? He was born at the greatest period of 
 English history, not that of her world-wide empire, of her 
 enormous wealth, of her crowded population, but the period 
 in which she gave birth to her greatest men. Within the 
 compass of Harvey's life there lived on this island Shake- 
 speare, Spenser, and the galaxy of Elizabethan dramatists, 
 followed by the great epic poet, who was in his prime 
 when Harvey died. In philosophy there were Bacon, 
 Hobbes, Locke. In science there were Napier and Briggs, 
 the inventors of logarithms ; Harriot, the forerunner of the 
 mathematical revolution of Descartes ; Wallis, the alge- 
 braical precursor of Newton ; Gilbert, the founder of 
 magnetic science ; and that most fertile and ingenious 
 of physicists, Robert Boyle. If statesmanship were in 
 question, it would be sufficient to name Elizabeth and 
 Cromwell. 
 
 Passing from England to the Continent, we may say that 
 Harvey was born into the full splendour of the philosophical
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 191 
 
 and scientific Renascence. In art the Renascence had set 
 in a century before, under Ariosto, Raphael, Da Vinci, 
 and others. The awakening of science was not slow to 
 follow. Thirty years before Harvey's birth, the Revolu- 
 tions of Celestial Bodies had been published in the last 
 month of its author's life. The work of Copernicus was 
 carried on during Harvey's youth by Tycho Brahe" and 
 Kepler. The cometary genius of Bruno was flashing 
 through the universities of Europe, preaching the gospel 
 of the new astronomy ; and with a yet greater man than 
 these the young Harvey was brought into near contact. 
 
 In 1597 Harvey took his degree at Cambridge, at that 
 time a school of no great importance ; in the following 
 year he went to Padua, and studied under one of the 
 greatest among the many great anatomists of that century 
 and country, Fabricius of Acquapendente. Six years 
 before this time a young man had been appointed to the 
 professorship of mathematics in that university who was to 
 open a new epoch in European thought. Galileo Galilei 
 had already made his mark in his native city of Pisa. He 
 had studied medicine under Cesalpino, chafing, no doubt, 
 under his interminable pedantries. He had made his 
 brilliant discovery of the equality of time in the oscilla- 
 tions of the pendulum, and had applied that discovery, by 
 a pendulum of suitable length, to the study of the speed 
 and regularity of the pulse ; the first instrument perhaps 
 ever constructed for the precise observation of phenomena 
 in a living organism. He had already done fierce battle 
 with the powers of darkness in attacking the petrified 
 philosophy that was called Aristotelian, and in laying the 
 foundation of the true science of motion. The mathe- 
 matics in which he was interested were applied mathe- 
 matics, the interpretation and measurement of physical
 
 192 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 forces. From the beginning to the end of his life his 
 unfailing conviction was that the phenomena of motion 
 and energy which constituted the world were calculable 
 quantities. The very use of the word " mechanics " to 
 denote the abstract sciences of static and dynamic dates 
 from his treatise, published in 1593, on the Utility of the 
 Scientific Study of Machines. In this work the great 
 modern conception of the conservation of energy is, I 
 believe for the first time, traceable in his discussion of the 
 paradox that the smaller weight on the longer arm of the 
 lever balanced the heavier weight on the shorter one. 
 " Philosophy," he said, " is written in the great book of the 
 universe, which lies always open ; but we must first under- 
 stand the language and the character in which it is 
 written ; that language is mathematics. Without it we 
 cannot understand the words, and wander through a dark 
 labyrinth without a clue." 
 
 His lecture-hall in Padua held two thousand students, 
 and was crowded with strangers from every part of Europe. 
 He had the art of forming a school and of attracting young 
 men round him. Torricelli, the first measurer of atmo- 
 spheric pressure, was one of his pupils. The thermometer, 
 first invented by Galileo himself in an imperfect form, was 
 completed by another pupil shortly afterwards. Of the 
 telescope I need not speak ; and again it must be repeated 
 that Galileo took the first step to that all-important con- 
 dition of science the precise measurement of time. In a 
 word, the science of physics was founded by Galileo. 
 
 Of personal intercourse between Galileo and Harvey 
 we have no record, but that the influence of his mighty 
 genius is to be taken into account as one of the incidental 
 forces which moulded his mind there can be no doubt 
 whatever. He came back from Padua with the sense that
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 193 
 
 nature was not merely to be observed, but measured. He 
 had imbibed elementary truths as to motion and energy 
 which stood him in good stead when he began himself to 
 think on the mechanism of the human body. 
 
 Let us briefly review the condition of biological science 
 at the close of the sixteenth century. It may be summed 
 up in one sentence an advanced state of descriptive 
 anatomy ; hopeless confusion as to the functions of the 
 organs described. The debt we owe to the descriptive 
 anatomists of the sixteenth century has perhaps never 
 been adequately recognized ; though Vesalius, Eustachius, 
 Fallopius, and others have left their names inscribed on 
 various structures of the human body. They were the 
 worthy successors of Galen, whose works are themselves 
 a cyclopaedia of the anatomical and medical knowledge 
 gained in the schools of Alexandria, enlarged by his own 
 observations and experiments. In the schools of Padua, 
 Bologna, and Pisa every part of the body was dissected 
 and scrutinized as minutely as was possible before the 
 invention of the microscope, and none more minutely than 
 the heart. 
 
 But with regard to the functions of these organs, the 
 confusion of men's minds was complete and seemingly 
 hopeless. Physiological science was far below the level at 
 which Galen had left it. Galen was a strictly scientific 
 observer and thinker, inheriting the results of six centuries 
 of Greek inquiry, from Hippocrates onwards, and pushing 
 them forward with marvellous zeal. In the thirteenth 
 century the great schoolmen notably, Albertus Magnus 
 and Roger Bacon had shown themselves his worthy 
 successors. They brought Aristotle's scientific researches 
 into prominence, and held them up as models for imitation. 
 Afterwards came a time of stagnation and retrogression. 
 
 O
 
 194 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 For several generations the professorial chairs of Europe 
 were filled by men who worshipped Aristotle not as a 
 keen observer of nature and a progressive thinker, but as 
 an inspired prophet who saved them the trouble of think- 
 ing. Even their Greek science they read backwards. If 
 Galen in the second century A.D. differed from Aristotle in 
 the fourth century B.C., so much the worse for Galen. 
 Thus, for instance, we find the man who is sometimes held 
 up to us as the true discoverer of the circulation Cesalpino 
 of Pisa rejecting Galen's admirable investigations into 
 the nervous system, and reverting to the curious doctrine 
 of Aristotle, that the brain was a refrigerator of the blood 
 which had been raised to boiling-point in the heart. 
 Similarly on respiration, where Galen's views, though very 
 imperfect, were far less wide of the mark than Aristotle's, 
 Cesalpino had no hesitation in following Aristotle rather 
 than Galen. Pedantry, obscurantism, indolence account 
 for much of this, but not for the whole. The doctrines of 
 the Church had become inseparably intertwined with 
 Aristotelian metaphysic and logic. To assault Aristotle 
 was to proclaim yourself a heretic. 
 
 Now, by Aristotle and all his successors the heart was 
 regarded as a furnace, or at least a reservoir of heat, by 
 the agency of which animal heat was maintained and the 
 food was concocted. It was regarded also by Aristotle, 
 though not by Galen, as the sensorium commune ; it was 
 the first organ that arose in the embryo, it was the last to 
 die ; it supplied the tissues with that which made them 
 sensitive. In the fifth of the Peripatetic Discussions of 
 Cesalpino (sect. 4), we have the following thesis maintained. 
 The soul, he says, is not made up of separate parts, each 
 residing in a separate organ ; nor does the whole soul 
 reside in the whole body, but the whole soul resides in the
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 195 
 
 heart. He quotes with approbation the view of Aristotle 
 that the animal is a commonwealth of organs, the soul 
 being the ruler of that commonwealth. The heart is the 
 soul's court ; and as in a community all things are done 
 by the soul's decree, though the king does not intervene 
 in each detail, so do all organs live by virtue proceeding 
 into them from the heart. For instance, in the function 
 of respiration, the beginning of the series of actions con- 
 cerned is the heart's heat. The blood boiling up in the 
 heart not merely dilates the heart and so produces the 
 pulse, but it dilates the lungs also by sending into them 
 a continual stream of heated blood. The lungs being thus 
 enlarged, it follows that external air streams in through 
 the bronchi, and this we call inspiration. Thence results 
 a cooling of the blood and a diminution of its bulk, as 
 when drops of cold water fall on boiling oil. The lungs 
 collapse and air is given out. This we call expiration. 
 The heart's heat is thus the initial force in respiration. 
 
 The whole of this alchemistic apparatus set up inside 
 man's body, the heart boiling the blood to the point of 
 evaporation, the subtler spirit thus produced condensed in 
 the cooling chamber of the brain and issuing from it in the 
 form of nerves, the lungs acting as an additional cooler, so 
 that the part of the blood which remained liquid might be 
 brought to the right temperature all this confused and 
 complicated fabric melted away as a morning mist before 
 the touch of positive science applied by Galileo to inorganic 
 matter and by Harvey to living organisms. 
 
 Let us not be unjust to Harvey's predecessors. It is 
 quite true, and it should never be forgotten, that certain 
 partial anticipations of his discovery had been made in 
 the sixteenth century. By Servetus and by Colombo the 
 transit of the blood from the right ventricle through the
 
 196 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 lungs to the left side of the heart had been distinctly put 
 forward as the most probable hypothesis ; and it is also 
 true that Cesalpino had shown that, in consequence of the 
 arrangement of the mitral and the aortic valves, the flow 
 of blood was from the left ventricle towards the various 
 organs of the body. I quote his actual words 
 
 " There is a motion from the veins into the heart while its 
 heat draws in aliment ; and at the same time there is a motion 
 from the heart into the arteries, because, owing to the position of 
 the valves, the blood cannot flow in any other way, for the same 
 motion opens both apertures that of the vein into the heart, that 
 of the heart into the arteries." * 
 
 Combining the view of Servetus and Colombo with 
 that of Cesalpino, it might seem that a true and complete 
 conception of the course taken by the blood would be 
 reached ; but, as a matter of fact, by no physician or 
 anatomist of the sixteenth century were they at any 
 moment so combined. Cesalpino was aware, indeed, of 
 Colombo's hypothesis, which may be found stated, as Sir 
 G. Johnson has shown, in two passages of his works. But 
 these passages are entirely dissociated from the foregoing 
 quotation. For a coherent view of the movement of the 
 blood as a whole we may search in vain. The substantial 
 identity of the fluid moving through the vascular system 
 was never grasped by him or by any one else. There 
 were, men thought, two kinds of blood one which was 
 perpetually being manufactured in the liver and thence 
 sent to the right side of the heart as fuel or aliment for 
 the heart to work upon ; the other was the concocted fluid 
 
 * See Cesalpino, Quastiones Peripatetics, lib. v., sect. 5. This 
 work was published in Florence, 1569. For a fuller discussion of this 
 part of the subject the Harveian oration of Sir George Johnson in 1883 
 should be consulted.
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 197 
 
 flowing from the heart to the tissues, part of it having 
 passed to the lungs for cooling purposes, and part filtering 
 through the partition wall dividing the right side of the 
 heart from the left. When we leave the consideration of 
 the motion of the blood and turn to that of the motion of 
 the heart, we find Cesalpino, like all his predecessors, 
 hopelessly in error. In his view the expansion of the 
 heart with blood was the efficient cause of the blood's 
 motion, this being produced, as we have seen, by the 
 boiling up of the blood when exposed to the imaginary 
 heat residing in the heart. He insists emphatically that 
 the contraction of the heart was a mere collapse due to a 
 temporary cessation of the boiling process. In death the 
 collapse, he remarks, is complete ; in the moribund it is 
 nearly complete. To attribute any expulsive force to the 
 heart in this condition would therefore be out of the 
 question. Thus the pulse results not from systole, but 
 from diastole. Indeed, the consideration of the pulse is 
 the main subject in this chapter of Cesalpino, the question 
 of the heart and its motions being quite secondary. It 
 may be stated broadly that the conception of a complete 
 circulation of the blood and the conception of the heart as 
 a contractile organ exercising mechanical energy were alike 
 foreign to him. 
 
 Nothing is more interesting than the vivid, pithy way 
 in which the true view both of the heart and of the blood 
 is expressed in Harvey's MS. notes. " The heart, when 
 contracting, moves like a muscle," he says. "By the 
 impulse of the heart there is a perpetual movement of the 
 blood in a circle." Again, if I may quote the quaint 
 mixture of Latin and English, " Constat per fabricam 
 cordis sanguinem per pulmones in aortam transferri as by 
 two clacks of a water-bellows to rayse water." The
 
 198 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 imaginary furnace that had been set up for so many 
 centuries within the human thorax disappeared, and in its 
 place there was an organ of definite construction, com- 
 parable with one of Galileo's machines, exercising a 
 measurable amount of energy. 
 
 The overwhelming importance of Harvey's researches, 
 the feature that marks them as an epoch in the history 
 of modern science, is the positivity of their method. We 
 pass from metaphysical haze into an atmosphere of reality, 
 utility, certainty and precision. He uses every method of 
 biological research, direct observation and measurement, 
 experiment, and, above all, the great Aristotelian method 
 of comparison ; an instrument of research created, so to 
 speak, by biology, and one so potent in every branch of 
 scientific investigation that, apart altogether from its 
 application to medicine, the science of biology would 
 deserve all the pains that have been spent upon it. It is 
 to the use of the comparative method that Harvey himself 
 explicitly attributes his success ; yet to what an extent he 
 used it could hardly be appreciated till the publication of 
 the notes of his lectures. In these the anatomy of eighty 
 animals examined by himself is referred to. 
 
 It has sometimes been said, especially of late years, 
 that experimentation on living animals was the process 
 through which Harvey's discovery was achieved ; but this, 
 though it has been used as a potent argument before an 
 uninstructed public, has always appeared to me an 
 exaggerated view. I am not about to enter, even in the 
 most cursory way, into the ethics of the subject. It was 
 not imagined in Harvey's time that any ethical problem 
 was involved in it. So far as I can find, the first to 
 recognize the existence of such a problem, and to dis- 
 tinguish himself from his contemporaries by voluntarily
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 199 
 
 accepting a certain measure of parsimony and restraint in 
 experiments on living animals, was that great and successful 
 experimenter, deep thinker and humane man, Sir Charles 
 Bell.* 
 
 But the question by what methods the discovery of the 
 circulation was reached is one for the dry light of historical 
 research. Harvey's MS. notes show, even more emphati- 
 cally than his published work, that direct observation of 
 the pulsating heart in the higher vertebrates taught him 
 but little. "Neque visu neque tactu" are his emphatic 
 words in these notes; "I could not follow the heart's 
 motions by sight or by touch, though I watched them for 
 hours together. Videte quam arduum et difficile dis- 
 cernere ; see," he says, pointing at the moment to the 
 experiment he was performing, "see how hard it is to 
 distinguish by sight or touch as to dilatation or contraction, 
 which is systole" which diastole"." When the animal was 
 moribund and the movement slow, or when he operated 
 on cold-blooded animals with a simpler form of heart, he 
 was more successful. When the discovery had been fully 
 made, and the business of convincing others of its truth 
 began, vivisectional experiments were of use to him. But 
 the principal paths that led to the discovery seem to me 
 to have been first, the conception of the heart as a 
 machine, exercising definite and measurable force on the 
 fluid which it contained ; secondly, that for the first time 
 there was an attempt to measure the amount of blood 
 contained in the heart and voided with each contraction, 
 
 * It may be well to explain that my own attitude on a very vexed 
 and difficult question is, and has been for many years, that of a 
 supporter of the present Act of Parliament against attacks from more 
 sides than one, pending the establishment, not merely in England, 
 but in Europe, of such ethical restraint as men of Bell's temper would 
 recognize.
 
 200 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 the result being to show that the rapidity of the current 
 and consequently the mass of blood returning to the heart, 
 was far greater than could be accounted for by new 
 formation of blood resulting from ingested aliment ; 
 thirdly, a far more careful examination of the anatomical 
 facts than had been made by Harvey's predecessors. To 
 the careful study of the heart's valves the important dis- 
 covery of the valves of the veins, due to Fabricius, was 
 now added, and was for the first time interpreted. Finally 
 the whole was illumined by the light of the comparative 
 method, by the examination of the foetal circulation on the 
 one hand and of the vascular systems of the lower verte- 
 brates on the other. The motto from Aristotle prefixed 
 to his lectures shows that the comparative method was 
 his guiding star.* 
 
 Leaving this part of my subject I pass now to the 
 consideration of the effect produced by Harvey's discovery 
 on the progress of medicine. 
 
 It was obvious that Harvey had struck into a new 
 path. His discovery was assuredly the most momentous 
 event in the history of medicine since the time of Galen. 
 It was the foundation stone of scientific medicine. It was 
 the first attempt to show that the processes of the human 
 body followed or accompanied each other in accordance 
 with laws as certain and as definite as those which Kepler 
 was at that time revealing in the solar system, and Galileo 
 in all moving bodies on the earth's surface. Henceforth 
 it became clear that all laws of force and energy that 
 
 * The motto is taken from the sixteenth chapter of the first book 
 of Aristotle's work on the History of Animals: "The organs of 
 human beings are less known to us than others : so that we must 
 examine them by reference to those organs of other animals to which 
 their nature is similar." I translate from the Greek, Harvey's Latin 
 being obscure.
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 201 
 
 might be seen to prevail in the organic world were appli- 
 cable to the human body. As an engine performing work, 
 the heart stood on the same footing as any of the ship- 
 building machines the operation of which Galileo had so 
 carefully studied in the arsenals of Venice. The action of 
 fluids in closed vessels under pressure was investigated in 
 Harvey's youth by Stevinus, and in his later life by Pascal. 
 The results were applied at once to the contents of the 
 human vascular system. 
 
 Still greater prominence was given to Harvey's achieve- 
 ment by the all-embracing philosophy of Descartes, which 
 during the latter part of Harvey's life had secured dominion 
 over the intellect of Europe, and which retained it through 
 the remainder of the seventeenth and a large part of the 
 eighteenth century. That Descartes was among the first 
 to appreciate the importance of Harvey's work has been 
 often mentioned. Yet the question has not so often been 
 asked, Why should Descartes, absorbed as he was in a 
 general philosophy of the universe and of the- human 
 mind, have taken special notice of Harvey? It was 
 extremely rare for Descartes to mention the name of any 
 contemporary. I cannot call to mind in his writings more 
 than one or two instances of his doing so. The explana- 
 tion, as I believe, is this. Descartes had put forward a 
 vast scheme of evolutionary philosophy, in which all the 
 phenomena of the universe were to be explained as 
 resulting from successive differentiations of a primitive 
 homogeneous matter to which motion had been imparted. 
 The scheme embraced the motions of the solar system, 
 the forces of light, heat, gravitation and the phenomena 
 of living beings all these being conceived as successive 
 differentiations of primitive rectilinear motion impressed 
 on the ubiquitous ethereal substance with which space
 
 202 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 was filled. In his view there were no facts in nature 
 which were insusceptible of explanation on mechanical 
 principles, and which could not be deduced from such 
 principles by a sufficiently powerful mathematical calculus. 
 He had himself taken the first decisive step towards the 
 construction of such a calculus in his Geometry, published 
 in 1637, leaving further steps to be taken half a century 
 later by the infinitesimal analysis of Leibnitz, Newton, and 
 the Bernoullis. 
 
 In his treatise on the nature of man Descartes had 
 seized on the facts of the reflex action of the nervous 
 system as illustrations of the automatic mechanical process 
 by which the most complicated phenomena presented to 
 our consideration could be explained. He welcomed 
 Harvey's discovery as a yet more conclusive example of 
 the applications of the new philosophy. The course of 
 the blood, hitherto conceived as governed by vital spirits, 
 by a vegetative soul, or by some other metaphysical 
 figment of a like kind, was now seen to be determined by 
 natural forces, to be regulated by the same laws of motion 
 as those which governed inanimate matter. We know 
 from the immortal prelude to his Philosophy his Dis- 
 course on Method, how high were the hopes which 
 Descartes founded on the future of biological research. 
 "Health," he says, "is the first of good things and the 
 foundation of all other good things in this life. For so 
 close is the connection of the mind with the temperament 
 and the arrangement of bodily organs that if there be any 
 instrument for making the mass of men wiser and more 
 skilful than they have been till now, I believe that 
 medicine is the art wherein to look for it. It is true that 
 the medicine now in use offers little that is strikingly 
 useful. But though I have no purpose to disparage it I
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 203 
 
 feel sure that no one, even of those who now practice it, 
 will deny that what is known is but a mere fraction of 
 what remains to be discovered ; and that we might gain 
 freedom from a multitude of diseases both of mind and 
 body, and perhaps also from the enfeeblement of old age, 
 had we sufficient knowledge of their cause and of all the 
 remedies with which nature has provided us." 
 
 Thus it was that under the combined influence of 
 Harvey's discovery and of the Cartesian philosophy the 
 vision of scientific medicine, the application of the laws of 
 nature to the art of healing, dawned upon the world in the 
 first half of the seventeenth century. It is worth our while 
 to inquire with what results. Comte has remarked on the 
 fact that the two initial discoveries of physics and of 
 biology, the law of falling bodies and that of the circulation 
 of the blood, were made simultaneously ; and he has 
 contrasted the immediate sequel in each case. Galileo's 
 discoveries led by direct roads on one side to Newton and 
 scientific astronomy, on the other to Torricelli, Pascal, 
 Boyle, Mariotte, Black, Watt. To what did Harvey's 
 discovery lead, and why the difference ? 
 
 The truth is that the medicine projected by the 
 ambitious brain of Descartes was from the first fore- 
 doomed to failure. It aimed at satisfactory explanation 
 of the facts of living organisms by the laws common to 
 them with other kinds of matter ; it recognized no pheno- 
 mena exhibited by living bodies that could not be so 
 explained. Biology was to Descartes a corollary of 
 physics ; it was not an independent department of science, 
 with physics for a foundation, but having a superstructure 
 peculiar to itself, requiring inductions of its own, methods 
 of its own ; it was a body of knowledge which was to be 
 made amenable as soon as possible to mathematical
 
 204 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 treatment This mode of regarding the subject imported 
 into medicine a spirit of reality, of certainty and of precision 
 which had never before belonged to it ; but in each and 
 every case the attempted solution fell short of the mark. 
 There remained always a residuum that could not be 
 accounted for in this way. Hence during the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries two opposing schools of medicine 
 the first fastening upon the lower, more general laws 
 which were susceptible of precise determination ; the 
 second dimly recognizing the existence of certain higher 
 and more special truths, which, however, they were unable 
 to quantify or even to discern with clearness. 
 
 Before describing the opposition of these schools, let 
 us take stock of the scientific material available for medi- 
 cine in the middle of the seventeenth century. We have 
 already seen that in all that related to mechanical force as 
 applied either to solids or fluids the first great steps had 
 been taken by Galileo and Stevinus. By Galileo's principal 
 disciple, Torricelli, a discovery had been made the im- 
 portance of which to medicine cannot be over-estimated 
 the discovery that the atmosphere had gravity, and that 
 its pressure could be precisely measured. For the first 
 time in the history of medicine the mechanism of the 
 respiratory function became intelligible. It was seen to 
 be a simple result of atmospheric pressure consequent on 
 certain muscular contractions which enlarged the thoracic 
 cavity. To Borelli and to Mayow of Oxford the credit 
 must be given of first describing the respiratory apparatus 
 with unmistakable clearness and accuracy. To Mayow 
 also is due the first, or nearly the first, attempt to explain 
 the chemistry of respiration. 
 
 On the subject of heat, its formation, its propagation, 
 its relation to mechanical force, and its connection with
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 205 
 
 vital action, there was complete, or almost complete, 
 ignorance. Descartes, indeed, with the prescient instinct 
 of genius, had put forward the conjecture that heat, like 
 light, was a violent, insensible motion of the ethereal sub- 
 stance pervading the universe. But no proof was offered, 
 no relation of this insensible molecular motion to molar 
 motion was indicated ; and the conjecture was buried with 
 many other far cruder hypotheses of this great philosopher, 
 to be revived in our own century. On animal heat the 
 beliefs of physicians were of the most fanciful kind, and 
 were in no respect sounder than those which had prevailed 
 since the time of Aristotle. Descartes and Harvey seems 
 to have been in the same case was content with the old 
 view that the heart was a spontaneous source of heat. By 
 this heat Descartes deviating here from the sounder view 
 of Harvey held that the blood on entering the heart 
 expanded ; such expansion being the principal motor force 
 which, when the mitral valve was closed, propelled the 
 current of blood through the body. A full century was to 
 pass before Black and Lavoisier were to place the study of 
 heat on a scientific foundation. 
 
 The second great hiatus rendering a scientific grasp of 
 vital facts impossible was the absence of anything that 
 could be called a science of chemistry. We know life as 
 a series of chemical changes, anabolic and katabolic ; old 
 substances decomposing, new compounds arising in their 
 place. This continuous metabolism, following predeter- 
 mined paths, is the distinctive fact of living organisms ; 
 that which most obviously demarcates them from inorganic 
 matter. No event that takes place in a living body, no 
 function of any organ, is intelligible without it. Yet of 
 the chemistry of life Harvey, and the generation following 
 Harvey, were entirely ignorant A few metals had been
 
 206 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 added to the list of those found in the virgin state and 
 known to the ancients, the principal alkalies and some of 
 the mineral acids had been discovered, and several mineral 
 salts had been investigated. But no step of the first 
 importance had been taken since the time of Paracelsus ; 
 and, above all other deficiencies, there was no pneumatic 
 chemistry. John Mayow, indeed, had a strong, though 
 dim, apprehension of the fact that something was con- 
 tained in nitrate of potash, of an ethereal volatile nature, 
 akin to the respirable atmosphere and essential to 
 the maintenance both of life and of combustion ; and I 
 know nothing more interesting in the history of science 
 than to trace in his works this clutching at the discovery 
 of oxygen, which yet eluded his grasp and that of other 
 searchers after truth for a hundred years. The composition 
 of air and water, the difference between air and other 
 gases, remained undiscovered. Combustion was explained 
 by the comprehensive though false theory of phlogiston, 
 the ethereal substance endowed with negative gravity ; a 
 theory destined to hold its ground so tenaciously that 
 even Priestley, a century afterwards, could not escape 
 from its shackles. The chemistry of respiration remained 
 unknown. Harvey, to whom both the mechanism of this 
 function and its chemistry were alike obscure, has told us 
 in his printed work, and still more clearly in his manuscript 
 notes, how obscure a problem the whole subject of the 
 lungs was to him, how great an obstacle to his discovery. 
 Before birth the lungs were not needed for the circulation 
 of the blood. Why should they become necessary 
 afterwards ? 
 
 As the scientific study of life presupposes a clear 
 apprehension of these physical and chemical laws, it is 
 abundantly clear that in Harvey's time a scientific
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 207 
 
 conception of life was not possible. And since the art of 
 medicine rests, or at least is ultimately destined to rest, 
 upon biological science, it follows that medicine regarded 
 as a scientific art an application, that is to say, of scientific 
 principles to particular cases must have remained 
 throughout the seventeenth and the first half of the 
 eighteenth century extremely crude and imperfect. 
 Nevertheless, in the seventeenth century the attempt was 
 made for the first time to found medical art on such 
 scientific laws as had been then discovered. Harvey was 
 not, perhaps, the conscious originator of this line of action ; 
 it was rather due to the stimulating influence exercised by 
 the scientific philosophies of Galileo and Descartes. Still 
 Harvey's discovery of the circulation was unquestionably 
 the starting-point from which it proceeded. It is worth 
 while, as I have said, to watch closely the course of this 
 procedure. For if much is to be reaped from the history 
 of truth, something may also be gleaned from the history 
 of error. 
 
 Of Harvey himself we are told that after the publica- 
 tion of his discovery his practice fell off; the implication 
 being that the propagation of a new truth aroused hostile 
 prejudice and alienated those who had previously con- 
 sulted him. Is there any valid proof of such alienation ? 
 By this College he was from the first held in profound 
 respect ; he enjoyed Royal favour so long as there was a 
 king in England. Under the Commonwealth his old age 
 was passed amid every sign of universal regard. I hope 
 it will not be attributed to disrespect of so great a name 
 if I suggest that among the reasons for diminished success 
 in the practice of his art, one may have been that his great 
 discovery reacted upon it unfavourably. Had that treasure 
 of his Medical Observations to which reference is so often
 
 208 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 made by him, been preserved to us, we should be able to 
 answer this question with some certainty. As it is, we 
 can but express a doubt whether the dazzling splendour 
 of a new truth may not have brought about a temporary 
 blindness to the old ; whether this one function of the 
 circulation, accurately and precisely determined, may not 
 have seemed so overwhelmingly important, by contrast 
 with the nebulous haze in which other functions were still 
 enwrapped, that the observer was tempted to account for 
 the myriad phenomena of disease by disturbances of a 
 single organ, and lost his power of regarding the organism 
 as a whole, on which, nevertheless, the art of medicine has 
 rested since Hippocrates, and must for ever rest. If this 
 were so, it was not to be the last time in the history of 
 modern medicine in which the two opposing processes of 
 analysis and synthesis came into disastrous conflict ; for 
 that history records analogous reactions on medical 
 practice of almost every important scientific discovery. 
 
 What happened in Harvey's case we do not and cannot 
 know. But as to the effect of his discovery on subsequent 
 theories of medicine we are not left in doubt. A school 
 of medicine arose, commonly known as the iatro-mathe- 
 matical, which numbered many distinguished names, and 
 held its ground for nearly a century, avowedly based on 
 Harvey's discovery, and having for its aim the explanation 
 of vital phenomena by mechanical forces. Some of the 
 most important representatives of this school may be here 
 mentioned. 
 
 The first on the list is Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, born 
 thirty years after Harvey at Naples, a professor of mathe- 
 matics and of medicine at Rome and Pisa. He died in 
 1679. His great work, De Motu Animalium, appeared the 
 year afterwards. He was the first to analyze distinctly the
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 209 
 
 operation of the muscular system, and to attempt to assign 
 with mathematical precision the exact mechanical energy 
 exerted by each muscle. Before his time it had never 
 been realized that the bones were levers and that the 
 muscular tissue was the moving power ; the resultant 
 action depending on the angle at which the force was 
 exerted, and on the distance of the point of insertion from 
 the centre of articulation. So long as the problem was one 
 of elementary statics he was on safe ground ; but many of 
 the problems handled by him needed a higher calculus 
 than was in his possession, and here he made serious 
 miscalculations. The important step was, however, to 
 break ground in this new field, to regard muscular energy 
 as a measurable quantity. 
 
 Borelli framed a careful and elaborate theory of mus- 
 cular contractility, beginning with criticism of the explana- 
 tions hitherto offered. The muscle in contracting shortens. 
 What makes it shorten ? Some had compared it with 
 what takes place in a rope when a weight attached to it is 
 lifted, and successive parts of the rope become slack as the 
 work is done ; but in the muscle the contraction is simul- 
 taneous throughout the whole length. Secondly, the 
 contraction of muscle is not elasticity ; this would imply 
 previous extension, and shortening could only take place 
 to the point from which extension started. But, thirdly, 
 could it be said that the contracted muscle is in a state of 
 strain, which being removed the muscle shortens ? If so, 
 effort would be felt in the state of rest ; while if any 
 exertion was made there would be a feeling of repose. 
 Again, it had been suggested that muscles contract by 
 animal heat, as hair and other animal substances contract 
 on scorching. Of such a rise of temperature there is no 
 evidence whatever. Once more, muscular contraction had 
 
 p
 
 210 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 been compared to the corrugation of worms or snakes, but 
 this corrugation is itself the result of muscular contrac- 
 tions. Finally, he dismisses with scorn the view held by 
 some that the process was not a mechanical one at all, but 
 a vital one. " As though nature," he cries, " could dispense 
 with the laws of destiny fixed by divine wisdom ! " 
 
 What, then, takes place when a muscle contracts ? 
 Some bodily substance, he conceived, is transmitted by the 
 nerves to the muscular particles, creating an explosion or 
 ebullition, as when oil of vitriol is poured on chalk, or 
 water on quicklime. So long as this nervous juice con- 
 tinues to be distilled into the muscle, effervescence goes 
 on, the fibres of the muscle are driven apart as by a wedge, 
 and shortening of the muscle results. When the supply of 
 nervous juice ceases things revert to their former state. 
 
 Borelli's theory of nutrition was equally mechanical. 
 Over-estimating the force of the heart as a mechanical 
 agent, he conceived the blood as rushing through the 
 vessels with sufficient force, first, to drive away worn-out 
 particles from the tissues and eliminate them through the 
 pores or otherwise ; and, secondly, to rebuild the tissues 
 by wedging in new particles adapted to the shape of the 
 pores, just as in mosaic work stones of various shapes are 
 fitted each into its proper place. 
 
 This sample of Borelli's physiology will prepare us for 
 his pathology. The central fact for the pathologists of 
 that day was fever. What was Borelli's theory of fever ? 
 The accepted view was that it was a heat kindled in the 
 heart A fermentation was supposed to be set up in that 
 organ, the result of which was to set free the spirituous 
 and sulphurous parts of the blood, and thus to bring about 
 the quick pulse and other phenomena of constitutional 
 disturbance. " But where," asks Borelli, " is the proof that
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 211 
 
 the heart is the scene of these chemical processes ? What 
 warrant have you for saying that the heart is hotter than 
 the rest of the body ? I," he says, " have tested the matter 
 with a thermometer and can find no difference.* As to 
 ferments contained in the heart, the lining membrane," he 
 continues, "is perfectly smooth, and a torrent of blood 
 rushing through it would sweep the imaginary substance 
 away with it. Besides, it is easy to show by injection of 
 hot substances into the blood that heat will not produce 
 fever. No ; it is not heat that causes the rapid motion of 
 the blood, but the rapid motion of the blood that produces 
 fever. My theory of muscular action explains it. During 
 fever the nervous juice is poured out into the heart and all 
 the involuntary muscles in abnormal quantities and arouses 
 them to increased action. After a time the voluntary 
 muscles cease, from the same cause, to be voluntary, and 
 these also are convulsed." Borelli was no doubt obliged 
 to imagine some other cause at work to produce this excess 
 of nervous juice. Either that juice was poisoned by some 
 ferment in the glands which were richly supplied with 
 blood, or the nervous tubules were mechanically obstructed 
 and the fluid contained in them fermented. In any case 
 the visible symptoms of pyrexia the heat, the swelling, 
 the redness, the pain were due entirely to mechanical 
 causes. The essential facts in fever were, in Borelli's view, 
 facts of hydraulics. 
 
 His followers, Lorenzo Bellini and Archibald Pitcairn, 
 carried out the same view in a still more systematic way. 
 Their names may be forgotten now, but in their own day 
 their fame was European. Pitcairn was a native of Edin- 
 burgh, and practised medicine in that city, where he was 
 
 * This, by the way, is the first instance known to me of the 
 application of thermometry to animal physiology.
 
 212 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 the leading physician. He had previously occupied a 
 chair at two foreign universities of the highest repute, 
 Montpelier and Leyden. In the latter city the illustrious 
 Boerhaave was among his pupils. It is to Pitcairn that 
 Lorenzo Bellini dedicated his work. 
 
 Pitcairn's remarkable work, Elementa Medicines Physico- 
 Mathematica, is a systematic treatise on medicine, begin- 
 ning, as was usual at that time, with a statement of 
 physiological principles. This is interesting if only as 
 evidence of the overwhelming importance attached by his 
 school to the discovery of Harvey. Life and the circula- 
 tion of the blood are identical, he says ; life is the circu- 
 lation ; there is no independent life of the parts. It is the 
 body which lives, not any part of the body. Circulation, 
 which is life, depends not on parts but on the whole. 
 "Dividitur corpus in partes continentes et contentas, id 
 est, canales et liquores." Vessels and the contents of 
 vessels make up the whole substance of the body. The 
 differences between one body and another were differ- 
 ences in the fluidity or viscosity of the contained 
 liquids. 
 
 Then follows his explanation of what was rightly 
 looked on as the fundamental problem of animal heat. 
 He conceived heat to be an explosive substance locked 
 up in certain particles of the blood, and liberated by the 
 attrition of those particles ; this attrition, of course, pro- 
 ceeding more rapidly as the circulation was more vigorous. 
 The notion that animal heat resulted from a certain 
 residuum of blood left in the heart, and continually fer- 
 menting, he scornfully rejected, as Borelli had done. 
 There could be, he said, no such remnant. The lining of 
 the heart was smooth, and the whole mass of blood swept 
 through it and passed on. To invoke the chemistry of
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 213 
 
 fermentation was needless. Mechanical causes accounted 
 for the whole. 
 
 For the pathological fact of fever, or at least pyrexia, 
 mechanics supplied sufficient explanation. " By the word 
 fever," he says, " I understand the velocity of the circulation 
 uniformly increased in equal intervals of time." Increased 
 motion of the blood produces rarefaction, as blood flows 
 more rapidly from capillaries to veins. On rarefaction 
 follows increased secretion of nervous fluid ; on this again 
 increased action of the heart's muscular tissue, hence a 
 quicker pulse, so that the effect of increased cardiac 
 action also becomes its cause. The classical symptoms of 
 fever flushing, swelling, pain, want of sleep, convulsions, 
 haemorrhage, cutaneous eruption, parched tongue, thirst, 
 anorexia, loaded urine are each in turn explained as the 
 result of mechanical processes. 
 
 Intimately associated with Pitcairn was Lorenzo Bellini, 
 one of Borelli's pupils, who carried on the same line of 
 research in an even more systematic way. The problem 
 specially attacked by him was that of secretion, attributed 
 by the chemical school of physicians to the action of 
 ferments. For this school the familiar fact of fermentation, 
 with its attendant phenomena of effervescence, heat, change 
 of substance, etc., did duty as the one solitary representative 
 of the vast domain now known as organic chemistry. It 
 had very naturally and legitimately forced itself upon the 
 attention of these men, offering as it did a prompt expla- 
 nation of a multitude of obscure facts. The liver was 
 supposed to secrete bile by virtue of its ferment ; so did 
 the pancreas, so did the salivary glands, the kidneys, the 
 gastric mucous membrane ; nay, as we have seen, the fact 
 of animal heat itself was supposed to be elucidated by an 
 imaginary ferment residing in the heart and acting on the
 
 214 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 blood as it passed through. Everything could be explained 
 in this way. Men soon become the slaves of words ; and 
 so here the word " fermentation " (which in reality held the 
 clue as two hundred years afterwards we have come to 
 see to some of the hidden secrets of life and disease) 
 became a mere metaphysical figment like the dormitive 
 influence of opium in Moliere's play. It solved hard 
 problems by the simple process of restating them in 
 obscurer and more pedantic language. 
 
 Against these crude chemical theories the mechanical 
 school of physicians, with Bellini at their head, waged 
 fierce battle. "What sort of an explanation," he asked, 
 " do you arrive at by your theory of ferments ? If secretion 
 is caused by a ferment contained in a gland, then what is 
 it that secretes that ferment? Suppose, for instance, that 
 bile is secreted from the blood by some special ferment ; 
 that ferment requires a second ferment to secrete it, and 
 that second yet a third, and so on without end." But in 
 truth the whole of this chemical apparatus is, he maintained, 
 unnecessary if we think for a moment what is meant by 
 the cohesion of particles of matter. Two molecules press 
 towards one another with a given force and in a given 
 direction. Change the force and the direction, and we 
 have a new arrangement of molecules in other words, a 
 new compound. To effect this change some external 
 force is needed, but this need not be a ferment ; the action 
 is mechanical, not chemical. Secretion is the separation 
 of certain elements of an animal fluid from the rest. Now 
 we see this separation taking place outside the body with- 
 out these imaginary ferments, as, for instance, after blood- 
 letting, in the separation of the clot from the serum. What 
 takes place outside the body may take place inside. " See 
 again," he continued, "what takes place when blood is
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 215 
 
 placed in a vessel and subjected to Mr. Boyle's new 
 machine for extracting the air. Ebullition and evaporation 
 ensue ; that is to say, certain portions of liquid at once 
 separate from the others, which had previously been held 
 down in contact with them by the pressure of the super- 
 incumbent atmosphere. So it is that inside the body 
 changes of mechanical pressure suffice to explain all that 
 takes place. A gland is simply a closed vessel with 
 extremely small perforations of different shape and size. 
 What takes place in it is as purely mechanical as what 
 goes on in the formation of a blood-clot or the filtering of 
 fine sand from coarse. There is not the slightest necessity 
 for complicating the matter with ferments. Deus natures 
 conditor est Deus facilitatis (God does everything in the 
 simplest way)." 
 
 As time went on the potent mathematical calculus of 
 Leibnitz, Newton, and the Bernoullis held out increasing 
 hopes of being able to overtake the subtle processes of 
 nature, and of anticipating direct observation by a reason- 
 ing process. Dealing with the infinitely little as well as 
 with the infinitely great, prepared to represent every 
 natural form, even the variations of each human countenance, 
 by an algebraical equation, it seemed to them that they 
 were entering on a path leading directly to omniscience, 
 and surely capable of unravelling the intricacies of life and 
 of disease. 
 
 It would be interesting, were there time to do so, and 
 it would not be uninstructive, to trace the influence of this 
 extraordinary scientific stimulus upon the great physicians 
 of the early part of the eighteenth century, more especially 
 upon Boerhaave, a pupil, as I have remarked, of Pitcairn, 
 and upon Richard Mead. In Boerhaave's theory of fever 
 the excited pulse indicated the effort of the heart to sweep
 
 216 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 away, as by a flood tide, the obstruction in the capillaries ; 
 and a similar attempt to explain biological facts by the 
 mechanical forces of the circulation is to be noted in Mead's 
 discussion of the operation of poisons. But these great 
 physicians were preserved by the wise empiricism of their 
 clinical instinct from the extravagances that beset more 
 one-sided men. 
 
 Thus it was that the devotees of the two great sciences 
 of mathematical physics and of chemistry the one brought 
 to a high degree of perfection, the other crude, imperfect, 
 struggling to be born strove strenuously for their exclusive 
 application to the art of medicine. The iatro-physicists 
 were far more fitly furnished than their adversaries with 
 the armament of scientific discovery. They had arisen 
 with Galileo and Harvey ; they were carried triumphantly 
 onward by Torricelli and Pascal, by Boyle, Newton, and 
 the Bernoullis. The great discovery of Harvey was their 
 own domain ; to extend its application to every bodily 
 function was the goal of their efforts. The chemiatric 
 school, on the other hand, could rely only on the sinister 
 though seductive memories of Paracelsus, and on the 
 dawning hopes of a future which they were not to witness. 
 
 The struggle was watched by a third school of medical 
 investigators, who saw weak joints in the armour of both 
 the combatants. I refer to the animist school, which arose 
 at the end of the seventeenth century under the leadership 
 of Stahl. He was the most prominent chemist of his 
 time. His hypothesis of phlogiston was accepted as a 
 satisfactory explanation of combustion for three-quarters 
 of a century. But Stahl felt, in a confused, dim, strenuous 
 way, that the facts of life the selective, coordinating, pre- 
 arranging processes presented by the humblest animal or 
 plant were not to be accounted for by the play of
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS 217 
 
 mechanical or chemical forces. So strong were his con- 
 victions on this point that his Arche, or Vital Principle, 
 dispensed altogether with mechanics and chemistry. It 
 was a metaphysical figment, involving error at the least as 
 gross as that against which he contended ; but within the 
 husk lay the germ of an all-important truth. 
 
 Later in the eighteenth century the discoveries of 
 Black, Cavendish, and Lavoisier fulfilled the preliminary 
 conditions for the evolution of biology as a distinct science. 
 Haller, Hunter, Bichat, and others brought that science to 
 the birth. From that time to this it has become more and 
 more plain that physics, chemistry, biology are distinct 
 sciences, with methods of their own and inductions of their 
 own, each of the latter terms in the series using the results 
 of its predecessor and adding new results of its own. Life 
 is a structure built up of physical and chemical facts. Yet 
 to the building, to the arrangement, to the ordering of 
 those facts there goes something that neither physics nor 
 chemistry can explain any more than algebra can explain 
 the behaviour of a magnet. To strive to interpret the 
 series of events which make up the life of an animal in 
 terms of chemical metabolism or of conservation and ex- 
 penditure of energy is an endeavour which will fail ; though 
 it is a useful endeavour, because only thus can we eliminate 
 what remains. That something remains the greatest of 
 living British physicists has always maintained and has 
 recently assured us. The admitted insufficiency, to take 
 one instance from a thousand, of Lavoisier's theory of 
 combustion to account for the phenomena of animal heat, 
 the admitted necessity of seeking in the nervous system 
 for a thermotaxic centre or centres to account for the 
 amazing adjustments of the organism to changes of tempe- 
 rature in the environment, might suffice to convince the
 
 218 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 biologist that, though he receives his building material 
 from the physicist, he must construct the edifice for 
 himself. 
 
 The history of medicine is a strange and fascinating 
 though sometimes a melancholy record. We see in the 
 fifth century before our era a man of genius, gifted with 
 that marvellous union of the observing eye with construc- 
 tive imagination which astounds us in the sculptors of the 
 Parthenon, building up without science, without anatomy, 
 the fabric of medical art of which what we still practise is 
 but the enlargement. Inheriting from the priestly guild 
 from which he sprang a vast store of observations, and 
 adding yet more of his own, Hippocrates was guided in 
 dealing with them by two fundamental principles (i) that 
 diseases, like other phenomena of nature, follow a natural 
 sequence ; (2) that the organism of man, however com- 
 plex, is yet an individual whole, each part receiving and 
 impressing reactions on every other. After Aristotle and 
 Galen had done their work, long centuries ensued of blind 
 and sterile routine, followed by a period of acute but one- 
 sided analysis. By the help of such analysis it may be 
 that the Hippocratic synthesis will be again built up on a 
 more enduring basis. 
 
 The ideal perfection of medical art rests upon an 
 equally ideal perfection of the science of human nature, 
 summed up in complete knowledge of our organism and 
 of the influences that act on it. The goal is unattainable, 
 yet till it be approached the physician must be content 
 with empirical knowledge of an infinite array of facts 
 biological, psychological, ethical, which, though certain as 
 mathematics, yet do not admit of quantitative determina- 
 tion. It is only within the last generation that the word 
 " subjective " has become familiar to the biologist. As the
 
 HARVEY AND HIS SUCCESSORS . 219 
 
 student of sensory organs deals with some of these sub- 
 jective facts, so does the student of human passions deal 
 with others, for these, no less than sensations, are functions 
 of our organism. To determine the way in which this or 
 that man will be affected by any morbid process without 
 taking account of such facts is assuredly impossible. They 
 must be taken into account at all costs ; if not by scientific 
 process, then by wise empirical instinct. 
 
 I shall conclude with saying that as medical art has 
 been affected by the rise of physics and chemistry in the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so will it be affected 
 by the scientific sociology of the nineteenth and the 
 twentieth.* Not till science has fully embraced every 
 aspect of human life can medical art, as founded upon 
 science, hope to be complete. But at the dawn of modern 
 science in the seventeenth century the dazzling brilliance 
 of mathematical and physical discovery led the keen and 
 daring minds of whom I have been speaking to the belief 
 that all phenomena with which the physician deals could 
 be spoken of in terms of mechanics. It was a legitimate 
 and inevitable stage in the progress of the human mind. 
 Without it the later stages would have been impossible. 
 It initiated the great discovery of Harvey, whom not 
 merely we, but future generations, will continue to venerate 
 as the principal founder of scientific medicine. 
 
 * As this remark perplexed some of my hearers, I would refer them 
 to the 1 27th section k of the first book of the No-vum Organum. It 
 was because of Comte's attempts to carry out the programme there 
 contained that G. H. Lewes, no blind adherent, spoke of him as the 
 Bacon, and "something more than the Bacon," of the nineteenth 
 century. That Comte was preceded, and that he has been, and will 
 be, followed in those efforts by other thinkers is obvious. And it 
 seems reasonable to suppose that better knowledge of Man will lead 
 to better Medicine.
 
 #. HEROES OF LITERATURE 
 
 I 
 
 DANTE'S POSITION IN THE HISTORY 
 OF HUMANITY* 
 
 WHAT is the position of Dante and Dante's work in the 
 history of Humanity ? 
 
 Its continuity with the Past may be made clear in two 
 words. Dante is guided through Hell and Purgatory by 
 the great -Roman poet Virgil. The ./Eneid of Virgil is 
 an imitation for the cultivated Romans of the time of 
 Augustus, of the Iliad of Homer, said or sung to the 
 warriors and sailors of the Greek coasts and islands nine 
 centuries before. Homer, Virgil, Dante ; Greece, Rome, 
 the Middle Age. The chain is complete so far. Of the 
 continuity with ancient Theocracy through the prophets 
 and lawgivers and psalmists of Judaea I need not speak. 
 He shared it with the Church of his time. 
 
 He has been called the voice of the ten silent centuries, 
 the ages that we have at last begun to leave off calling 
 dark ; the ages in which few brilliant books were written, 
 but in which heroic and saintly lives were being spent in 
 building up that Catholic Church which Comte has called 
 
 * A portion of a lecture on Dante, delivered on November 24, 
 1889. The first portion of the lecture exists only in the form of rough 
 notes. 
 
 220
 
 DANTE 221 
 
 the masterpiece of human wisdom : the first systematic 
 effort made in the history of the world to institute a 
 government of the hearts of men, and thus to secure for 
 the first time freedom for their actions. And this view of 
 Dante is true also. His Paradise is a glorification of the 
 mediaeval saints Augustine, Benedict, Bernard, Francis, 
 Dominic, Aquinas. 
 
 But there now comes before us this further question : 
 Continuous with the past history of Humanity, what is his 
 relation to her Future ? 
 
 First I ask, Was Dante an orthodox Catholic ? or 
 did he belong to the party of destruction ? Some have 
 thought one thing, some another. You have not for- 
 gotten his fierce denunciation of the corrupt Popes of his 
 own time. Martin Luther never wrote or said anything 
 so strong as the I9th canto of the Inferno. Three times 
 in the Paradise the same denunciation is uttered ; and 
 it comes with singular and emphatic symmetry at the 
 9th, the 1 8th, and the 2/th cantos, as if to show how 
 deeply such thoughts entered into the structure of his 
 poem. Again, in that central part of the whole poem, 
 where Beatrice, on the summit of Purgatory Mount, shows 
 him the triumphal procession of the Church, the triumph 
 seems suddenly to be transformed into utter defeat. 
 The eagle and the dragon destroy the sacred car ; the 
 powers of earth and hell, the corrupt Kings and corrupt 
 Popes, seem utterly to prevail. 
 
 Nevertheless, after reading many times everything that 
 Dante has written, I am persuaded that he died a sincere 
 Catholic. He is said to have joined the third order of St. 
 Francis, and we may well believe it. There were plenty 
 of emancipated statesmen and men of letters in Dante's 
 time ; some of them strong men, like Farinata and the
 
 222 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 Emperor Frederic II. ; some men of high culture and 
 feeble character, like Guido Cavalcante and many of the 
 minor poets with whom Florence abounded. Nothing was 
 more common in the Italy of Dante's time and the cen- 
 turies that followed than men who had no intention of 
 being martyrs, but who had no religious belief whatever. 
 I think it probable that Dante was at one time of those, 
 and that during his exile, under the influence of Aquinas, 
 he worked his way round painfully but surely to an 
 acceptance of Church doctrines, the destruction of which 
 in the fourteenth century would have brought such moral 
 misery on the human race. I believe that the bitter 
 repentance of Dante on his meeting with Beatrice has, like 
 everything in the poem, more meanings than one ; and 
 that one meaning, though not the only meaning, is, that 
 in the presence of the glorified Beatrice, the embodiment 
 of the highest spiritual wisdom, he confessed with penitence 
 his breaking away from the Catholic faith. I cannot doubt 
 that Dante died in sincere communion with the Catholic 
 Church. 
 
 But none the less does it remain true that what a man 
 thinks that he believes is one thing; and what the real 
 outcome of his thoughts may be has often been quite 
 another. And I still ask the question, Comparing the 
 teaching of Dante with the teaching of the Church, how 
 far do they coincide ? In some points they seem to differ. 
 
 In the first place, Dante assumes the function of a 
 Judge. He, a student of theology, but a mere layman, 
 brings the whole society of his time and of past times 
 before him, the highest leaders of that society especially in 
 Church or State, and glorifies or condemns them, as to his 
 judgment seems right. He is wholly without self-conceit ; 
 he is proud, but without the least taint of vanity : before
 
 DANTE 223 
 
 the great leaders of the Church, from the Apostles to the 
 saints of his own century, St. Aquinas and the rest, but 
 above all St. Francis and St. Bernard, he bows reverently. 
 He does not set up for being a saint himself; highly 
 endowed he knows himself to be, but also stained with 
 memories of error and sin ; but the spirit within him forces 
 him to judge between right and wrong, and to point out 
 as it were in a scale of twenty-seven degrees, with many 
 subdivisions, the different shades of right and wrong. He 
 writes with a distinct ethical purpose. As the blasts blow 
 most strongly against the mountain-tops, so the vials of his 
 indignation are poured out against the most illustrious 
 sinners, so that men's minds may listen more keenly to his 
 teaching. He is well aware that he is speaking to the 
 future more than to the present. This function of judgment, 
 thus assumed by a Catholic layman, was something wholly 
 new in the world. 
 
 Further, the standard by which Dante judges is not 
 altogether the Church's standard. I will take one instance. 
 In the Inferno, he has nine scales of guilt in descending 
 order, the lowest circles given to the vilest sins. Now see 
 the startling difference in the space allotted to those 
 circles. The Inferno has thirty-four cantos. The first 
 three are introductory. There are thirty-one left for the 
 description of the various kinds of sins. Seven of the 
 circles are disposed of in fourteen cantos. To the last two 
 circles seventeen cantos are devoted, exactly half the poem. 
 These two circles deal with fraud and with treason. 
 
 Note also that the eighth circle, that of fraud, containing 
 as it does ten subdivisions, is wholly disconnected from the 
 circles above it, by precipices as steep as the sides of a 
 well, so that Dante is carried down to it through the air 
 on the back of the monster Geryon. Fraud and treason
 
 224 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 are thus wholly isolated from the other sins as something 
 very far blacker than they. I have not found this startling 
 difference of condemnation in the works of any theologian, 
 or in the decrees of any council of the Church. But I do 
 find it in the morality of feudalism and chivalry ; in the 
 feudal horror of disloyalty in the execration of Ganelon, 
 the traitor of Roland. In a word, the moral standard of 
 Dante in this great division of his poem is feudal and 
 human even more than it is theological or Catholic. 
 Truth, honour, loyalty : these are feudal virtues. 
 
 Note, too, that whatever intrinsic virtue the worst of 
 sinners possess remains with them to the last. Brutus, 
 the traitor who assassinated his trusting friend, and brought 
 infinite sorrow on the world, shares the lot of Judas ; but 
 in the very jaws of Satan he retains his courage. Ulysses, 
 the fraudulent warrior, is credited with his adventurous 
 spirit Ugolino with his fatherly tenderness Brunetto 
 with his fine culture. Farinata, the infidel, is punished for 
 his infidelity, but preserves his noble and fearless spirit ; 
 he rises up from his red-hot coffin as Dante passes with 
 breast and brow as though he held hell in high disdain ; 
 and when he hears from Dante of the exile of his friends 
 and their ruined hopes, says that news is greater torture 
 for him than his bed of fire. 
 
 Dante's ethic, in fact, was the ethic not merely of a 
 theologian, not merely of a feudal warrior, but also of a 
 great citizen. It is the combination of these things that 
 constitutes his singular position in history. 
 
 His ethic is essentially social and human, and not 
 personal. Without citizenship, he says, a man is lower 
 than the brutes. The intensity of his love for Florence 
 stayed with him to the end. He would purchase return 
 from exile by no humiliating concession ; if only " thus they
 
 DANTE 225 
 
 will let me back to Florence, then to Florence I will never 
 return. Have I not the sun and the stars?" He was 
 unsparing in denunciation of her sins, her miserable 
 factions, her avarice, her democratic caprice. But he loved 
 to dwell on what she was in past times, on the simplicity 
 of life of which his ancestor tells him, when " she lived in 
 peace, temperate and chaste. She had no chains nor 
 coronet, nor dames in rich attire nor girdle such as to be 
 looked at more than the wearer." " I have seen Bellincion 
 Berti go girt with leather and clasp of bone ; and his lady 
 leave her mirror with unpainted face. I have seen the 
 Nerli and the Vecchietti contented with their sheep-skin 
 coats, and their dames with spindle and distaff. Ah, happy 
 life! each woman was certain of her burial place, none 
 was left deserted in her bed by reason of France. One 
 would watch over the cradle with the soft soothing talk 
 that fathers and mothers delight in : another, drawing her 
 thread upon the distaff, would tell tales to her household of 
 Troy and Fesole and Rome. To this tranquil, honorable 
 life of citizens, this sure and faithful civic bond, was I born, 
 when the Virgin heard my mother's cries to her for help." 
 Remember that the man who says this was a soldier, and 
 a Crusader. 
 
 He is never weary of it. In the heaven of the stars he 
 sees St. Peter and talks to him of Faith and then again his 
 thoughts go back to Florence and its beautiful Baptistery ; 
 with the longing thought that possibly he may see his 
 home again. "If ever it befall that the sacred poem to 
 which Heaven and Earth have set their hand, so that it 
 has worn my bodily frame through long years of toil, shall 
 overcome the cruel spite that bars me out from the fair 
 sheepfold where I slept a lamb, hated by the wolves that 
 make war thereon with other fame thenceforth, with 
 
 Q
 
 226 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 other robes shall I come back a poet, and at my fount of 
 my baptism shall receive the crown." St. Peter gave the 
 crown ; but he wishes that crown to be seen in Florence. . . . 
 
 One often asks, What were Dante's thoughts in those 
 last years amidst the pine trees of Ravenna ? Joyful they 
 could not have been. The world was going from bad to 
 worse. A glorious vision of the Church had been shown 
 to him on the summit of the Purgatorial mountain. He 
 saw her as the triumphal chariot drawn by the mystic 
 creature that typified the union of man with God ; in the 
 car sat Beatrice, his glorified Love, the source of his 
 highest spiritual wisdom. Before it marched the procession 
 of the ages, the saints, prophets, and martyrs of past time ; 
 at either wheel the virtues danced, the four Roman virtues 
 robed in purple, Wisdom, Fortitude, Temperance, and 
 Justice: the Christian virtues to the right, Hope draped 
 in transparent emerald, Faith with white like snow new- 
 fallen, Love in the red of fiery flame ; and Love led 
 the way. 
 
 Then came the end. The Roman eagle dashed down 
 upon the car. From its fierce talons the Church was kept 
 safe ; persecuting emperors did no harm : not so the kindly 
 emperors from Constantine downwards, who gave rich 
 endowments to the Church, so that Dante saw it become 
 gradually a comfortable nest feathered with the eagle's 
 down. Then the Dragon of sin rose from the nether pit 
 and crashed upwards through the floor of the car, and 
 finally the giant and the whore were seated there in shame- 
 less and loathsome embrace. Corrupt Popes and corrupt 
 Kings. This empire gone [there were], Philip IV. of 
 France, first in ungodly conspiracy with Boniface VIII., 
 then in ungodly violence worrying him to his death at 
 Amalfi ; Clement V. parading Southern France in open
 
 DANTE 227 
 
 adultery ; and after the nine years of Clement V. the nine- 
 teen years of John XXII. Of these Dante saw five only ; 
 but at John's death in 1334, thirteen years after the death 
 of Dante, there was found, says the accurate chronicler 
 Villani (quoted by Fleury), in the treasury of Avignon the 
 sum of eighteen million golden florins in coin ; in plate, 
 crosses, crowns, mitres and other jewels and precious stones, 
 to the value of seven millions, making a total of twenty-five 
 millions, equal perhaps to two hundred and fifty million 
 pounds of our money. I know this to be true, says Villani. 
 My brother, a most trustworthy man, was a man who did 
 business with the Papal Court, and he happened to be at 
 Avignon at the time of the Pope's death, and had these 
 facts from men who counted the treasure. He claimed 
 fees on every Church appointment throughout Christendom; 
 and as no one was ever made a bishop at once, but as each 
 bishopric fell vacant some other bishop was translated to 
 it, and again some other to his post, and so on, each 
 vacancy brought in six or more sets of fees. He was not 
 a bad man, says Villani. He was sober and refined in his 
 way of living. He rose every night to say his office : he 
 said mass every day ; he was accessible to those who 
 wished to see him : he despatched business promptly. 
 He was learned, acute, and magnanimous. So says the 
 chronicler with truth I dare say. But such was the 
 conception that Popes now had of their office. 
 
 This is the Pope of whom St. Peter, meeting Dante in 
 Paradise, hides his head for shame ; and of whom Dante, 
 in the sixth sphere, the heaven of Justice, of the Emperor 
 Trajan, and of the Trojan Ripheus, speaks thus : 
 
 " O thou noble star . . . may the most high God who gives 
 thee motion and power, look whence issues the smoke that spoils 
 thy ray, so that at some time hereafter he may be wroth at the
 
 228 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 buying and selling within that temple whose walls were built with 
 miracles and martyrdoms. O soldiery of the heaven on which I am 
 now gazing, pray for those who are all gone astray after the evil 
 example. Once men were wont to make war with their swords ; 
 but now it is carried on by taking away now here now there the 
 sacramental bread which the Father of all locks up from no man." 
 
 [This alludes to the shameless abuse of interdicts and 
 excommunications, and the fees extorted when they were 
 removed.] Then passing to John XXII., and making 
 allusion to the image of St. John Baptist carved on the 
 gold coin of Florence, the florin, he burst out 
 
 " But thou who writest only to sell the cancelling of thy 
 writs, bethink thee that Peter and Paul who died for that 
 vineyard which thou layest waste, are yet alive. Still this thou 
 canst say : ' I think with such fixed longing on him who lived 
 alone in the wilderness and who came to his martyr's death 
 through the dancing of Herodias, that of Peter the Fisherman or 
 of Paul, I know nothing.' " 
 
 The truth is that of the two institutions on which 
 Dante relied for the salvation of society, the empire as a 
 power which could keep order among the miserable factions 
 of the Italian republics had perished fifteen years before 
 Dante's birth, when Frederic II. died. The papacy as a 
 spiritual force, uniting the Western nations into one, put 
 forth its last expiring effort when Dante was a boy of nine 
 years old, at the council of Lyons, to which the great 
 doctors of the Church (I will add the greatest intellects 
 of the age, Roger excepted), Aquinas, Bonaventura and 
 Albertus Magnus, were invited by Pope Gregory to see 
 how the wounds of Christendom could be healed. 
 
 Imagine for a moment Pope Leo XIII. inviting the 
 greatest intellects of Europe I leave you to fill up the 
 list as you like to Geneva to a congress where all would
 
 DANTE 229 
 
 use a common language, like Latin, which roused no 
 national prejudice, and should set themselves to see how 
 Europe could be saved from war, and how the intellectual 
 problems of our time could be solved. That sounds a silly 
 dream now ; it was not a silly dream, but very nearly an 
 actual fact then. Reformers long for what they call the 
 United States of Europe. So do I, if by that you mean 
 the peaceful growth of small political communities, freed 
 from the curse of imperialism and commercial wars, and 
 international hatred and territorial annexation, whether in 
 Tunis or Tonquin or South Africa if you mean that the 
 bond uniting these communities should be a spiritual bond 
 the bond of art and science, and friendly guilds of 
 thinkers and of craftsmen sharing one another's hopes, 
 and dealing with labour questions and art questions peace- 
 fully, and seeing that the great spiritual inheritance of 
 Humanity is shared by all. Will that time come? I 
 believe it firmly and fully. Nevertheless, between us and 
 it a red mist hangs low down in the sky. It may be that 
 it will pass away ; it may be that we shall yet have to pass 
 through the valley of the Shadow of Death. Meantime 
 I assert that some faint approximation to this vision 
 of the future had been reached between the eleventh 
 century and the thirteenth. The union of Western Europe 
 against the Mahommedan was far from perfect Think of 
 what was to follow in the after time. Recall the hundred 
 years' war between England and France, of the fourteenth 
 to the fifteenth centuries : think of the confusion brought 
 by Luther's onslaught on the fabric of the Church, of the 
 horrors of the Spanish wars in Flanders, of Bartholomew's 
 massacre, of the Thirty Years' War, which set Germany 
 back for a century, of the commercial wars and the 
 imperialist wars carried on in the last century and this,
 
 230 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 and on the imminent danger of other convulsions yet to 
 come. And remembering how much of all this (not all of 
 it, mind, but much of it) has sprung from the lack of a 
 common faith, a common hope, a common love controlling 
 men's hearts and actions, we might well think that Dante, 
 as he lay down in Ravenna to die, despaired of the 
 future. 
 
 For it was no question of mere corruption of institu- 
 tions, due to the shortcomings of this man or that, such 
 as all institutions may suffer from. It was very far more 
 than that. The papacy, after three centuries of corruption 
 and disruption, was reformed by the extraordinary genius 
 and energy of Loyola. Under the Jesuits during the last 
 centuries it has exercised a very great influence in the 
 world good influence mixed with evil, but the good still 
 preponderating, as I cannot doubt. It has produced many 
 holy and devoted men and women. It has sheltered 
 millions of men and women from spiritual death. It still 
 remains by very far the most powerful of the Christian 
 Churches, as men in Protestant countries are at last 
 beginning to see. Nevertheless, it has ceased since the 
 time of Dante to be the governing force. It has been a 
 secondary influence, of great value. But the governing 
 minds of the world have stood outside it and apart from 
 it. What mind of philosophic power equal to Aquinas 
 has arisen since his time to defend the doctrines of the 
 Church against the countless assaults led with increasing 
 vehemence by the Protestant reformers of the fifteenth 
 and sixteenth centuries, and the deists and atheists of the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth, the evolutionists of the nine- 
 teenth ? Many respectable advocates have arisen ; many 
 of the greatest minds have expressed more or less sincerely 
 a passive adhesion to the faith. But who has done battle
 
 DANTE 231 
 
 for it like Aquinas ? Apparently none, since it is on him 
 that the champions of the Catholic orthodoxy still rely. 
 
 But the plain truth is that Aquinas and the schoolmen, 
 Dante among them, were themselves among the destructive 
 forces. With heroic courage they brought the articles of 
 the faith to the test of discussion, and that test it could 
 not bear. Philosophy from Descartes to Spinosa and 
 Hobbes, from Spinosa to the great thinkers of the 
 eighteenth century, Hume, Diderot, Kant, has gone its 
 course outside the Church. 
 
 Look round this room. I divide the thirteen busts* 
 around it into four groups : (i) The old theocracy typified 
 in Moses ; (2) Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Caesar ; (3) 
 Catholic feudalism : St. Paul, Charlemagne, Dante ; (4) 
 The modern group: Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Descartes, 
 Frederic, Bichat. Now these are continuous. No link can 
 be spared. The Middle Age could not have been, but for 
 Greece and Rome: modern Europe could not have been 
 born, could not have any spiritual life, but for the Middle 
 Age. But still, if I ask myself the question, Does this last 
 (fourth) group stand outside the Church, or inside? 
 Modern Industry, Modern Poetry, Modern Philosophy, 
 Modern Statesmanship, Modern Science have those vast 
 influences been rallied round the fabric of the Catholic 
 Church, or is it quite otherwise ? What answer can there 
 be but one ? 
 
 Let us then, still standing by Dante's death-bed and 
 lifting for him the veil of futurity, ask yet this further 
 question. True, the Deluge is coming; but what hopes 
 of life and green leaf afterwards ? 
 
 Well, let us begin with Dante's friend, Giotto the 
 
 * Le. of the men commemorated in each of the thirteen months 
 of the Positivist Calendar.
 
 232 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 shepherd's son, the builder of the beautiful tower, the 
 great initial force of modern painting. At Assisi the 
 walls of the church built above the tomb of St. Francis 
 are completely covered with Giotto's pictures : and those 
 pictures are inspired by Dante. It is Dante's canto on St. 
 Francis translated into colour. Those who are unfamiliar 
 with Italian art no one within walking distance of the 
 National Gallery need be unfamiliar will be surprised 
 to find how large a part of it is inspired by Dante's poem. 
 Look, for instance, at Botticelli's picture of the Coronation 
 of the Virgin. The floor of the Cathedral of Siena is a 
 reproduction of the canto of the Purgatory. I need not 
 go on Dante's poem gave an impulse to the whole cycle 
 of Italian painters which cannot be overrated. They are 
 in the truest sense his offspring. What is that picture 
 which you see behind me but the translation into line 
 and colour of the glorious hymn sung by St. Bernard to 
 the Queen of Heaven with which Dante brings his Vision 
 to an end ; and which we too take as the fittest symbol 
 of the supreme Love that guides our life and purifies our 
 passion ? 
 
 And on the poets Dante's influence was hardly less 
 than on the painters. He is the founder of Italian 
 literature. Petrarch owed everything to him, Boccaccio and 
 Ariosto much, and thence his influence spread to Spain, 
 to France, to England Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, 
 Byron received it either directly or through others. The 
 last lines of Gothe's Faust bear the impress of the last 
 canto of Dante. 
 
 So that if Dante could have lifted the veil of the 
 future, which happily it is not given to man to do, he 
 would have seen amidst all the storm and confusion that 
 was to follow through five and six centuries, and how
 
 DANTE 233 
 
 much longer we know not, the eternal longing of man 
 for an ideal life surpassing in beauty and nobleness 
 anything that he has known in past ages. That longing, 
 that Love which stirs the universe and the heart of man, is 
 the ground principle of life ; it leads to Progress, which is 
 our goal. But aspirations for the ideal, however priceless, 
 are not enough. Love may prompt the desire to seek the 
 distant goal ; but the road to it is the straight and painful 
 path of Law. Beatrice could not lead Dante from star 
 to star, unless he had passed the black pit of the dead 
 souls, unless he had striven for Liberty up the toilsome 
 path of Purgatory, unless by shaking off the fetters of 
 debasing passion he had reached that true freedom which 
 consists in self-mastery, renouncement, submission to a 
 wisely ordered social state. Self-mastery each one may 
 achieve ; it is the first step to the moral order in 
 Church and State for which we have still to wait and 
 hope. 
 
 Therefore, though Dante created a great school of art 
 and of poetry, the vision of that long line of painters and 
 poets, glorious though it were, would not have satisfied 
 him. He would have strained his sight yet further into 
 the future to see if the reign of peace and orderly govern- 
 ment were coming, bringing with it true freedom of man's 
 will by the ascendency of the highest Love and the servi- 
 tude of baser passions. He would have joined hands, we 
 cannot doubt it, with the man who, taking Love for the 
 principle, and Progress for the end, made Law, physical 
 and moral, the foundation of all wise action. I believe 
 that Dante, however he may have been reverenced by 
 others, could never be truly appreciated until the synthesis 
 of Comte had been founded. 
 
 Dante was the singer of ten silent centuries. He was
 
 234 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 the morning star of the Renaissance. He was all this ; but 
 he is for us here, yet more. He is the herald of the wider 
 and loftier Church of which the foundations are already 
 laid, and which the coming centuries will complete. 
 Meanwhile let us be content to lodge very simply and 
 poorly in the builders' huts, and work heartily along with 
 them.
 
 II 
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON* 
 
 IT is one of the distinguishing features of Positivism that 
 it claims to introduce no fundamentally new principle ; it 
 does but promote and regulate spontaneous forces already 
 existing. What Comte did, what, in fact, has been done 
 consciously or otherwise by all great social renovators, was 
 to bring prominently forward certain deep natural ten- 
 dencies, to rescue them from baser elements, and to give 
 them systematic form. 
 
 A striking example of this procedure is his view which, 
 at first hearing, seems so strange a paradox, of the affinity 
 between Positivism and Fetichism. Yet on closer inspec- 
 tion it is seen that the renewal, widely changed and exalted, 
 of those simple feelings of reverence, and awe, and love, 
 called forth by inanimate objects in the world around us, 
 is a tendency which has increased in modern times, and 
 which is still increasing. All modern poetry, all modern 
 art, bears witness to it. The affectionate care for animals, 
 the love of flowers, the craving for solitude among the 
 woods and mountains, the clinging affection for old build- 
 ings, I might add for old creeds also, even after reason has 
 rejected them these things are nearer akin than most of 
 us are aware to the nature-worship of primaeval races of 
 men. 
 
 * This discourse was given in the rooms of the Positivist Society, 
 Newton Hall, Fetter Lane, on May 29, 1881. 
 
 235
 
 236 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 Now this strong current of thought and feeling was 
 fully recognized by Comte. The affinity between Fetichism 
 and Positivism is one of the most impressive and fertile 
 conceptions of his philosophy. For to the Positivist the 
 word Fetichism calls up something besides wild pagan 
 ceremonies, or antiquarian treatises on folk-lore. It in- 
 cludes the poetry of Wordsworth, and the painting of 
 Turner. 
 
 Closely connected with this matter is another very 
 striking tendency of our time : the honour paid to great 
 men of the past on the anniversaries of their birth and 
 their death. Consider it closely, you will find that the 
 desire to know every detail in the life of a great poet, or a 
 great statesman, the reverence for the house where Shake- 
 speare or Michael Angelo was born, or for the tomb of 
 Dante, spring from the same root as the Fetichist love of 
 outward nature which counts for so much as a spiritual 
 influence in modern life. Our reverence and love flow 
 over from animate to inanimate things. They become 
 sacred to us. Even what might seem at first sight a mere 
 shadow and abstraction, the fact that after a number of 
 revolutions of the earth in her orbit, fixed not by any 
 natural law but by a purely human arrangement at one 
 hundred, we should pay special honour to the date of a 
 great man's birth ; this, as indeed the celebration of birth- 
 days and other anniversaries, shows how natural it is for 
 even abstract things and institutions like the Calendar, of 
 man's devising, to be clothed with affection and reverence. 
 
 Be this as it may, the modern movement towards the 
 revival of centenaries is in full accordance with every aim 
 of Positivism. We should be slothful and sullen indeed 
 did we hold aloof from it. We are striving to do in a 
 more thorough and systematic way what is done outside
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 237 
 
 us on a far larger scale no doubt, and with the prestige of 
 literary applause, but irregularly, capriciously, and far too 
 seldom. We welcome these outbursts of public enthusiasm, 
 whether it be for the memory of Dante, or of Moliere, of 
 Mozart, or of Shakespeare. That such beauty and genuine 
 feeling should be possible is the deepest encouragement to 
 us. For our aim is not to create anything afresh : it is 
 simply to extend and systematize these feelings ; to bring 
 them into closer contact with the every-day life of men. 
 In a word, we would revive these glorious memories once 
 a year, not once a century. We would free them from any 
 trammels of narrow nationality, if any there be, that still 
 cling to them. And, finally, we would stamp a deeper 
 meaning into these revivals by showing how each great 
 life has played its own proper part in the vast drama of 
 Humanity. 
 
 This last point it is that specially distinguishes the 
 celebrations of great men that take place under the inspira- 
 tion of Positivist teaching from an ordinary biographical 
 notice. We do what others do, but we try to do it more 
 systematically : that is, with greater precision and greater 
 reality. Our endeavour is to look at each great life rela- 
 tively to its social environment: in simpler words, rela- 
 tively to the place it occupies in history. Life, whether of 
 a plant, bird, or man, is the interaction, the adjustment, of 
 organism and environment. And for a great man the 
 environment includes all the influences of his country and 
 his century. 
 
 Now, Calderon was a Spanish nobleman. He was 
 born at Madrid in 1601. His genius was recognized by 
 Philip IV., under whose protection he mixed in the great 
 world of his time as a soldier and diplomatist, while sedu- 
 lously practising his dramatic art. At the age of fifty he,
 
 238 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 like the other great Spanish dramatist, Lope de Vega, 
 became a priest. For thirty years he wrote religious 
 dramas, of which more afterwards. He died on Whit- 
 Sunday, the 25th of May, 1681. The house in which he 
 died is still standing : and last week half a million of 
 people came from every part of Spain and Europe to see 
 it. We need not think that the age of pilgrimages is past. 
 Perhaps it is only just beginning. 
 
 To-day a few Positivists, of very varied nationality, in 
 Rio Janeiro, in Paris, in Rouen, in Stockholm, and here in 
 London, are meeting together for the same cause. Outside 
 Spain and the regions' where the peninsular language is 
 spoken, I do not know that any other commemoration of 
 this great poet has been held ; for men are slow as yet to 
 overstep the limits of nationality. And yet one of the 
 principal reasons why I am speaking here to-day is that 
 Calderon was a Spaniard ; and that it seems well that 
 Englishmen should teach themselves how to pay due 
 honour to the Spanish nation. Therefore I begin with a 
 few remarks, first on the nation of Calderon, and secondly 
 on his century. Knowing the environment, we shall better 
 understand the life. 
 
 The five populations which, broadly speaking, make up 
 what, dating from the time of Charlemagne, may be called 
 the commonwealth of Western Europe, were arranged by 
 Auguste Comte in a certain order of value. His views as 
 to that order underwent a striking change in the course of 
 his life. This at least shows how difficult and how im- 
 portant the problem seemed to him. Briefly the change 
 consisted in this. In the Philosophic Positive the arrange- 
 ment was as follows : France, Italy, Germany, England, 
 Spain. The final arrangement was this: France, Italy, 
 Spain, England, Germany.
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 239 
 
 Without discussing the general question of this order, 
 which would take us too far, one or two points will help to 
 explain the subject immediately before us. 
 
 I. By this order of arrangement, Comte meant to give 
 his opinion not as to which nation had produced the 
 greatest number of remarkable men, but which was best 
 prepared, as a whole, for undergoing the social regenera- 
 tion which he called Positivism. His appreciation of 
 England, for instance, is sufficiently shown by the sixty-six 
 English names which he introduced into his Positive 
 Calendar. And he never failed to acknowledge the exist- 
 ence in England of a small minority who were likely to 
 take the initiative in the regenerating movement, and to 
 sustain its first efforts. But this is widely different from 
 saying that the whole mass of the English nation were 
 well prepared for the movement. And looking at England 
 as a whole, Comte thought that some of those things which 
 have made her so important in the world were not likely 
 to help, but on the contrary were quite sure to hinder, the 
 moral and social elevation of the great mass of her people. 
 
 II. Why was Italy placed second ? For several 
 reasons : 
 
 1. Her very weakness was an advantage, morally and 
 socially. It made her more willing to receive European 
 influences, less inclined to absorption in thoughts of 
 national aggrandisement. 
 
 2. That weakness was due to the temporal power of 
 the Pope ; and the very miseries which this anomalous 
 institution brought upon Italy stimulated strong desires 
 for social renovation. 
 
 3. To have kept clear of the moral and intellectual dis- 
 turbances caused by Protestantism was, in Comte's view, a 
 great advantage for a nation, even though it might have
 
 240 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 checked for the time the growth of great men. Politically 
 speaking, the most valuable aspect of Catholicism was the 
 conception of a spiritual power making its real force felt ; 
 equalling and surpassing the temporal power in prestige. 
 To live in a country where a priest, the son of poor 
 peasants, could hold his head as high as the richest 
 banker or the oldest duke, was, socially speaking, an im- 
 mense advantage to the great mass of the people. It 
 saved them from coarse and vulgar admiration of worldly 
 success. No conquests of India, no inventions of power- 
 looms, and steam engines, and telegraphs, no overflowings 
 of populations into thriving colonies, could, in his eyes, 
 compensate such an advantage as this. It has been well 
 said that vulgarity is one of the forms of death. To this 
 danger, at least, populations like the Italian and Spanish, 
 by the very fact of being behind others in industrial pro- 
 gress, and consequently less keen in the modern scramble 
 for wealth, are assuredly less liable. 
 
 4. And finally, the sense of artistic beauty, the love for 
 poetry, music, and other arts, has been more widely dis- 
 seminated in the mass of the Italian people than in any 
 other. It is not a question of whether the schools of art 
 now prevailing are good ; we know that they have fallen, 
 of late years, far short of those of Northern Europe. For 
 our present purpose, it is less important to think of the 
 cultivated few, than of the wide diffusion of artistic sensi- 
 bility through the mass. In England there are exquisite 
 connoisseurs of music and painting among our aristocratic 
 and professional classes. We think Beethoven a greater 
 genius than Rossini ; we are probably right ; but we should 
 not forget that Rossini wrote an opera for every little town 
 that he passed through ; and that would hardly be possible 
 in Shropshire or Suffolk.
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 241 
 
 III. Why was so high a place given to Spain ? 
 
 Partly for the same reasons that applied to Italy. The 
 Spaniard like the Italian, like the Irishman, if you will, 
 or the Pole, or the Tyrolese was saved from cringing to 
 noble birth, or high place, or vast wealth, by seeing the 
 parish priest hold his own with the village squire. The 
 bishop of his diocese a peasant, perhaps, by birth took 
 precedence of the bluest blood in Spain : the Pope was 
 supreme over kings. 
 
 Let us grant that the continuance of Catholicism in 
 Spain, as in other countries, retarded the growth of science, 
 and made her slower to accept the steam engine with its 
 attendant blessings. Let us admit that great intellects 
 rose less easily into prominence. Yet always this is to be 
 put into the other scale. The nation, as a whole, has been 
 saved from the deadening vice of vulgarity; it has not 
 stooped so low as others to the worship of rank and 
 wealth. 
 
 Add to this another advantage peculiar to Spain. 
 
 The Spanish nation had been knit together, as no other 
 nation had been knit, by a common danger. While 
 Norman was trampling on Saxon, and treading in the 
 seeds of social antipathies that even yet have not been 
 rooted from our soil, prince and peasant in the Asturian 
 mountains were in the full swing of their long struggle for 
 the recovery of their land from the Moor. The whole 
 history of Spain till modern times lies there. One can 
 hear the sound of the pibroch * in the old law latin of 
 their earliest statutes, when at the cry of danger townsmen 
 and herdsmen were bid to rally from market-place or 
 mountain round the common standard. Footmen in such 
 
 * See extract from Fueros of Jaca, quoted in Hallam's Middle 
 Ages, ch. iv.
 
 242 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 cases were of more avail than horsemen, and they knew 
 their worth. The deepest sources of caste hatred were 
 drained away. Such an education in loyalty, fraternity 
 and independence, it has fallen to the lot of no civilized 
 nation to receive. Loyalty to the king was stretched to 
 the limits of oriental adulation ; but let the king try to 
 infringe the charter, or to exact a rate in aid that had not 
 been voted the answer was decisive. The orders of his 
 majesty are to be " obeyed, but not executed." The plain 
 farmer of Zalamea, if he be mayor of his township, will 
 stand to the king in person, and do summary justice on his 
 own officers, if need be. The meanest beggar, says an 
 English traveller * who knew the Spanish people singularly 
 well, holds his head high in Spain. Alms may be refused, 
 but he is never treated with contumely. 
 
 Such is the nation which defied Buonaparte when all 
 the rest of continental Europe was cowering under his heel. 
 Without the immense advantages of wealth and insular 
 position that England enjoyed, misgoverned, deserted by 
 her governing classes, her peasantry defied the most 
 scientific machinery of war that the world had seen ; and 
 from that time Buonapartism was doomed. Guerilla is a 
 Spanish word. This was the country of Calderon ; and 
 these were the reasons which led Comte to place that 
 nation so high. In great discoveries, in large applications 
 of scientific industry, in mercantile enterprise, Spain is far 
 behind-hand ; but the lee-way can be made up more easily 
 in these things than in some from which other nations 
 suffer. Such defects cannot weigh down the balance when 
 the union of brotherhood with personal dignity, the highest 
 ideal of human life, is set in the opposing scale. 
 
 From the country of Calderon I pass to his century. 
 * George Borrow.
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 243 
 
 It was the century of the Thirty Years' War. Calderon 
 was eighteen years old when this war began ; he was in 
 maturity of life when it ended. The treaty of Westphalia 
 marks the moment when the two great forms of Christi- 
 anity gave up their rival hopes of European supremacy, 
 and accepted the limits which they held then, and which 
 they still retain. Germany, Holland, Sweden, Britain, are 
 Protestant still ; Austria, France, Spain, Italy, are Catholic, 
 though the word Catholic from that time lost its meaning. 
 The hope of universality was gone. 
 
 Still, there was a breathing time ; the deadly inter- 
 necine strife was over ; and for a hundred years, until the 
 first blasts of the Revolutionary storm warned men of far 
 greater changes yet to come, till the middle of the 
 eighteenth century, there was peace. It was a time 
 singularly favourable for the grander forms of poetry. 
 After the fierce activity of religious war had stirred 
 thought to its depths, the need for action suddenly ceased, 
 and there was leisure for clothing strong public emotions 
 in ideal forms. It is surely by no accident that we have 
 at one and the same time Milton idealizing Protestantism 
 in England, Calderon idealizing Catholicism in Spain, 
 while Corneille, in France, chose his subjects from the 
 course of Roman history, down to the point when it passes 
 into modern life. 
 
 The apparition of great poets is no mystical or miracu- 
 lous fact. Like every other fact of human nature or of 
 society, it is the result of fixed laws ascertainable with 
 some degree of certainty, though, doubtless, never ascer- 
 tainable with precision. Some of the elements in the case 
 are worth considering. 
 
 All the three aspects of Logic, in Comte's large 
 acceptation of the word, are concerned in Poetry : the
 
 244 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 Logic of Feeling, the Logic of Images, and the Logic of 
 Signs. There must first be Passion ; strong emotions of 
 Love or Antipathy called out by certain things or persons. 
 This is the fetichistic element in Poetry, the groundwork 
 of the whole. Here is the Logic of feeling. There must, 
 in the second place, be the power of vividly portraying the 
 image of those things or persons, in such sort as to leave 
 out all that is unmeaning and indifferent, and to dwell 
 only on the striking and salient features abstracted from 
 the rest, and often made stronger and more intense ; the 
 transformation thus wrought being often so great that the 
 image portrayed corresponds to nothing found in nature, 
 being purely ideal, yet none the less resting on fact This 
 is the Logic of Images. And finally, there must be some 
 clear statement, in speech of the ordinary kind, connecting 
 these passions and images together. This is the Logic 
 of Signs, the only kind to which the word has commonly 
 been applied. 
 
 This applies to Poetry of every sort. Now it follows 
 from this that the two forms of Poetry which appeal to 
 the general mass of mankind, dramatic and epic, require 
 three corresponding conditions. The emotions which lie 
 at the root of the whole must be felt in common by all ; 
 the habits of life from which the series of pictures is to be 
 drawn must be sufficiently fixed and adopted by all ; the 
 beliefs which connect these feelings and these images into 
 a whole must be accepted by all. 
 
 A nation utterly divided among itself, with fierce wars 
 of classes, with a small cultivated minority holding itself 
 apart from the mass of the people, breathing a different 
 atmosphere, admiring and loving different things ; or 
 again, a nation distracted by religious controversies, part 
 occupied in pulling down, part in galvanizing old forms
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 245 
 
 into factitious life, part in nursing the germs of future 
 growth ; how can such a nation be animated by those 
 collective emotions, those common sympathies and anti- 
 pathies, of which dramatic poetry is the outcome? The 
 appearance of a great dramatic poet in England at the 
 present moment is not easy to believe in. Our wars of 
 classes, our enormous overgrown cities, in which East and 
 West hardly know of one another's existence ; our disputes 
 on every article of faith, the absorption of our men of 
 science in specialities, of our men of practical energy in 
 the building of great fortunes ; our moral reformers con- 
 centrating their attentions on the abolition of this or that 
 institution, on the rooting up of this or that evil, but 
 holding up no general ideal of good before the whole 
 community to strive for; an environment made up of 
 such influences as this renders the existence of a great 
 dramatic poet impossible. It becomes for the time a form 
 of life as anomalous as the dragon or the phcenix. 
 
 But it was far different with the Spain of Calderon. 
 The Thirty Years' War had ended. Spain, to use Comte's 
 expression, was " saved " from Protestantism. This expres- 
 sion has scandalized many let us see what it means. 
 
 The Catholic Church, as Cardinal Newman has so 
 abundantly shown, was the result of a long evolution. Its 
 dogmas grew very gradually, and were intimately con- 
 nected, as Comte had pointed out (for no Catholic writer 
 could see this), with the social organization that made it 
 possible for the priest to hold his own against the king. 
 It is difficult to find the creeds in the New Testament. 
 The Divinity of Christ is very dimly expressed there : the 
 Trinity not at all ; the doctrines of Transubstantiation, 
 and of the worship of the Virgin, no one assuredly could 
 find who had not been taught them elsewhere. All these
 
 246 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 things were of very slow growth ; you find more of them 
 in Saint Augustin than in Saint Paul ; more of them in 
 Thomas Aquinas than in Saint Augustin. 
 
 Now Protestantism, regarded as a doctrine, is an 
 arbitrary arrest of that evolution at a fixed point. The 
 hard and fast line was not drawn by all Protestants at 
 the same fixed point, and here began the difficulty. By 
 Lutherans and Anglicans it was drawn at the New 
 Testament and Saint Augustin and the first four councils. 
 By Calvinists the line was placed somewhat earlier. But 
 to draw a line at all was a very difficult logical feat, which 
 ended by overtaxing the powers of all who tried it. 
 Interpret your Bible for yourself, so that you end by 
 believing it ; use private judgment, but do not use it too 
 much ; this was a slippery foundation to build on. 
 
 The intellectual incoherence of Protestantism is too 
 obvious to need much discussion. Socially it gave up the 
 great characteristic of the Catholic Church : an independent 
 priesthood that could resist the temporal power. If 
 Christianity had been content to assume Protestant forms, 
 the great civilizing influence of the Church from the third 
 to the thirteenth century would never have arisen. Saint 
 Gregory, Saint Benedict, Saint Bernard, Saint Dominic, 
 Saint Francis, Saint Thomas, would have been impossible ; 
 and the Christian Church would have been as impotent 
 as it has shown itself to be in Russia. Protestantism then 
 is so incoherent intellectually, and in its moral control of 
 social forces so incompetent, that it has unquestionably 
 exercised in many ways an enfeebling influence over the 
 nations who have accepted it. It was necessary that part 
 of Europe should be Protestant, otherwise the new re- 
 modelling forces to which we look for re-organization 
 could not have arisen. If Descartes could not have found
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 247 
 
 a Holland to work in, his work could never have been 
 done. The partial emancipation of Holland and England 
 in the seventeenth century was necessary if only as a step 
 to the total emancipation of France in the eighteenth. 
 But, looking to the mass of the community, it was 
 undoubtedly well in many ways for those nations who 
 have been spared the incoherent agitation connected with 
 Protestant controversies. 
 
 All this may seem a departure from my subject ; but 
 we shall see that to understand the Calderonian drama 
 without it is impossible. 
 
 That drama may be defined in a word thus : It is the 
 ideal portraiture of the life of a Catholic and Feudal people 
 in all its phases. Now rightly to idealize is a work of the 
 gravest social importance. Many things have been said 
 in comparing and contrasting the work done by Art and 
 Science in the world. But this at least may be said of 
 Art, that it is the most powerful lever for raising the great 
 mass of mankind outside and above their own immediate 
 interests. The vast majority of men will neither be philo- 
 sophers nor students of philosophy. But we may hope 
 for the time when they will be so far artists that all the 
 higher forms of Art shall be received by them with 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 And among forms of Art the drama is surely one of 
 the highest. See what it does. It makes the mass of 
 men speculate, whether they will or no, on the highest 
 objects of speculation, human nature, human character, 
 human life. If you think for a moment of a gathering 
 of men and women in a theatre listening to a masterpiece 
 of Shakespeare, Moliere, or Calderon, and compare it 
 with one of the miscellaneous gatherings at the British 
 Association listening to the last new discovery as to the
 
 248 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 history of the world before man came into it, you will 
 see that this latter assemblage has really no sort of title 
 to take precedence over the former. Between a people 
 educated by School Boards and a people educated by a 
 national drama, it is not the School Board folk that seem 
 to be in the happier case. The people in the theatre 
 are thinking, unconsciously perhaps, but still thinking, 
 about very difficult problems, and problems well worth 
 the solving. And when to the intellectual stimulus implied 
 in following a dramatic masterpiece you add the collective 
 sympathies called out, the feelings that all of us there 
 together, rich or poor, high or low, share in common, the 
 touches of nature that make the whole world kin ; and 
 when you add, yet further, those deeper thoughts that 
 reach conscience, and strike down to the depths of 
 passion, purifying it, to use Aristotle's marvellously pro- 
 found word,* by stripping its veils away and revealing 
 man to himself as he really is, we shall come to think 
 perhaps that, of all functions of social life, that of such 
 dramatists as ^Eschylus, Shakespeare, and Calderon, is 
 among the very highest. 
 
 Such an institution as the Spanish drama was not built 
 in a day. Calderon is its greatest representative, the 
 noblest of a long line, as Shakespeare of the English 
 drama or ^Eschylus of the Greek. In the month appro- 
 priated in Comte's Historical Calendar to Shakespeare, 
 there are the names of eight Spanish dramatists, six in the 
 week of Calderon, two in the weeks following : Lope de 
 Vega, Guillen de Castro, Guevara, Montalvan, Moreto, 
 Rojas, Tirso de Molina, Alarcon. Now, Lope de Vega 
 
 * "Eoriv ovv rpaywSt'a /averts Trpa&us (TTrovSatas Kat rcXct'a?, . . . 
 81 eXe'ov KCU <f>6(3ov TrepcuVovcra T^V TUV TOIOI/TOJV Tra^/xarajv Ka.6ap<riv. 
 
 A rt'st. Poet. cap. vi.
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 249 
 
 was born in 1562; Calderon died in 1681. The lives of 
 all the rest fall within these dates. The work of the whole 
 was therefore contained in less than a century a century 
 to which the history of literature can hardly produce a 
 parallel ; for I have not yet named Cervantes, whose death 
 was almost in the same week as Shakespeare's. 
 
 It was about 1580 that the strolling companies, which 
 abounded in Spain as elsewhere, were permanently fixed 
 in two courtyards in Madrid, still the sites of the two 
 principal theatres. There is this remarkable character 
 distinguishing the foundation of the Spanish drama from 
 the English or any other. From the very first, and 
 throughout, it was subject to religious control. The two 
 brotherhoods, named of the Sacred Passion and of Solitude, 
 were appointed by the Government to take charge of it. 
 The restrictions imposed by them at one time threatened 
 to become intolerably oppressive. Under Charles V., all 
 drama that was not strictly theological was suppressed ; 
 and Philip II. made more than one attempt to do the 
 same thing. In the very last year of his long, sour life, 
 he forbade every form of theatrical representation. The 
 national feeling was, in the end, too strong for him. 
 Nevertheless, no one can doubt that the sort of censorship 
 thus exercised, due as it was partly to the jealous fear of the 
 invasion of Protestant ideas, had very much to do with 
 the purity of language and of thought which distinguishes 
 the Spanish stage. One of its most striking contrasts 
 with the English contemporary drama, whether of Elizabeth 
 or Charles II., is the almost entire absence of coarse 
 language, or of appeals, subtle or brutish, to sensual feel- 
 ing. Shakespeare, as we know, stands far above his 
 fellows in these things as in others. But many passages 
 that Shakespeare tolerated would not have been tolerated
 
 250 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 in Spain. It was not that human passion was excluded. 
 There was no cold classicism turning flesh and blood into 
 marble antiques. In all the countless masterpieces of the 
 Spanish drama, the men are men and the women are 
 women ; and the passions of love, jealousy and revenge 
 to say nothing of the brighter and merrier sides of life 
 are painted with an energy and vividness unsurpassed 
 in the whole history of art. But in the vast range of the 
 Calderonian drama there is no word at which a woman 
 could blush. The connection of the Stage with the Church 
 counts for much in this ; and it was a very close connection. 
 Lope de Vega, the true founder of the Spanish drama, was 
 first a soldier and afterwards a priest : Calderon was also 
 a soldier, and was also for thirty years a priest. Cervantes 
 was a soldier, as all his readers know ; he fought at 
 Lepanto, as Lope de Vega fought in the Spanish Armada ; 
 and Cervantes, towards the end of his stormy life, entered 
 a religious brotherhood. Montalvan was a doctor of 
 divinity. Tirso de Molina, the first author of Don Juan, 
 lived and died in a monastery. Moreto also took orders. 
 All this meant, of course, something widely different from 
 what it would mean now. The Catholic priest of our own 
 time is set to his work very young ; he has been brought 
 up in theological colleges, in strict seclusion from the 
 world. He is kept carefully aloof, so far as the Govern- 
 ment will allow, from the public schools of his country. 
 When all the lads of his own village do their duty as 
 soldiers he is not allowed to join them. And brought up 
 in this exotic atmosphere, ignorant of human life in all its 
 phases, joining neither in the intellectual or social progress 
 of his time, he is not likely to do much for the spiritual 
 government of man. But the Church of Spain, in the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was co-extensive with
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 251 
 
 the whole life of the nation. And while we bear in mind 
 that certain currents of social progress were rigidly and 
 savagely resisted, that a Descartes, a Bacon, an Isaac 
 Newton, a Locke, a Hume, were impossible in Spain ; that 
 science, philosophy, modern industry, were arrested in their 
 very germs, waiting for later centuries to ripen them, we 
 may yet fairly and frankly own that it has been well that 
 one nation of the European brotherhood should show by 
 example what the old feudal Catholic order was without 
 these things. For Spaniards can say, We have invented 
 no steam engines, and built no factories ; but we are less 
 divided by the war of classes than any other nation ; and 
 we stood up against the tyranny of Napoleon as our 
 fathers stood against the Moors. The life of our nation 
 has been a noble life, and great poets have found it worth 
 their painting. 
 
 The greatest of these poets, if for the moment we 
 except Cervantes, was Calderon. Others were great ; and 
 to others the structure and constitution of the Spanish 
 drama is due : to Lope de Vega especially, the most 
 astonishingly facile and fertile genius, perhaps, in the long 
 list of the world's poets. Calderon entered into no field 
 of art that others had not cultivated before ; his metres 
 are the same, the structure of his plays is the same, his 
 choice of subjects the same. But he did their work better. 
 He put wider and deeper thought into it. 
 
 His work, as I have said, was the portraiture of the 
 manners and the passions of a Catholic and Feudal people. 
 Loyalty, Honour, Love, Jealousy, Revenge, the conflict 
 of all these complex passions offered an inexhaustible 
 treasure-house of themes. The restraints imposed by the 
 Church were assuredly light enough. Impurity and heresy 
 being banished, these poets were free as the winds. The
 
 252 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 tone was feudal and Catholic : Christian, in the narrower 
 sense of the word, it was not ; as little as it was pagan. 
 Half Calderon's plays turn on fine points of honour, and 
 on the conflicts of honour with love or with loyalty ; and 
 the feeling of honour is neither Christian nor pagan : it is 
 mediaeval and feudal. Honour is an alliance of the higher 
 egoistic instincts with the social instincts against the baser 
 passions of fear, lust, or avarice ; this alliance always pre- 
 supposing a special state of outside opinion to which it is 
 adjusted. The feeling of comradeship must be strong ; 
 the sensibility to praise or blame must be very keen ; and 
 pride, as distinct from vanity, must be strong too ; there 
 is resolution not to submit to force of any kind. Given a 
 social environment corresponding to this combination of 
 feelings, and you have the remarkable phase of feeling 
 unknown in Europe before the Middle Ages, though 
 paralleled perhaps till lately in Japan, called the sense of 
 honour ; and it remains, and will always remain, a stronger 
 guarantee for truthful dealing between man and man than 
 any which has been created by theology. No such 
 machinery for crushing the baser power of egoism has 
 ever been invented. To be too proud to tell a lie, to suffer 
 death rather than disgrace feelings of this kind lie at the 
 root of all noble character. Their germs may be traced 
 everywhere, but it was mediaeval life that first brought them 
 into prominence ; and of the two elements of mediaeval 
 life it was the Feudal rather than the Catholic element 
 from which they sprang. In Oriental Christendom, where 
 the feudal element was absent, you find few traces of all 
 this. In Spain the feeling was stronger than elsewhere ; 
 and it led sometimes to strange aberrations, which Calderon, 
 in such dramas as The Painter of his own Dishonour, was 
 not slow to indicate. Be this as it may, the antagonism of
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 253 
 
 honour with love and loyalty, in combinations of circum- 
 stances which Calderon surpassed all other poets in con- 
 triving, gave the Spanish poet such opportunities for 
 bringing into prominence the grandest elements of our 
 moral nature, as Greek sculptors had for portraying the 
 physical form of man in the contests of their wrestlers. 
 
 An even stronger contrast between ancient and modern 
 poetry is the part which women hold in it. One or two 
 beautiful types apart, like the Penelope of Homer or the 
 Antigone of Sophocles, the women of Greek poetry are 
 either slaves, like Briseis, whose ownership stirs quarrel, or 
 pernicious phantoms like Helen, or revengeful demons like 
 Clytemnestra and Medea. Such portraits of women as 
 Shakespeare and Scott have given us are of modern crea- 
 tion, for the originals themselves are modern. In the 
 dignity and noble charm of his women Calderon seems to 
 me sometimes supreme amongst poets. I do not main- 
 tain, of course, that in delineating the subtle idiosyncrasies 
 of character either in man or woman he is to be mentioned 
 in the same phrase as Shakespeare. Shakespeare came 
 into the world to teach this one truth above others, a truth 
 of the profoundest social import, and which needed telling 
 that every man and woman born into the world differs 
 from every other man and woman. And portraiture of 
 individualities of character have been the strong point of 
 English art ever since. Calderon's powers did not lie in 
 painting individualities of character. His men and women 
 are the men and women of Titian or Vandyke, rather than 
 those of Holbein or Reynolds. Nevertheless, I think that 
 women, broadly speaking, play a more important part in 
 Calderon's drama than in Shakespeare's. They have more 
 responsible work to do ; and some of them reach heights 
 and depths which Shakespeare never measured. I will
 
 254 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 give as an instance Calderon's Mariamne, the victim of 
 Herod's atrocious jealousy. There is a vague prophecy 
 which haunts the drama like a dim phantom that she is to 
 die by his hand. Herod is passionately in love, and his 
 love stirs him to attempt the conquest of the world that he 
 may make her its empress. Nevertheless, he is possessed 
 by frantic jealousy, lest, he dying the first, she should be 
 possessed by another ; and knowing that his own life is in 
 danger from Octavius, against whom he had fought, and 
 whom he knew to have expressed great admiration for his 
 wife's beauty, after having seen her picture, he descends to 
 the infamy of attempting her life. Mariamne gets know- 
 ledge of the plot She begs her husband's life from 
 Octavius. Then, with very noble and calm indignation 
 beneath which her outraged love lies buried she tells her 
 husband that she will never see him again. Octavius, 
 wishing to protect her from Herod's frantic rage, secretly 
 obtains access to her, and urges her to flight. But, with 
 quiet dignity, she tells him she needs no protection : 
 
 My lips were dumb when first I saw you here ; 
 And now I hear you speak my breath comes back 
 Plainly to tell you this : Some perjured traitor 
 It must be who has dared to fill your mind 
 With this abhorred proposal. Sir, my husband 
 Is my husband ; and say he were to kill me 
 I am guiltless, which in the flight you talk of 
 I could not be. I dwell in safety here, 
 And you are ill-informed about my grief ; 
 And though you were not, and the dagger's point 
 Should hush my life, I die not through my fault, 
 But through the fatal influence of my star ; 
 And to die spotless is a lighter thing 
 Than to live pointed at by common scorn. 
 If therefore you intend me any kindness, 
 You cannot do a greater than to leave me.* 
 
 * The translation of this extract is based on Ticknor's, as given in his 
 History of Spanish Literature; but it is rather closer to the original.
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 255 
 
 It is too late. Octavius and Herod meet in the dusk, 
 and Herod's fatal dagger meant for his enemy falls 
 on Mariamne. I think that any one who reads this play 
 carefully will say that Mariamne is greater than Desde- 
 mona ; her equal in purity ; her superior in womanly dignity. 
 
 Take again the Justina of The Sorcerer (El magico pro- 
 digioso). This play has, superficially enough, been com- 
 pared with Goethe's Faust. But what woman in Faust, 
 whether in the first part or the second, what woman in 
 any poem of Goethe, is to be compared to Justina ? Cyprian 
 of Antioch, like Faust, has sold his soul to the Demon ; he 
 claims from the Demon that he shall win Justina, a young 
 Christian of that city. Then the Demon tempts Justina, 
 not with necklaces and earrings, like Mephistopheles, but 
 with the subtlest and most delicate influences of art and 
 nature that from the air all round her breathe ethereal 
 love. This may be read in Shelley's exquisite fragment of 
 translation, too long to quote here, and too beautiful to 
 mutilate ; as also the passage where Justina resists the 
 Tempter : 
 
 JUSTINA. 
 
 So shall thy promise fail. This agony 
 Of passion which afflicts my heart and soul 
 May sweep imagination in its storm. 
 The will is firm. 
 
 DAEMON. 
 
 Already half is done 
 In the imagination of an act : 
 The sin incurred, the pleasure then remains. 
 Let not the will stop half way on the road. 
 
 JUSTINA. 
 
 I will not be discouraged, nor despair, 
 Although I thought it : and although 'tis true 
 That thought is but a prelude to the deed ; 
 Thought is not in my power, but action is. 
 I will not move my foot to follow thee.
 
 256 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 Feudal life in all its phases is the staple material of the 
 Calderonian drama. But, as I have said, feudal life in 
 Spain was not accompanied by the war of caste and class 
 that embittered it elsewhere. The homelier side of Spanish 
 life has a dignity all its own, as readers of Cervantes know. 
 And perhaps in the whole range of European literature no 
 more genuinely republican poem is to be found than 
 Calderon's Mayor of Zalamea, where the poor village 
 magistrate carries out the utmost penalties of the law on 
 the king's officer, and with grave decorum upholds the 
 righteousness of his action before the king himself. 
 
 One short quotation gives the key-note to the whole. 
 The General, Don Lope, is remonstrating with Farmer 
 Pedro for what he thinks disrespectful treatment of the 
 officer who had been billeted upon him, and who had 
 already shown insolent attention to his daughter. 
 
 General. By God, sir, do you know he is a Captain ? 
 
 Pedro. By God, sir, I do : and, though he were a General, I 
 would kill him if he touched my reputation. 
 
 Genera!. If a man here touches one hair of the poorest 
 soldier in my army, as sure as there's a God in heaven, I'll send 
 him to the gallows. 
 
 Pedro. And as sure as there's a God in heaven, if any one 
 here makes free with one jot or one tittle of my honour, I'll send 
 him to the gallows too.* 
 
 General. Don't you know that you, in your station of life, 
 are bound to bear this charge ? 
 
 Pedro. Bound for my money's worth, yes : for my good name, 
 no. My fortune and my life are the king's ; my honour belongs 
 to my own soul ; and my soul belongs to God. 
 
 On many sides of Calderon's work I have left myself 
 no space to dwell. The April and May Mornings, gay, 
 delicate, and rich as a picture by Watteau ; Life's a Dream, 
 
 * The point of the story is that Pedro was as good as his word.
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 257 
 
 the profoundest and most original of his dramas, the 
 humorous bravery, wild adventure, and lurid passion of 
 countless others, must be unnoticed here. I pass to that 
 part of his life's work on which he himself set most store : 
 his religious drama. In the full maturity of his powers, 
 after full experience of the world as a soldier, a diplomatist, 
 and a courtier, after delighting it with his brilliant pictures 
 and profound studies of the passions and struggles of life, 
 he became a priest. The thirty remaining years of his life 
 were spent mainly, and yet not entirely, in the composition 
 of poems called Autos Sacramentales : in other words, 
 public acts in honour of the Sacrament. They were, in 
 fact, mystery-plays, like those that were performed in 
 every country through the Middle Ages, and of which the 
 Ammergau play is a survival. These autos were performed 
 at the festival of Corpus Christi, in Madrid, in Toledo, and 
 in Seville, and indeed throughout Spain. Calderon was 
 not the first poet who wrote such plays : for Lope de 
 Vega, and many others, had done the same thing. But 
 by the energy which he concentrated on the subject, by 
 the infinite variety which he gave to a few very simple 
 themes, by the wealth of thought and imagination which 
 he poured into it, Calderon has made this great branch 
 of art his own. It was in no pietistic or morbid mood, 
 but in deliberate judgment, that he judged this part of 
 his work far more important than the rest. It was not 
 merely because he became a priest that he exchanged 
 secular for religious drama. He wrote several religious 
 dramas before he became a priest ; he wrote some secular 
 plays afterwards, one in the last year of his life. But 
 for the last third of his life, that is, say, for thirty years, 
 he devoted himself mainly to the great work of clothing 
 the religious beliefs of his countrymen in a poetic form. 
 
 8
 
 258 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 For his secular plays he cared so little that it was with 
 some difficulty that he was persuaded towards the end 
 of his life to draw up a list of them ; but some of the 
 Sacramental Acts he was at the pains of editing, and 
 altogether he wrote one hundred, of which seventy-two 
 have been preserved. 
 
 The religious drama of Calderon falls under two heads ; 
 his Plays of Saints, and his Sacramental Acts. The first 
 were written on the same plan as ordinary plays : they were 
 in three Acts ; the characters were living men and women ; 
 the supernatural machinery is hardly more prominent than 
 in Shakespeare's Macbeth or Hamlet. The Purgatory of 
 Saint Patrick, the Devotion of the Cross, and The Sorcerer, 
 from which I have already quoted, are examples. 
 
 But the Sacramental Acts stand entirely apart from 
 this. The occasion, the subject, the place, the audience, 
 the style, the mode of construction, were all different from 
 those of other dramas. The occasion was the festival of 
 Corpus Christi ; the uniform theme was the dogma of 
 Transubstantiation ; the place the public square of the 
 city ; the audience was the whole population of that 
 city, from king to beggar. There were religious functions 
 in the churches ; there were processions of priests and 
 people through the streets, the king carrying his lighted 
 taper like any other layman ; there was kneeling of the 
 vast multitude in the street, as prayer alternated with 
 song ; and, midway in the ceremonial, all gathered before 
 the stage erected in the market place, and the play began. 
 The plays were in one act, preceded by a prelude. The 
 personages were, for the most part, allegorical beings, like 
 those of Bunyan's Pilgrim, or of his Town of Mansoul.* 
 
 * Calderon's Philothea has a remarkable resemblance to the Town 
 of Mansoul. It has been translated by Mr. D. F. MacCarthy.
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 259 
 
 The titles of these wonderful works show the infinite 
 play of fancy which could present one and the same theme 
 in so marvellous a variety of forms. The Merchant- 
 Ship, The Brazen Serpent, Belshazzar's Feast, Psyche and 
 Cupid, The Divine OrpJieus, TJte True God Pan, Sacred 
 Parnassus, The Sorceries of Sin, To God through Policy, 
 No better Luck tJian God, Tlie World's a Stage, Ttte 
 Dumb Devil, The World's Market, Gideoris Fleece these, 
 and other the like titles, prepare us for what we are to 
 find. As for the characters, Bunyan himself is far out- 
 stripped by their variety. The Christian virtues, the 
 seven deadly sins, the five senses, Judaism, Paganism,* 
 Mahommedanism, Atheism, the Saints, the Sibyls, the 
 heroes of the Old Testament or of Greek or Roman story ; 
 Earth, Air, Fire, and Water ; the trees of the forest, the 
 seven days of Creation, the Sacraments, the orders of 
 Chivalry, Human Nature, Intellect, Free-will, demons of 
 every sort, and the Creator Himself; all these, and more, 
 are called on the stage. The appeal is not to pity and 
 terror only, or to religious awe. There is much whole- 
 some scorn and genial mockery. Not one of these sacred 
 plays but has its fool. Atheism in one play, Free-will in 
 another, Gluttony in a third, gave infinite amusement to 
 the audience. On the mechanism of the stage great pains 
 were lavished. Vast cars of boat-like shape, suspended 
 in the air, were swung round to the front, containing 
 the personages of each successive scene. The decoration 
 was magnificent and costly. 
 
 A short account of one of these plays will serve as 
 an example to the rest. 
 
 * It is noteworthy that Paganism is invariably treated by Calderon 
 with much more respect than Judaism ; a true, though instinctive, 
 appreciation of the preponderating importance of the Graeco- Roman 
 element in modern life.
 
 260 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 In the Divine Orpheus a black pirate ship appears on 
 the gloomy waters of Chaos and of Night ; the captain 
 is the Prince of Darkness, and Envy is with him. A 
 sweet voice heard in the distance makes them shudder. 
 Then, through the dim light, a vast globe shows itself, 
 and, opening into two hemispheres, discovers Orpheus. 
 He invokes Chaos, and, as he sings, a third car appears, 
 in which are seen sleeping the Seven Days of Creation. 
 One after another, each is bidden to awake. Let there 
 be light, the Master sings, and the first Day rises with 
 his torch and passes on. The second divides the sea 
 and sky ; the third brings fruit and flowers ; the fourth 
 the sun and moon ; the fifth arises, and fish swim in the 
 sea, and birds fly through the air ; the sixth is awakened 
 by the magic singing, and beasts break forth from the 
 rock ; and, last of all, Human Nature herself, represented 
 as a beautiful woman, wakes from sleep, and the message 
 of dominion, and free will, and obedience, is delivered to 
 her. The demon has seen and heard this ; but admiring 
 while he hates he is goaded by envious fury, and resolves 
 on her ruin. He bids the pilot of the River of Oblivion 
 to make ready his bark to carry her into eternal night. 
 But Human Nature again appearing, accompanied by 
 Pleasure, the wit and buffoon of the piece, and by the 
 Seven Days, begins to chant the praises of the Creator 
 in the words of the hundred and thirty-sixth psalm ; the 
 chorus of the Days joining in with the refrain, For His 
 mercy endureth for ever. Now begins a scene of most 
 courteous gallantry between Orpheus and Human Nature, 
 in which the lover wins his bride and leads her into his 
 palace. The Demon, disguised as a gardener, presents 
 himself to the Lady, and persuades her to taste the 
 forbidden fruit. Instantly the days, one by one, flee
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 261 
 
 from her, each followed by the black shadowy form of 
 Night ; and Human Nature, now called Eurydice, is 
 carried by the Demon across the black water. 
 
 Orpheus returns, bearing a lyre fashioned like a cross, 
 and, breaking forth into musical lamentations ; the chorus 
 of the Days following him. He conjures the pilot Letheus, 
 who defies him, but who in the act of striking him falls 
 dead. The two disappear in darkness, and an earthquake 
 follows. The scene changes, and Orpheus reappears on 
 the black ship, the mainmast of which is now fashioned 
 like a cross. Orpheus claims his bride from the Demon. 
 The chorus of Days surround her, and lift her to the 
 Ship of Life the symbol of the Church which now sails 
 forward, gay with streamers, and carrying at her top a 
 lantern, in which is placed the Chalice and the Host. 
 " What avails it," says the Prince of Darkness, " that you 
 take her from me ? for, whenever your face is turned 
 away, she will come back to my prison." " I accept the 
 challenge," Orpheus replies, "for in the Ship of Life are 
 Sacraments to guard her from that danger." " What 
 Sacraments are these ! " ask Envy and the Demon from the 
 deck of their Black ship. " Seven," says one of the Days 
 from the other ship, " and the holiest of all is that which 
 this lantern shows : the body and blood of Christ in bread 
 and wine." Then actors and spectators sink on their knees, 
 and with triumphant chorus, broken only by the moans 
 of the Demon, bid god-speed to the Ship of the Church. 
 
 Such was Calderon : his life being of all great artists 
 almost the completest that I know. It was lived out to 
 the full in health and full activity. No base passion 
 choked it, no harsh circumstance hampered its free growth. 
 Soldier, diplomatist, courtier, and priest, the favourite of 
 his king, the beloved of his nation whose pride and
 
 262 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 sorrows he shared to the full his experience of life was 
 richer than Dante's or Milton's, for he could laugh as 
 well as weep ; richer than Goethe's, for he knew what 
 religion was, and Goethe did not. His culture was the 
 high culture of the Renaissance, well stored in such philo- 
 sophy as Aristotle and Aquinas taught ; eagerly receptive 
 of every phase of aesthetic or natural beauty. He loved 
 music ; he lived with great painters as well as great poets, 
 and he wrote a treatise on their art. And, finally, sparing 
 of all detail though his biographer has been, he has told 
 us these two simple things worth many volumes of im- 
 pertinent minuteness ; the house of Calderon was the 
 refuge for every one in distress, and he never made an 
 enemy, or said a bitter word of any one. 
 
 Of all great poets he is among those few who have 
 well understood and completely fulfilled the social function 
 of the poet. That function is to idealize the life of his 
 nation in all its phases, standing halfway between abstract 
 principle and realized result, and bridging over the gulf 
 between them. Homer did this for the world. Dante, 
 impeded by hard circumstance, and uttering dark oracles 
 for the few rather than the many, did this for mediaeval 
 Europe. Calderon, happier in his narrower sphere, did 
 this for Spain. And it is in Calderon that we see the 
 latent capacity for poetic development that lay within 
 Catholic and feudal society, had only the fatal imperfections 
 of the Catholic doctrine permitted, and could we forget 
 that behind the splendid pageant of the Autos Sacra- 
 mentales loomed the lurid smoke-clouds of the Autos da Fe. 
 
 The history of great poets and of their times teaches 
 us something of the conditions which allow great poets 
 to arise. It may be that our own time is not one of those 
 in which the greatest minds will easily accept this form
 
 THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON 263 
 
 of spiritual activity. An age in which every doctrine is 
 disputed and none accepted, an age of chronic warfare 
 between rulers and ruled, between rich and poor in which 
 the very sexes are being goaded, however vainly, into 
 ignoble rivalry is not the age of great poets. Our 
 business is the harder and duller work of establishing 
 firm principles, of laying foundations of solid convictions 
 on which the future fabric of human life may rest. Yet 
 it is some solace amidst the confusion and disarray of 
 modern life to look forward to the after-time when a faith 
 that unites men and nations, instead of dividing them, 
 shall be embodied in song and colour and carved stones, 
 and stir the hearts of men, as no written words can do, 
 to noble impulse and action. 
 
 Dante admitted with much hard straining here and 
 there one Pagan into Paradise, or remitted for others the 
 fiercer pains of Hell. Calderon, using a poet's licence to 
 break the limits of the Church's rules, handled the beliefs 
 of our Greek and Roman ancestors with kind indulgence. 
 But to us the whole life of Humanity is one, and is sacred, 
 from her earliest childhood to her remotest future : for 
 us her days are " bound each to each with mutual piety " : 
 for us the faiths, Pagan, Christian, or Mussulman, which 
 have hurled nations into deadly conflict, even whilst they 
 knit their ranks together, are but varying and imperfect 
 forms of one and the same religion which shall one day 
 unite the world. And thus the treasure-house of future 
 poets and artists is boundless, for it is nothing less than 
 the history of Humanity.* 
 
 * The seven plays of Calderon, selected by Auguste Comte in his 
 volume of Spanish Plays (Paris, 1854) are as follows : Two Stabs in 
 the Dark, The Mayor of Zalamed, Life's a Dream, Not Always so 
 Bad as we Think, April and May Mornings, The Merchant Ship, 
 The Lord's Vineyard.
 
 Ill 
 
 CENTENARIES OF CORNEILLE AND 
 DIDEROT.* 
 
 WHEN we are told as we often are told of the cramping, 
 narrowing, repressive tone of Auguste Comte's teaching, 
 that he could only conceive one type of excellence into 
 which all the world was to be thrust, and that to co-operate 
 with those who are trying to carry out his work is to 
 fasten on again the chains which, after many years of pain 
 and struggle, have at last been broken, it would seem 
 enough in answer to these and the like objections to point 
 to the Positivist Calendar. I suppose that never before 
 were five hundred names collected so widely different in 
 parentage, in time and place, in the nature and quality of 
 their work, yet all convergent to a purpose. There have 
 been biographical dictionaries without number ; and there 
 have also been collections of Lives of Saints. But the 
 dictionaries admit good and bad alike ; their business is to 
 exclude no name that has stamped itself for good or evil 
 on the world's history. Borgia is there with Raphael, 
 Augustine with Attila, Shakespeare with Philip II., Goethe 
 and Byron with the first Napoleon. And, on the other 
 hand, the Lives of the Saints are restricted to one type of 
 excellence or, at any rate, to the followers and upholders 
 of one special creed. 
 
 But the Positivist Calendar is distinct from these, both 
 
 * October 26, 1884. 
 264
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 265 
 
 in what it admits and in what it rejects. It rejects all 
 mere destroyers ; it excludes also all those who have set 
 themselves to turn the tide of progress backwards. Attila, 
 Alaric, Genghis Khan, find no place. The statesmen of 
 Protestantism are admitted, but not the founders of Pro- 
 testant sects. Even the leaders of the French Revolution, 
 though it forms the era from which the Calendar is dated, 
 are not there. So, too, Julian the Apostate, Philip II. of 
 Spain, and Napoleon Bonaparte, are shut out. But it 
 collects representative names from all countries and cen- 
 turies and creeds, whatever the quality and character of 
 their work, who have built up the life of Humanity, with a 
 special reference to the life of Western Europe, from the 
 earliest times of Greece to our own. For it is not pre- 
 tended that full justice is done to the yet earlier periods in 
 the life of Humanity representing primitive Fetichism, and 
 even primitive Theocracy. It is not maintained that these 
 five hundred names are the names of saints. All that is 
 assumed is that, each in their way, have done good and 
 valuable work that deserves to be thankfully remembered 
 and commemorated. 
 
 Another consequence follows from this character of the 
 Calendar. It is almost impossible to associate by mere 
 hazard any two names in it between which some definite 
 link of connection cannot be easily pointed out. This 
 comes, of course, from the fact that all the true functions 
 of Humanity are necessary, and are correlative and inter- 
 dependent : just as in the life of the individual, seeing, and 
 feeling, and motion, and nutrition are all closely connected 
 together, so that disturbance or paralysis of one disturbs 
 and weakens the other. So with the social organism 
 Poetry, Philosophy, Science, Statesmanship, act and react 
 on one another.
 
 266 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 The two men whose services we are to commemorate 
 to-night lived in different centuries, and had very different 
 work to do. Nevertheless, it will not be difficult to show 
 that their work tended towards the same purpose. 
 
 Peter Corneille was born at the beginning of the seven- 
 teenth century, in 1606, and died two hundred years ago, 
 in 1684. During his childhood, Shakespeare and the 
 greatest genius of Spain, the author of Don Quixote, were 
 still living. Lope de Vega was in full force, and survived 
 till Corneille's manhood. Milton and Calderon were, as 
 nearly as possible, his contemporaries. Milton was two 
 years younger than Corneille, and died two years before 
 him. Calderon was five years older ; we celebrated the 
 bi-centenary of his death two years ago. Moliere's short 
 life of forty-nine years was included in Corneille's ; his 
 death was in the year before Milton's. Racine was in full 
 vigour when Corneille died, and survived him for fifteen 
 years. 
 
 Here, then, we have a list of eight poets, all of very 
 high eminence. Other names might have been added, 
 from Spain and from England especially. But these 
 suffice. Few centuries have seen such an outburst of 
 poetic art of the grandest and largest style. Can we in 
 any way account for this, or render to ourselves any account 
 of the value of this work ? 
 
 Early in the sixteenth century the decay of the Catholic 
 organization, which had been going on for two centuries, 
 led to the open conflagration that goes by the name of the 
 Protestant Reformation. Between the nations that accepted 
 the Reformation as a refuge from intolerable evils, and 
 those that rejected it as a remedy utterly inadequate to 
 the disease, and bringing worse evils after it, inevitable 
 struggles ensued ; and into the struggle entered all the
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 267 
 
 personal cupidities of rival statesmen, no longer restrained, 
 as they had been during the Middle Ages, by the counsels 
 of a spiritual power universally recognized. The strife was 
 not finally ended till the great treaty of Westphalia, in 
 1648, by which the nations of Western Europe formally 
 recognized that Europe was to become neither Catholic 
 nor Protestant just as by the cessation of the Crusades, 
 some centuries before, it had been practically recognized 
 that neither the Christian nor Mussulman faith was to be 
 the universal religion. In France, where the struggle 
 during the sixteenth century had been singularly fierce, the 
 reconciliation had been effected already for some time by 
 the accession of Henry IV. and the edict of Nantes, which 
 allowed freedom of worship to Catholic and Protestant alike. 
 
 Thus, in the century following that of the Reformation, 
 there was a time of comparative repose after violent strain 
 and conflict. Such times have always been favourable to 
 an outburst of poetic energy. Vigorous natures deeply 
 stirred by conflict have no other outlet for their energy 
 than that which poetic idealization offers. Thus in Greece 
 after the Persian struggle, in Rome after the long civil wars 
 of the republic were ended by Augustus, and in our cen- 
 tury at the close of the war with France, there have been 
 times of great poetic fertility. The noblest passions of our 
 nature have been called out in the struggle, and the poet 
 has idealized those passions as the Greek sculptor idealized 
 the splendid forms that contended before him in the arena. 
 
 Such a period was the seventeenth century. It was a 
 breathing-time between the two great struggles of the 
 Reformation and the Revolution. The struggle was far 
 from over ; it was yet to assume dimensions that Luther 
 and Calvin had never dreamed of. But, meantime, there 
 was rest ; it was possible to think of the problem which
 
 268 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 always remains constant amidst whatever conflicts and 
 changes the future may bring the idealization of life. 
 
 Into such a time Peter Corneille was born. He was a 
 Norman, son of a Commissioner of Forests, belonging 
 therefore to that upper middle class which has produced so 
 many great Frenchmen. Like Descartes, like Diderot, 
 D'Alembert, and so many others, he was brought up by 
 the Jesuits, of whom he never ceased to speak with grati- 
 tude. His life and character are notable for their extreme 
 simplicity. He was utterly free from ambition, cupidity, 
 or intrigue, with a certain grave, Stoic ruggedness of cha- 
 racter, inspiring respect in all round him. His life lay in 
 his work. There are few incidents in it that are worth 
 recording. His four noblest tragedies were written in 
 early manhood, between 1636 and 1640. In those that 
 followed there are noble scenes, but no complete work 
 which we can admire. The other work of his which has 
 come down to us is the poetic version of the Imitation of 
 Thomas a Kempis, which, together with the original, finds 
 a place in the Positivist Library. 
 
 A few words on these four principal dramas. These 
 are The Cid, Horace, Cinna, Polyeucte. The interest of all 
 these dramas turns on the conflict between opposing duties 
 and affections. He has not dealt as Cervantes and Shake- 
 speare did with the animal or the vicious propensities 
 which intertwine themselves with the higher emotions, and 
 bring about the parti-coloured result which is seen in real 
 life. Vice and treachery find no place in Corneille's drama. 
 He spent his strength in one problem, quite large enough 
 for any one man to handle the conflict of public and 
 private duty, the opposing strain of two passions, either of 
 them pure and noble, but pulling in contrary ways. 
 
 In the Cid, the scene of which is laid in Spain of the
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 269 
 
 eleventh century, Rodrigo's father, Diego, an old man, has 
 been insulted by the father of the woman to whom he is 
 betrothed. Rodrigo is urged by Diego to avenge the 
 insult. After a violent conflict between his love for his 
 betrothed and his sense of wounded honour and filial duty, 
 he complies, and Chimene's father is killed in the duel. 
 Chimene's love for Rodrigo, which is great, is brought into 
 conflict with the passionate respect for her father, urging 
 her to demand vengeance on his slayer. On the conflict 
 of these emotions turns the interest of the drama, for the 
 two passions do not destroy one another ; they work 
 simultaneously. Chimene loves ardently, and continues to 
 love the man she desires to punish. The strange paradox 
 of revenge and wounded honour contending with love, 
 each retaining its full force in the desperate encounter, is 
 ended at last by an overwhelming public danger. The 
 Moors invade Spain. Rodrigo is the only man in whom 
 his countrymen can trust. He leads them to battle and 
 victory. And the king at last satisfies the heroine that 
 the baptism of battle has wiped away the deadly wrong 
 that severed her from her lover. 
 
 The drama of Horace carries us back to the early days 
 of Rome, when the little city of Alba, a few miles away, 
 was her deadly rival. It was agreed that the strife between 
 them should be decided by a combat of three champions 
 on either side. Horace, with two brothers, was the Roman 
 champion. Curiatius and his two brothers were to fight 
 for Alba. Private passion intertwined itself with the 
 struggle. Horace was married to an Alban wife. His 
 sister, Camilla, was betrothed to the Alban champion. 
 The story follows the old legend as we may read it in 
 Livy. The two brothers of Horatius are slain in the 
 combat. But all three of the Alban champions are more
 
 2/o COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 or less severely wounded. Horatius, feigning flight, is 
 pursued by them ; and when they have been separated, 
 turns round, fights with each separately, and is victorious. 
 Entering Rome in triumph, he is goaded by the violent 
 reproaches of his sister into a paroxysm of indignation, in 
 which he kills her. He is judged by the king for so ter- 
 rible a deed, but, having saved his city from servitude, he 
 receives pardon. 
 
 This old familiar theme was well suited to Corneille's 
 genius. The conflict of private and public duty receives 
 five distinct modulations. The father of the Horatii is 
 eager for his sons to be the champions of their city, but 
 tenderly compassionate for his daughter betrothed to their 
 foe. Horatius himself is the perfect type of the Roman 
 citizen, wholly absorbed in his patriotic duty. His wife, 
 Sabrisa, though Alban, and tenderly attached to her 
 brothers, is yet the true Roman wife, unflinchingly faith- 
 ful to the country of her adoption, though in no way 
 hardened against natural affection. Curiatius, the Alban 
 chief, is of another mould from Horatius far less firmly 
 knit together. In him private passion contends with far 
 more hope of mastery against public duty ; and, finally, in 
 his mistress, Camilla, the vehemence of love sweeps 
 patriotism utterly away. 
 
 The play has five acts. The story is simple, trite, and 
 even hackneyed. There is an absolute and entire absence 
 of local colour. Such elaborate scenery and costumes as 
 we are now in the habit of requiring from those who 
 represent Shakespearean drama would be utterly out of 
 place. The characters might belong to any period of 
 Roman history, and they talk like civilized Europeans. 
 Moreover, the drama is wholly unrelieved by the play of 
 realistic humour and the tones of common, everyday life,
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 271 
 
 of which Shakespeare and the Spanish dramatists made 
 such abundant use. And, nevertheless, it is a noble poem. 
 The sympathies are so deeply and sublimely stirred, the 
 balance of emotions so carefully maintained, the suspense 
 of the battle is portrayed with such skill and such glowing 
 feeling, that it can be read year after year with renewed 
 admiration at least by those who are not so distracted by 
 the morbid individualism of much modern poetry that all 
 generous public emotions have become distasteful to them. 
 
 In the drama of Cinna, Corneille has given a finished 
 portrait of a very complex and remarkable character 
 Augustus. Repentant of the sanguinary struggles of his 
 earlier life, and resolute to restore peace to the Roman 
 world, he is beset on every side by bitter enemies, bound 
 to vengeance by the deepest blood-feuds. Emilia, daughter 
 of one of the aristocratic, so-called republicans from which 
 the popular dictatorship of the Caesars had saved the 
 Roman world, was one of these enemies. Her father had 
 been put to death in the civil wars. She urged her lover, 
 Cinna, a man in whom Augustus had placed great con- 
 fidence, to form a conspiracy against him. It was betrayed 
 by one of the conspirators. Augustus, instead of punish- 
 ing the two framers of the plot, heaps coals of fire on their 
 head, and vanquishes them by complete forgiveness. 
 
 Polyeucte, the last play of which I shall speak, is per- 
 haps, on the whole, the greatest work of Corneille. The 
 scene is laid in Armenia, during the reign of the Emperor 
 Decius, one of the emperors who made the most strenuous 
 efforts to suppress Christianity. Polyeucte, an Armenian 
 noble, has married Paulina, the daughter of the Roman 
 governor, Felix. Paulina, before her marriage, had ardently 
 loved Severus, a Roman officer, who had distinguished 
 himself in battle by saving the life of the emperor, sacrificing,
 
 272 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 as it was believed, his own. He is not dead, however, 
 but merely taken prisoner by the enemy. Released at last 
 from captivity, he returns to claim Paulina's love, but 
 finds her married to a rival. Paulina's interview with him 
 is extremely noble, pure, and touching. She is honour and 
 loyalty itself: faithful without prudery, dignified without 
 hardness. She is a believer in the old religion. She now 
 learns with dismay that her husband has openly declared 
 himself a Christian, and has audaciously defied the wor- 
 shippers of the old gods in the principal temple of the city. 
 Her father, the governor of the province, a self-seeking man 
 of the world, is for the strictest punishment. He owns to 
 his confidant that if Polyeucte were out of the way, and 
 Paulina were free to marry her first lover, he should feel 
 more secure of the emperor's favour. Paulina tries all her 
 power upon her husband, whose stringent Christian ortho- 
 doxy, bent on eternal happiness in another world, does not, 
 it must be owned, contrast very favourably with the noble, 
 unselfish devotion of his pagan wife, or with the generosity 
 of his rival, Severus, who unite their efforts to save him. 
 He undergoes martyrdom, however. And from love and 
 desperation with life, more than from conviction, his wife 
 at last declares herself a Christian. 
 
 In this drama the principal interest is certainly concen- 
 trated on the heroine, one of the purest, most tender, and 
 most loyal types in all poetry. It is very remarkable that 
 Corneille, orthodox Christian as he undoubtedly was, 
 should in this, and, indeed, throughout the whole series of 
 his dramas, have made Humanity predominate so entirely 
 over divine interests. The simple truth is that, in the noble 
 form of art to which Corneille devoted himself, the idealiza- 
 tion of public life in harmony and in conflict with private 
 passion, the pure Christian absorbed in future blessedness
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 273 
 
 was of necessity relegated to a subordinate place. The 
 drama supposes action and passion between suffering and 
 striving men and women, aiming at different goals. These 
 may be noble for each one, and yet, being diverse, may 
 involve fatal conflict, of which either side may call out our 
 strongest sympathy. But those who, withdrawing from 
 the common lot, look upon this world as a pilgrimage, for 
 which it is hardly worth while to take much care or 
 thought, can hardly interest us so much as those who share 
 to the full earth's joys and sorrows. 
 
 When Corneille felt that his genius had lost its elas- 
 ticity and freshness, he withdrew into dignified retirement. 
 His translation into French verse of the Imitatio Christi of 
 A Kempis, which occupied his later life, has a place in our 
 library. That book has been the consolation of many to 
 whom the special dogmas of the writer had lost their 
 meaning. It formed, with the Vision of Dante, almost the 
 sole reading of Comte in his later years. But the special 
 contribution of Corneille to the treasure of Humanity is 
 his noble application of art to public life. The elevation 
 of tone, the capacity for the noblest civic feeling, the 
 generous ardour that, in the best times of France, have 
 distinguished her citizens, are largely traceable to the 
 influence of this great and good man. 
 
 Corneille was buried in the Church of St. Roch, in the 
 Rue St Honore. A hundred years afterwards, that is to 
 say, a hundred years ago, there came the burial in that 
 same church of a man of widely different life, character, 
 and work, the man whom the world is slowly coming to 
 regard as the representative genius of the eighteenth 
 century Denis Diderot. 
 
 Before we speak of him we are led in the first place 
 to ask, What is the link between the seventeenth century 
 
 T
 
 274 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 and the eighteenth ? How did the first prepare the way 
 for the second ? What is their filiation ? 
 
 I spoke of the seventeenth century as an apparent 
 time of rest a halting-time. And so it was, in France 
 through the whole period, in England through the latter 
 half. Nevertheless, there was a progressive movement 
 going on, and one of vast importance, though limited to a 
 mere handful of human beings. Let us always remember 
 that Progress is not a magical metaphysical entity, always 
 going on in every generation everywhere alike. There 
 is such a thing as Regress, Decay, Degeneration, a long 
 steady process of Decline, ending in Death. It cannot 
 possibly be maintained, if you confine your view to a 
 single country, through many centuries, that that country 
 can in every case be said to have made progress. The 
 melancholy truth forces itself upon us that 'exactly the 
 opposite has been the case. Can it be said that Greece 
 in the present day shows a steady progress through the 
 twenty-three centuries that have passed since the time of 
 ^Eschylus and Pericles ? Has there been steady progress 
 in Spain since her glorious struggle with the Moors, or in 
 Italy since the time of the Lombard Republics, and of 
 Giotto and Dante ? We must not live in a fool's paradise, 
 and suppose that progress is a force like the force of 
 gravitation, on which we can always count ; or that the 
 great mass of mankind everywhere always partake in it. 
 Quite the contrary is the case : and it is well we should 
 keep it constantly in mind that each generation is in 
 constant danger of degeneration and decay : from which 
 nothing but the strenuous effort of all good men and 
 women living therein can save it. And as a matter of 
 fact, the progressive movement of this life of Humanity 
 has very often been limited to a single nation, and more
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 275 
 
 than this, to a very small group of men in that nation : 
 sometimes perhaps to a single mind. Progress is a process 
 as wholly independent of universal suffrage as the growth 
 of an oak tree is of the sparrows that twitter about its 
 branches. Mere counting of heads has nothing to do 
 with it it is neither democratic nor aristocratic, but 
 sociocratic it depends on neither Lords nor Commons. 
 The sacred fire is handed on from one generation to 
 another sometimes by a very small group of men, and 
 these not seldom toil up the hill in isolation, silence, and 
 neglect. 
 
 It is not too much to say that in the first half of the 
 seventeenth century the progress of Humanity depended 
 in the main upon some half-dozen lives. I am not for a 
 moment ignoring the vast number of true hearts and firm 
 characters who maintained the standard of vigorous and 
 pure life ; still less the poets who idealized that life and 
 inspired that healthy delight in it which it is the business 
 of poets to instil : but I speak of Progress as a definite 
 movement towards a definite end. That movement is 
 the transition of Humanity from Theocracy to Sociocracy : 
 from the society governed by priests and kings in the 
 name of God, to society governed by republican chiefs 
 and thinkers in the name of Humanity. Among the few 
 names in the first part of the seventeenth century who 
 carried on this movement, stand in the first rank, Bacon, 
 Galileo, and Descartes. The first led the revolt against 
 the idle expenditure of energy in the study of words and 
 metaphysical abstractions, and turned men's minds to the 
 patient study of nature. The second, acting with Kepler 
 and Tycho Brahe, revolutionized our conception of the 
 universe by showing that the earth was an insignificant part 
 of the solar system, and the solar system an insignificant
 
 276 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 fraction of the universe. The life and work of both these 
 men undermined Theocracy at its root. Clear-sighted 
 defenders of the Catholic system knew very well that a 
 blow was being dealt at it compared with which the 
 assaults of Martin Luther were as the brushing of a fly's 
 wing. Since that time every generation has produced an 
 increasing number of thinking men and women to whom 
 the biblical narrative of Creation and Redemption has 
 ceased to be credible. Following close on these men, 
 with whom he was contemporary, though junior, came 
 Descartes. His aim was to extend the conception of 
 natural law to every department of life, and thus to 
 substitute the study of the scientific order of the world 
 for the study of the divine will. In other words, he was 
 the principal precursor of Positivism. He had distinctly 
 before him the aim of reorganization of life. And the 
 first step to such reorganization was that the structure 
 of man's body should be seen to follow the same physical 
 laws as those which governed the movements of the 
 planets. All this was not mere loose and vague talk with 
 him. He did more than any one man has ever done to 
 make his vision a reality. The instrument by which man, 
 without the use of a line, or a foot rule, or a balance, is 
 able to measure a distance, or a weight, or a force ; the 
 instrument called mathematics, the science of indirect 
 measurement, was entirely revolutionized by Descartes. 
 He first made it possible by abstract calculation to follow 
 to a large extent the complicated forces of nature : not 
 those alone which move in straight lines or in simple 
 curves like circles or ellipses, but those far more compli- 
 cated movements which depend on many forces acting 
 continuously in different directions. Thus it became 
 possible to conceive of the time when the vital activities,
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 277 
 
 those which produce the facts of growth and of movement, 
 should be brought, like the activities of the planets, within 
 the range of calculation, and nothing short of this was 
 the audacious attempt of Descartes. Assuming the two 
 facts of space and motion, he attempted to build up a 
 scheme by which the world, including man's physical 
 structure, might have been evolved. It was an attempt 
 at a scientific cosmogony, an attempt to show how a few 
 very simple mathematical laws would account for the 
 universe. 
 
 We now can see very clearly that this stupendous 
 scheme was an Utopia, that the world is far too complex a 
 thing to be accounted for by human calculation, and that 
 the attempt to do this must be ranked with attempts to 
 make wings and fly, or to find the philosopher's stone, 
 or the Elixir of life. Nevertheless, like all Utopias put 
 forward by great men, it stimulated thought in a very 
 potent way, and in a right direction. The extraordinary 
 movement of mathematical, physical, and biological 
 research which went on from the seventeenth century to 
 our own time was more distinctly initiated and helped 
 forward by Descartes than by any other man. It indicated 
 very clearly to all who could think consistently that 
 demonstration, not revelation, must be the basis on which 
 the framework of society must rest. Descartes did not, 
 it is true, attempt to account for moral facts on mathe- 
 matical principles. But he brought in here a principle 
 which, though not of such permanent value, was yet 
 equally destructive of the old stage of belief, the principle 
 of examining the consciousness, and rejecting all ideas 
 that were not clearly thinkable. Here he set in motion 
 the whole current of modern metaphysics : which, though 
 it has expended a great amount of intellectual energy
 
 2/8 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 wastefully, has at least proved fatally destructive to the 
 old orthodoxy. When once you were told to believe, on 
 religious and moral subjects, not what your fathers had 
 taught you, not what the Church appointed, but what 
 consciousness revealed to you, that is what appeared clear 
 to your own particular way of thinking, the door was 
 opened to a kind of Protestantism of which Luther and 
 Melancthon had never dreamed. 
 
 We need not follow the spread of this intellectual stir 
 from the mind of Descartes to such minds as Hobbes, 
 Spinosa, and Locke. But now, while this ferment was 
 going on in a few leading spirits of Europe, let us see 
 what was going on in the political world. The political 
 movement and the philosophical movement must never be 
 dissociated. It is from the combination of both that great 
 social and moral changes come. Now, the seventeenth 
 century saw the successful close of one great rebellion and 
 the rise and temporary arrest of another. The Dutch 
 Republicans asserted their complete independence of 
 Catholic Spain by the end of the sixteenth century. The 
 English Republic had performed the unparalleled feat of 
 bringing its king before a tribunal and sentencing him to 
 the death of a traitor. That Republic was suppressed, 
 and its adherents fled across the Atlantic. But the deeds 
 they did shook Europe to its foundations, though their 
 full effect was not to be felt till the recoil of them came 
 back in the third generation from New England to France. 
 
 For the time, France handed herself over to the 
 Jesuits, who now, a hundred and fifty years after their 
 first foundation, had become a corrupt and mischievous 
 conspiracy against the progress of Europe. Five years 
 after Corneille's death, the wise edict of Nantes, giving 
 toleration to the Catholics, was revoked. The last thirty
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 279 
 
 years of Louis XIV.'s life were years of despotism, 
 spiritual and temporal, at home, and of recklessly aggres- 
 sive and iniquitous attempts to disturb the balance of 
 power in Europe for the advantages of France. 
 
 But when Louis XIV. died, in 1715, Voltaire was 
 twenty years old. And very soon there began the series 
 of assaults upon the established Church and Creed of 
 France which gave the eighteenth century its title of the 
 century of Voltaire. Voltaire began by popularizing the 
 mathematical philosophy of Newton, which he thus raised 
 to the rank of a political event. He then put into simple, 
 idiomatic French the destructive reasoning on moral and 
 religious subjects of the thinkers of the previous century 
 from Descartes to Spinosa. Having such wit, such power 
 of lucid expression and copious illustration, as have never 
 been equalled, his influence as a propagandist of free- 
 thought on a society groaning under the intolerable bond- 
 age of the French State Church was wide, rapid, and 
 irresistible. It is no wonder that he should have been 
 regarded during his life, and for many years after his 
 death, as the chief representative of the eighteenth century, 
 the second being Rousseau, whose influence, summed up 
 in his Social Contract, was as nihilistic in politics as 
 Voltaire's was in religion. 
 
 Carlyle, in his Frederic, thoroughly endorses this 
 view. For him, Voltaire is the great intellect of the cen- 
 tury. So far as I know, the first decisive attempt to 
 dethrone Voltaire from his high throne, and to relegate 
 him to a secondary place, was made when Auguste Comte 
 examined the intellectual movement that prepared the 
 way for the French Revolution. He admired Voltaire, and 
 fully appreciated the amazing combination of faculties of 
 expression and clear utterance with restless activity which
 
 280 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 made him so unrivalled a propagandist. But there was 
 work going on apart from the process of mere destruction, 
 a work of building up the new fabric of society on a purely 
 human foundation, with the materials which commerce, 
 industry, science, and art had been long accumulating. In 
 this far more difficult work of rebuilding Voltaire took but 
 little part. It was the work of men of less widespread 
 notoriety men like Montesquieu, Vico, Beccaria, Adam 
 Smith, Turgot. But the greatest of all were David Hume 
 and Denis Diderot. 
 
 Diderot was the son of a working cutler in the small 
 town of Langres, born 1713. He was brought up for a 
 time under the Jesuits, like Descartes, like Corneille, like 
 D'Alembert, and so many other leading thinkers of France. 
 He had a boyish desire to be a priest, which soon passed 
 off. He made his way, like other adventurous lads with 
 brains, to Paris. There his true vocation speedily showed 
 itself. Adopting no profession, and living from hand to 
 mouth in a Bohemian way, he joined the band of thinkers 
 who were actively engaged in attacking the old order of 
 belief and of life, and in bringing about the new order, so 
 far as they knew how, and had any organic principles to 
 build with. He joined them, and rapidly became their 
 head, and also their heart. For his was a nature richly 
 endowed not merely with keen perception, capacity for 
 wide generalization, and for deductive reasoning he was 
 endowed to the full as richly with every generous emotion. 
 Never was there a man of letters so free from mean 
 jealousy or blinding vanity. Far as the poles from any 
 purpose of his was to claim property in any thought or 
 discovery of his own. All that came to him he gave 
 richly, and without hope of return. Gay, genial, bright, 
 social, his energies were as unflagging as those of the
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 281 
 
 sternest ascetic ; and they were fixed from first to last on 
 one object the illumination and progress of mankind. 
 When fame came to him at last, it turned him aside no 
 whit. A great monarch courted him not he her and he 
 was as independent and as simple and frank with her as 
 with the first man or woman he might meet in Paris. 
 
 He often told me, says one of his friends, that he never 
 found the hours pass slowly in the company of a peasant, 
 or a cobbler, or any handicraftsman, but that he many a 
 time found them pass slowly enough in the society of a 
 courtier. " For of the one," he said, " one can always ask 
 about useful and necessary things ; but the other is mostly, 
 so far as anything useful is concerned, empty and void." * 
 
 There are aspects of his life that are quite impossible to 
 defend, though they need that those who judge them 
 should take for their standard the life of Paris or London 
 in the eighteenth, and not the nineteenth, century. His 
 relations with his wife, a woman of fretful, uncongenial 
 temper, to whom he was not faithful, and with Mademoi- 
 selle Voland, a woman of many noble and admirable 
 qualities, to whom he remained fervently attached till her 
 death, in 1774, form a story which it is painful to read; 
 though, contrasted with the life of the court, and of the 
 great nobles against which not a single priest or bishop 
 protested, the life of Diderot was purity itself. But, as we 
 shall see presently, the revolutionary philosophy of Diderot 
 offered no sufficient guarantee for the sanctity of the 
 family tie. 
 
 But it is time to form a precise idea of Diderot's work. 
 Some clear notion of it may be gained by looking briefly 
 at the three treatises of Diderot which are placed in the 
 Positivist Library. 
 
 * Morley, p. 316.
 
 282 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 We have first the Thoughts on the Interpretation of 
 Nature, which are connected, in the Library, with Des- 
 cartes' work on Method and the Novum Organum of Bacon. 
 
 The principal thought in this treatise is the protest 
 against the notion that mathematical reasoning from one 
 or two fixed principles will enable you to explain the 
 universe. Descartes had tried to do this, as Mr. Spencer 
 has tried to do it in our own day. Diderot's treatise is 
 really a refutation by anticipation of such attempts as 
 Mr. Spencer's. Readers of Carlyle's French Revolution 
 remember the scorn with which he talks of "Victorious 
 Analysis ; " and most readers pass that expression by 
 unexplained. What he is jeering at is the ambitious and 
 idle pretension of the mathematical and mechanical philo- 
 sophers, who, because their algebra enabled them to calcu- 
 late the path of the planets round the sun, supposed that 
 by carrying this calculation a little further they would be 
 able to explain the universe, or the operation of the human 
 brain. Against all such pretensions Diderot protested as 
 vehemently as either Bacon or Comte would have done. 
 He saw clearly enough that the world was not like a steam 
 engine or a clock of a more complicated kind, of which, when 
 you once understood the principle of the expansion of 
 vapours, or of the elasticity of springs, you would be 
 thenceforth able to explain every part. The atmosphere 
 of the time, full of revolt against the oppressive dogmas of 
 the Churches, was all in favour of cut-and-dried systems of 
 nature, those of Maupertius, d'Holbach and others, which 
 were put forward as a substitute for the worn-out Catholic 
 creed. In reality, there was but one of these which was 
 justifiable the attempt made in the previous century by 
 Descartes. That attempt did its work, by showing the 
 impossibility inherent in all such attempts. Those of
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 283 
 
 d'Holbach, those of Mr. Herbert Spencer in our own 
 time, are prejudged at their birth. 
 
 All this Diderot saw clearly. He was far on the road 
 that led from the Objective Synthesis to the Subjective 
 Synthesis: hard words, but which are easily made clear 
 to the humblest mind. There is the view of the world 
 in which it is supposed to lie before you like an object 
 which can be apprehended, grasped, understood, as a 
 whole. That is the Objective Synthesis, which ambitious 
 thinkers have attempted, and which wise thinkers have 
 abandoned ; that is the " Victorious Analysis," against 
 which Carlyle levelled his sarcasms; that is the "idol of 
 the cave " which Bacon knocked down ; that is the tower 
 of Babel, which Diderot advised men to leave off trying 
 to build ; that is the pride of intellect which emancipates 
 itself from all social purposes, and seeks to build a monu- 
 ment to its own glorification. And from this vain attempt 
 to explain the Universe we pass to the only true synthesis, 
 the human or subjective synthesis, in which the facts of 
 science are grouped round man as the centre, and 
 arranged in the order of their closer or more distant 
 connection with the life of Humanity. But though 
 Diderot could see the vanity of the first of these two 
 attempts, he could not see clearly the true nature of the 
 second. Had he lived a few years longer, he would have 
 witnessed the distinct growth of two sciences as distinct 
 from physics, as physics is from mathematics, the sciences, 
 namely, of Chemistry and of Biology. That would have 
 added new force to his conviction that the facts of the 
 Universe were not to be explained by calculations derived 
 from a single principle. And the man was living, and 
 known to Diderot, whose work* gave the immediate 
 * I refer to Condorcet's Progress of the Human Mind.
 
 284 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 stimulus to the discovery of the final science of Sociology, 
 round which all the other sciences could henceforth be 
 grouped ; thus, forming the only possible synthesis, the 
 human or subjective synthesis. But this it was not 
 possible for Diderot clearly to foresee. He worked vigor- 
 ously, instinctively, but blindly in this direction ; but he 
 could not distinctly see the goal. And meantime the 
 void was filled in the only way that was possible for the 
 moment : by the old stop-gap of Nature. D'Holbach's 
 System of Nature was then hailed as a sort of gospel. 
 It was a systematic and most vigorous onslaught on the 
 whole system of belief and social institutions of the time. 
 It was a direct repudiation of the Past. "The woes of 
 the human race were increased," he said, " by the religions, 
 the governments, the opinions, in a word by all the 
 institutions that man had been led to adopt with the view 
 of ameliorating his lot." From this they were to return to 
 Nature. But it never seemed to occur to him that these 
 very institutions were one of the productions of Nature. 
 Man himself being one of the products of Nature, all the 
 works of man were products of Nature too. But it was 
 the Philosophy of Revolt : the direct philosophy of the 
 French Republic. Diderot did not adopt this philosophy, 
 though he could not substitute a better. Nevertheless, he 
 was working towards a better. 
 
 Let us pass to the second of the works mentioned in 
 the Library : the Letters on the Blind. 
 
 This is really a very careful and profound study, put 
 in most luminous and familiar words, of the way in which 
 man's whole mental and moral framework is coloured by 
 his physical organization : and especially by the organiza- 
 tion of his senses. How far could our whole conception 
 of the world be altered if the human race were without
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 285 
 
 the organ of sight ? is one of the questions he asks. He 
 explains that the moral instinct of modesty would take, 
 for instance, in such a case, a wholly different form. 
 Again, that current conceptions of religion would be 
 widely different. The proof so commonly insisted upon 
 of the existence of God, derived from the beauty and 
 perfection of the works of Nature, would have no meaning 
 for a blind man. He introduces with wonderful dramatic 
 skill the blind professor of mathematics, Saunderson, of 
 Cambridge, who was a known sceptic, and an orthodox 
 clergyman, who visited him on his death-bed. The clergy- 
 man, Mr. Holmes, pressed upon him the wonderful marvels 
 of Nature as a proof of the existence of God. "Ah, my 
 dear sir," replied the third philosopher, "let us leave off 
 talking of this beautiful spectacle ; it was not made for 
 me. I have been condemned to pass my whole life in 
 darkness ; and you tell me of marvels which I don't 
 understand, and which are only convincing to you and 
 to those like you who have eyes. If you want me to 
 believe in God, you must let me touch Him." " Sir," said 
 the clergyman with some skill, "apply your hands to 
 your own body, and you will find Deity in the wonder- 
 ful mechanism of your organs." "Mr. Holmes," replied 
 Saunderson, "I must observe that all this is not so 
 admirable for me as for you. But supposing the animal 
 mechanism to be as perfect as you say, and I am willing 
 to believe, for you are a straightforward man, incapable 
 of imposition, what has all this to do with a Being of 
 Supreme Intelligence ?" * 
 
 Here then, a hundred years before Darwin published 
 his Origin of Species, we have the great theological 
 principle of final causes, and Divine design in creation, 
 * Cf. Motley's Diderot^ vol. i. pp. 93 ff.
 
 286 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 antagonized by the fertile and positive principle of the 
 conditions of existence and the survival of the fittest. 
 What use Comte made of this principle in discussing the 
 problem of man's first appearance on the earth is well 
 known to all students of his philosophy. In France and 
 in other parts of Europe the assault made by Diderot 
 and his fellows on the argument of design and the proof 
 of an all-wise Creator was decisive. The great naturalist 
 Lamarck followed in the next generation, and put forward 
 a systematic scheme of development of animal life from 
 the simplest forms up to the higher animals and man. 
 In England there ensued the great aristocratic struggle 
 against the Revolution, in which the Church was called 
 in as the ally of the State. Paley and his Natural 
 Theology introduced a new dogma into the English 
 orthodox creed. Under pain of being utterly tabooed no 
 doctor or student of anatomy dared to criticize any part 
 of the animal framework obvious as its imperfections 
 were to common sense. Not till the middle of the nine- 
 teenth century did the publication of Darwin's books 
 bring us into line with the other nations of Europe in 
 these matters. 
 
 The treatise of Diderot contains many other very 
 profound observations on that part of biological science 
 which deals with the senses, and with perception as result- 
 ing from the combined effects of the senses of sight and 
 of touch. Diderot was not the man to content himself 
 with loose literary generalities. He was a genuine and 
 patient student of science ; although his range was as 
 wide as human nature itself, and his function was rather 
 that of an architect than a bricklayer. 
 
 I have yet to notice two other aspects of his work. 
 He spent much time in the study of art of every kind.
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 287 
 
 His criticism of the pictures exhibited annually in Paris, 
 mediocre though the paintings were in almost all cases, 
 contain very profound thoughts on the nature of art and 
 its social function. He had the soul of a great poet, 
 keenly alive to everything that touched man's life, sensitive 
 and responsive throughout the whole scale of emotion. 
 The old saying of Terence was truer of him perhaps than 
 of any other man, unless it is Shakespeare : " He was a 
 man, and everything in man's life was near to him." 
 
 His treatise on Beauty is the third work of his that has 
 a place in our library. It is, in fact, the article on that 
 subject which he wrote for the Encyclopaedia. I cannot, 
 in the short space allotted to me, do justice to his analysis. 
 He seeks for the common property in all that we speak of 
 as beautiful a human countenance, a building, a poem, a 
 picture, an industrial product, etc. He finds it in the 
 quality of calling up within us the perception of relations. 
 For instance, he takes the well-known word in the Horatius 
 of Corneille 1 , when the old father first hears the news that 
 Horatius' two brothers are slain, and that he is flying from, 
 his three enemies. While he is bitterly reproaching his 
 son, his daughter says to him, " But what would you have 
 one man do against three ? " " Die ! " says the stern old 
 veteran. The word electrifies the audience. Diderot 
 takes this word. Die ! There is nothing in it remarkable ; 
 it is neither beautiful nor ugly. When you know that it is 
 an answer given to a question as to what a man should do 
 in battle, your interest begins to be roused. " Then when I 
 add that the issue of the battle in this case is the safety 
 and honour of the country ; that the man who is fighting is 
 the son of him who gives this answer to the question ; that 
 he is the only son left to him ; that this son is matched 
 against three enemies, who have already killed his two
 
 288 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 brothers ; that the old man is speaking to his daughter ; 
 that he is a Roman citizen then the word ' Die ! ' which 
 at first was neither beautiful nor ugly, grows more and 
 more beautiful as I unfold its relations to the circumstances 
 in which it was spoken, and is seen at last to be sublime." 
 
 I have mentioned the word " Encyclopaedia," and I must 
 close this tribute to Diderot's memory with a few words on 
 this great work which occupied so many years of his life, 
 and the publication of which was a long battle with very 
 arduous difficulties. 
 
 Eager to build up some structure to replace, if only 
 provisionally, the hopelessly obsolete synthesis of Catholi- 
 cism, and yet without any binding principle round which 
 the new and ever-growing mass of positive knowledge 
 could be grouped, Diderot conceived the wise and practical 
 scheme of a dictionary of useful knowledge, which would 
 enable himself and his fellow-workers to put forward their 
 views on human life in as systematic a way as the case 
 admitted. Comte has always admired the phrase uttered 
 by a statesman amidst the turmoil of the revolution of 
 1848 : "Faire de 1'ordre avec du d^sordre" (Make the best 
 order you can with disorderly elements). Diderot was in 
 the position that neither God nor even the metaphysical 
 entity Nature could be adopted by him as a central prin- 
 ciple, and yet he could not grasp the only permanent 
 principle of unity Humanity. Yet towards this he was 
 blindly groping his way. And the principle of practical, 
 social utility, which is what he really took for his guide,* 
 served him well in the choice of his subjects. And, at any 
 rate, this great enterprise served as a rallying point to 
 
 * "A society of educated men, linked together by the general 
 interest of the human race and by mutual friendship " this is how he 
 defines his purpose. The work is dedicated, " A la posterity a I'Stre 
 <jui ne meurt point ! "
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 289 
 
 bring the band of pioneers together. Such a brilliant 
 troop of fighters in the cause of Progress has never been 
 seen. Among the contributors were Montesquieu, Vol- 
 taire, Buffon, Rousseau, Marmontel, Quesnai, Holbach, 
 Du Brosses, Haller, Turgot, Condorcet, and, finally, the 
 great mathematician, D'Alembert. The first volume was 
 published in 1751. At the second volume the clergy in- 
 duced the State to stop the publication. It began again 
 in 1753, and went on amidst the execrations of the Church 
 till 1759, when D'Alembert's article on Geneva, contrasting 
 the tolerant spirit of the Unitarian clergy of that society 
 with the cruel obscurantism of the French clergy, brought 
 a second Government order of suppression. Then D'Alem- 
 bert, weary of the struggle, left the work, and for thirteen 
 years Diderot went on alone. 
 
 It would be a great mistake to suppose that this 
 Encyclopaedia was a systematic series of attacks on Christi- 
 anity. These men had something else and something 
 better to do. They showed, indeed, in a very unmistakable 
 way, their own scepticism and indifference to mystical and 
 theological beliefs ; but the real force of their attack lay in 
 their representation of the great mass of secular and useful 
 knowledge as something which made this earthly life 
 worth the living. What is specially noteworthy is the 
 detailed attention paid to the work of artisans in every 
 branch of industry. It was the first recognition of the 
 dignity of labour. And this is due essentially to Diderot. 
 He spent hours and days throughout this part of his life in 
 workshops, patiently learning for himself the details of 
 machinery of all sorts, getting the machine taken to pieces 
 and put together for him, putting his own hand to it, and, 
 as he said, doing bad work himself that he might teach 
 good work to others. 
 
 U
 
 290 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 Comte praises the admirable wisdom of Diderot in 
 planning this scheme as a rallying point for all those who 
 were engaged in the common work of emancipating their 
 fellow-men from theological bondage, and in making this 
 life interesting and precious. Had any definite set of 
 articles of philosophical belief been proposed for adoption, 
 Comte remarks, intellectual differences, envenomed by 
 envious rivalry, would have hampered the success of the 
 undertaking, as similar attempts brought discredit on 
 Protestantism. But Diderot interposed with his happy 
 expedient of the Encyclopaedia, which formed a provisional, 
 though artificial, rallying point for the most divergent 
 efforts, without requiring the sacrifice of independence. 
 Thus this man of incoherent speculations gained the out- 
 ward appearance of a sort of philosophical system. And 
 the time spent on the undertaking was long enough for the 
 really important contributions to be thoroughly elabo- 
 rated.* Elsewhere he speaks of the Encyclopaedia as a 
 sort of workshop, in which the political school might 
 co-operate with the philosophical school. This concentra- 
 tion of purpose constantly reminded the writers of their 
 organic purpose in the midst of their critical labours, by 
 bringing back their thoughts to the construction of a 
 complete synthesis. 
 
 I conclude this commemoration by reading to you 
 Comte's appreciation of this great constructive school of 
 thinkers, the pioneers of Positivism, contrasted by him 
 with the mere demolishers of the past. 
 
 " This grand school, the sole representative of the eighteenth 
 century towards both the future and the past, binds it to the seven- 
 teenth century in the person of Fontenelle, to the nineteenth in 
 that of Condorcet. Its special organs naturally group themselves 
 
 * Phil. Pos. v. 520.
 
 CORNEILLE AND DIDEROT 291 
 
 round two types of the first order, Diderot and Frederic : the 
 former the most encyclopaedic intellect that had arisen since 
 Aristotle, the latter a political genius more comparable than any 
 other to Caesar and Charlemagne. But these two essential repre- 
 sentatives of this phase of transition had not equal opportunities 
 of showing their worth. The adjustment of circumstances to 
 capacity was widely different in the two cases. The dictator 
 offers the best of modern statesmanship, conciliating, as Hobbes 
 wished, power with freedom. But the philosopher born for 
 building-up was forced to take part in the work of destruction, 
 which alone was thus possible, without being even able to call his 
 highest faculties into action. Nevertheless, Positivism, always 
 enabling us to disentangle individual worth from the complications 
 of historical position, will soon secure for the principal genius of 
 the eighteenth century the supremacy which belongs to him, just 
 compensation for the fatalities which thwarted his life by outward 
 obstacles and filled it with bitterness. Round these two types, 
 intimately connected, though never personally associated, will be 
 grouped the men who were the chief glory of those days, and who 
 could never find a place in either of the secondary schools Hume, 
 D'Alembert, Montesquieu, Buffon, George Leroy, and Turgot." 
 
 It is encouraging to us to remember to-night that 
 this prophecy has at last come true, and that the first 
 systematic recognition of Diderot by his countrymen as the 
 representative genius of the eighteenth century has been 
 organized and carried out in the presence of some of the 
 leading statesmen of France by the successor of Auguste 
 Comte, Pierre Laffitte. 
 
 A striking statue of Diderot stands now near the house 
 where he spent his life. It does justice to the noble head, 
 to the animated gesture, to the keen, vivid sensibility and 
 sympathy to everything human. And in the brow and 
 eye there is a prophetic look, as though to a distant 
 future, in which man should be free and worthy of his free- 
 dom. Towards that future he is one of those who have 
 led the way.
 
 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD* 
 
 THE year that comes to its end to-night will be remembered 
 in the world's history for two events of supreme import- 
 ance: the establishment of Japan as one of the Great 
 Powers, and the awakening of Russia from a condition of 
 torpid despotism to constitutional freedom. Each of these 
 events has already reacted, and will for a long time 
 continue to react, upon opinion throughout the world in 
 many ways. Let us examine the first of them. 
 
 During the last three centuries the conviction has 
 been firmly established that the Eastern nations of the 
 world were subordinate to the Western ; and that the 
 superiority of the West was connected, in some way, not 
 always very clearly defined, with its acceptance of Christi- 
 anity. In former times such a belief would have been 
 impossible. The rivalry of Christianity with Islam 
 endured for many centuries, until, a century after the 
 capture of Constantinople by the Turks, the long strife 
 was finally settled at the battle of Lepanto. Since then 
 the leading Powers of the world have been exclusively 
 Christian ; the non-Christian East has been, in one way 
 or other, subordinate to the Christian West ; has been 
 understood to stand on a lower level of civilization and 
 power. 
 
 * An Address delivered in Essex Hall, on December 31, 1905. 
 (Reprinted from the Positivist Review of April, 1906, by kind per- 
 mission of the editor.) 
 
 292
 
 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 293 
 
 The truth underlying this conception was, not that 
 the West was made strong by Christianity, but that it 
 inherited from the Greco-German world the germs of science 
 and industry, which, when developed in the sixteenth and 
 succeeding centuries, became the source of modern civiliza- 
 tion. Through the Arabs, Western Europe received the 
 results of Greek astronomy. Roman imperialism gave 
 birth to mediaeval feudalism, and the replacement of 
 slavery by serfage, and, ultimately, by free labour. The 
 inventions of the compass, of gunpowder, of printing, the 
 geographical discoveries of Vasco da Gama and Columbus, 
 and, finally, the tremendous impulse to thought given by 
 Copernicus and Galileo, opened to the world a new era, 
 which, as we can now see, was destined to bring about the 
 unification of the nation under the religion of Humanity. 
 
 The first fruit of this new era has been the uplifting 
 of Japan to the level of the Western nations. The process 
 seemed to superficial onlookers unexpected and sudden. 
 In reality its foundation had been long prepared and 
 deeply laid. An ancient and coherent civilization, built 
 up from units of great individual energy, strengthened by 
 long periods of internal struggle, in which a type of 
 character had been developed, recalling the noblest 
 examples of our own mediaeval chivalry, was ready to 
 receive the results of Western science and industry, without 
 sacrifice of its own original powers. Japan adopted our 
 law, our medicine, our marvellous mechanical appliances, 
 our methods of self-defence by land and sea. She never 
 for a moment abandoned her resolution to uphold the 
 independence of her tribunals, and to rid herself at the 
 earliest moment of the incubus of foreign law-courts in 
 her cities, which hitherto had been the symbol of Western 
 ascendency in Eastern countries.
 
 294 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 What is the religion of Japan? If we look into it 
 closely, we see that one constituent of it, the most ancient, 
 and, perhaps, not the least potent, is a development of the 
 simple nature worship and ancestor worship common to 
 all primitive nations. It has much in common with the 
 religion of China, with the religion of primitive Rome, 
 with the religion of ancient Israel, before the establishment 
 of monotheocracy. Shinto, thus it is called, is a genuine 
 product of Japanese soil. Its Pantheon is crowded with 
 a host of deities : every stream, every mountain, every tree, 
 has its god or goddess : every hero, every ancestor, have 
 their places in the Shinto theocracy. Its creed may be 
 summed up in two sentences : belief in the continued 
 existence, real though shadowy, of the dead ; and belief in 
 the sacred origin and character of the occupant of the 
 throne. 
 
 If we would see this religion in action, I know no 
 better way than to quote from the description given by 
 the correspondent of the Standard of the ceremonial that 
 took place on June 20, 1904, at the funeral service per- 
 formed in the presence of the First Japanese Army in 
 memory of those who fell in the battles fought at the 
 crossing of the Yalu River : 
 
 The priest stood on the mountain side facing the multitude. 
 In his uplifted hand was a pine branch hung with strips of white 
 paper, emblems of the soul's purity. Thrice the branch swept the 
 air above the bowed heads in the plain below. The simplicity 
 of this act of purification, the silence of the vast congregation, the 
 beauty of the scene, all combined to fill with awe and reverence 
 the alien spectator as well as the native worshipper. Behind the 
 priest, on a green mound, was the sanctuary, an oblong enclosure 
 hung with symbolic banners, white, blue, yellow, black, and red. 
 The High Priest drew near to the altar, and, bowing before it, 
 took from his breast a scroll, from which he recited these words :
 
 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 295 
 
 " I, Hirokage Shimizu, Shinto priest, reverently speak to the 
 souls of Lieutenant Jiro Takuma and other officers and soldiers 
 who died in the battle of the Yalu and elsewhere, inviting them 
 to approach the altar which we have erected at the foot of Mount 
 Teisen, beyond the walls of Feng-huang-cheng. When friendly 
 ties were broken, and we came to the Russians with weapons in 
 our hands, you marched to the front with the First Army, knowing 
 that this was the hour of sacrifice and duty. Bravely did you 
 endure hardship and privation on sea and land, on mountain and 
 in valley. On the first day in May you came to the Yalu and 
 fought with admirable courage amid hail of bullet and flash of 
 bayonet. Some of you did excellent service in the work of road 
 and bridge building and transport. All of you helped to achieve 
 that brilliant victory which has added lustre to the Empire and 
 renown to the army. Here we would willingly tell again the 
 story of that battle and talk over the future ; but, alas, you are 
 separated from us by the dark veil of death. We cannot see your 
 brave faces, nor hear your cheerful voices. Deeply do we feel 
 this separation. More than worldly honour have you won. Your 
 spirits will be for ever with the gods who guard the Empire, and 
 your name will be cherished as an example of loyalty. Our General 
 and we desire to pay our respects to your loyal souls by this 
 memorial service, and by offerings reverently laid upon the altar." 
 
 It would seem, then, that men, not isolated heroes only 
 of surpassing worth, but men in the mass, men by the 
 thousand and the million, may be roused to heroic 
 endurance and absolute self-sacrifice quite apart from any 
 transcendent prospects of a personal future inspired by 
 supernatural belief. It has long been matter of common 
 knowledge that the Hebrews, till a very late period of 
 their history, had no belief in a future state. The three 
 hundred who fell with Leonidas at Thermopylae were 
 assuredly stirred to their immortal deed by something 
 more potent than the worship of Zeus, or Artemis, or Hera. 
 The poet's epitaph on their grave was just this one simple 
 word : " Stranger, tell the Lacedemonians that we lie here
 
 296 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 in obedience to their commands." " Winning inextinguish- 
 able fame for their loved fatherland," he says elsewhere, 
 "they clad themselves with the dark cloud of death. 
 They died, but they are not dead. Valour leads them up 
 with glory from the house of Hades." The more closely 
 we look into it the more clearly we shall see that what has 
 brought men to their highest level has been the bond that 
 united man with man. Trace history throughout and we 
 shall find that this is true. Pass from Greece to Rome, 
 thence to the history of the Crusades, and onwards to the 
 history of the Revolution. We shall see that, as the elder 
 Pliny said, where man helps man there is God. There is 
 the force that raises man above himself and lifts him to 
 the highest level of manhood. 
 
 We have been led to these thoughts by considering the 
 first of the two great events of the last year the outcome 
 of Japanese valour and Japanese religion, resulting in the 
 admission of a new member into the commonalty of great 
 nations. Let us turn now to the second : the struggle of 
 Russia to awake from the torpor of despotic autocracy, 
 and to take her place among free self-governing common- 
 wealths. One or two prefatory words, by way of briefly 
 surveying the problem. Russia is a new country ; new by 
 comparison with Western Europe, new by comparison 
 with the two established governments of the Far East 
 China and Japan. She did not pass through the reno- 
 vating discipline of Roman conquest. She was left outside 
 the spiritual dominion of the mediaeval Popes. Imagine 
 Latin and Teutonic Europe, between the fifth and twelfth 
 centuries, deprived of the moral discipline of men like 
 Benedict, Bede, Boniface, Alfred, Charlemagne, Hilde- 
 brand, and St. Bernard, and we realize what the Slavonic 
 world has been through all those centuries. Its religion
 
 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 297 
 
 was the second-rate form of Christianity that was left in 
 England when Henry VIII. had made himself Head of 
 the Church. The separation of spiritual from temporal 
 power, of Church from State, is the first condition of 
 freedom. That freedom Russia has never possessed. The 
 deposition of the Procurator of the Holy Synod from his 
 power to suppress the slightest sign of spiritual indepen- 
 dence in the remotest village of the empire is the surest 
 and most signal proof of the momentous importance of 
 the crisis that is now being decided. " Through much 
 tribulation," it was said of old, " must ye enter the 
 kingdom." And fearful is the tribulation through which 
 Russia is now passing, and has yet to pass. We can but 
 stand by and look on as the struggle advances, and the 
 smoke of battle becomes darker and more dense; confident 
 that a highly gifted race which has been slowly assimilating 
 the science and thought of the West, which has already 
 produced great men of science, great thinkers, great artists, 
 great musicians, will win through to the daylight and to 
 the blessings of peace. Her bravest blood during these 
 past years has been shed like water ; but it will not have 
 fallen to the ground in vain. Her dead will sanctify and 
 ennoble the living and the yet unborn. 
 
 We meet to-night to celebrate the Festival of the 
 Dead ; the dead of every degree and rank and worth. 
 Other days are set apart for the commemoration of saints 
 and heroes, those who are in a special sense the types 
 and representatives of Humanity the great poets, the 
 great thinkers, the great rulers, the great spiritual 
 guides. We are not thinking to-night so much of 
 Shakespeare or of Aristotle, or of Caesar and Cromwell, 
 of St. Paul, of St. Augustine and St. Francis, of Moses, 
 Mahomet, Confucius, and the marvellous Indian Prince
 
 298 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 who regenerated the Asiatic world, as of the vast mass of 
 men who have worked and toiled without fame or distinc- 
 tion, and the fruit of whose labours we inherit and enjoy. 
 We think of the millions of workmen who, from the days 
 of the Romans to the present time, made our roads, cleared 
 our forests, drained our marsh lands, built and rebuilt our 
 towns and villages, from century to century, of the women 
 who bore and nursed their children, and ministered to 
 their daily wants, kept alive the mother-tongue, handed on 
 traditions, customs, legends, rules of life. These " fear no 
 more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter's rages ; 
 they their earthly task have done ; home have gone and 
 ta'en their wages." The kindly earth holds them. Yet 
 the payment of wages does not settle the matter, does not 
 wind up the account. Their work, or the fruit of their 
 work, remains ; and is gathered in by us who follow them. 
 Such is the vast assemblage of the Dead with whom 
 we place ourselves in communion to-night. Let me quote 
 Dr. Ingram's beautiful words 
 
 " Not only those by household memories 
 Linked with our lives, for whom, on bended knees, 
 
 Daily we yearn, and tears not seldom shed 
 
 Not only the great spirits who have led 
 Man's upward march to nobler destinies, 
 
 Whose record in Fame's golden book is read 
 We reverence to-day ; not only these, 
 
 But all, in whatsoever age or clime 
 (Albeit the names of most the unpitying Hours 
 
 Have hid for ever in the abyss of time), 
 Who, faithful, patient, helpful, strove to be, 
 And so, while worshipping imagined Powers, 
 True service did, Humanity ! to thee." 
 
 The Festival of the Dead, supplemented in every fourth 
 year by the Festival of Noble Women, terminates the list 
 of eighty-one festivals which constitute Auguste Comte's
 
 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 299 
 
 ideal picture of the public worship of Humanity. It may 
 be well to look a little more closely into the arrangement 
 of these festivals ; frankly admitting that the realization 
 of the scheme is reserved for a distant future. Yet 
 regarded as an Utopia it will be found to throw light on 
 the structure and the life of the great Organism of which 
 each of us is a member. The festivals fall into three 
 groups. The first group, occupying the first six of the 
 thirteen lunar months, that is to say twenty-four weeks, 
 deals with the fundamental bonds of society, that is, with 
 the elementary social relations. The year begins with the 
 greatest of all festivals, that which presents the idealiza- 
 tion of our highest hopes and aspirations the Festival 
 of Humanity. When our numbers permit, and this may 
 be sooner than we think, this day will probably be the first 
 to offer an adequate combination of the resources of music 
 and poetry with the synthetic thoughts that naturally 
 belong to the greatest of our festivals. 
 
 The four Sundays of the first month are given to the 
 various degrees of social union. The first to the religious 
 bond, independent of political ties. The faiths of Chris- 
 tianity, Islam, Buddhism, unite many nations, which, 
 politically, are wide apart and often hostile, by the tie 
 of a common Church. Next in order comes the territory 
 which unites small States by the memories of the larger 
 political aggregate to which they once belonged : those 
 memories being strengthened in most cases by the bond 
 of a common language. The memory of a common origin 
 and history and the possession of a common language is 
 a strong bond of union for England with English Colonies 
 and with the once hostile commonwealth of the United 
 States. When Italy becomes a federation of small 
 republics, these will still be knit together by the language
 
 300 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 of Dante. On the third Sunday in this month the State, 
 properly so called, will be commemorated : the great 
 historical city as, for instance, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, 
 Edinburgh, Rouen, Bordeaux, Florence, with the smaller 
 towns and territory belonging to each ; calling forth all 
 the historic memories and all the political energy and 
 social enthusiasm so keenly felt where prominent citizens 
 are well known to all their fellows, and where the deaden- 
 ing lust of conquest and empire is powerless to penetrate. 
 Finally, the fourth Sunday of the month is given to the 
 humblest form of social union, that of the village or town- 
 ship : in which each member of the community is brought 
 into the close fellowship of neighbourhood. 
 
 The festivals of the next five months are suggested by 
 the intimate ties of family life the union of husband and 
 wife, the relation of parents to children, of children to 
 parents, the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood, the bond 
 of master and servant. In the third chapter of the second 
 volume of his Positive Polity, Comte dwells in detail on 
 the great principle that family life is the preparatory 
 school of ethics : the spontaneous source of our moral 
 education. In no other department of thought does he 
 diverge more completely from the current views of most 
 social reformers, who are for taking education more and 
 more out of the hands of parents and transferring it to the 
 community. But Society, Comte tells us, is not made up 
 of individuals. It is made up of families. 
 
 The family is the natural transition between pure 
 personality and true sociability. The affections which 
 it calls into play are not without alloy. They have, always 
 more or less marked, an element of Self, and from this 
 they derive their peculiar energy. The educational work 
 of the family begins with the forced submission of the
 
 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 301 
 
 infant at birth. This grows to respect and veneration for 
 parents. On this grows the affections of brotherhood and 
 sisterhood; and, at last, come the voluntary ties of marriage 
 and of children. Looked at politically, we may speak of 
 the family as the smallest of political societies, consisting 
 essentially of the couple by which it is founded ; but 
 extended by the filial, fraternal, and domestic ties. From 
 it we derive our best and surest insight into human nature. 
 Speaking generally, the members of our family are the 
 only beings whom we ever learn fully to know. And this, 
 even though our judgment be sometimes partial. It is 
 said that love is often very blind. But we should re- 
 member that hate is blind invariably, and with more 
 baneful consequences. We may admit that family life is 
 exposed to the danger of promoting an aggregate selfish- 
 ness. But this is a danger which attaches to all commu- 
 nities less than Humanity, whether large or small. A 
 great part of history is occupied by fierce struggles of 
 opposing patriotisms ; yet who will say that patriotism 
 is ignoble ? We must face this danger as well as we can. 
 But before everything we must arouse the instincts of 
 sympathy from their original torpor, whatever may be the 
 danger of their receiving at one time or other a mischievous 
 bias. 
 
 We must bear in mind that Comte looked forward to 
 certain important changes in family life, which would 
 bring it into fuller accordance with social needs. One of 
 these is the frank and full recognition of domestic service 
 as an element of the family. This clashes sharply with 
 the modern revolutionary temper. If we wish to rise 
 above the habitual disregard of such service as degrading, 
 we have to go back to the Middle Age, and think of the 
 motto, Ich Dien, so proudly adopted by the Prince of
 
 302 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 Wales in the fourteenth century. Another change was 
 Comte's enlarged view of inheritance. To the bulk of a 
 rich man's fortune his children, he considered, had no 
 necessary claim. Capital is a trust to be handed down to 
 those most fit to preserve and increase it ; and the most 
 fit will often be found outside the range of blood relation- 
 ship. Adoption of a capable successor will often super- 
 sede inheritance by the natural tie. 
 
 On the sound constitution of the family depend the 
 health and vigour of the community. The festivals of five 
 months bring into prominence all the phases of private 
 life that are treated, wisely or unwisely, in the modern 
 novel. 
 
 We pass, then, in the twenty-fifth week of the year, to 
 the review of the past phases in the history of Humanity, 
 which have prepared the way to her present and future 
 state. These phases connect themselves with the three 
 successive stages of belief: Fetichism, Polytheism, 
 Monotheism. 
 
 Here we note at once that Fetichism, for the first time, 
 receives due honour as the primal phase in this great 
 story ; honour which could not be paid in the Calendar 
 commemorative of great men, for the great men of 
 Fetichism have passed away from us without a sign. Four 
 festivals are celebrated in the month of Fetichism, mark- 
 ing four essential steps in human history. When they 
 were taken we know not: we can but note their funda- 
 mental importance. The taming of animals, the invention 
 of fire, the worship of the Sun, as the prime regulator of 
 the Seasons and of social institutions, and the use of Iron 
 for weapons of war and for implements of industry. 
 
 Fetichism was followed by Polytheism : and in the 
 Polytheistic month we celebrate, first, its conservative
 
 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 303 
 
 stage, the great theocracies of Egypt, Babylonia, India, 
 Peru, not forgetting its fundamental institution of Caste, 
 the great school of apprenticeship and discipline in the 
 arts of life ; and, next, the progressive polytheism of 
 Greece and Rome. To Greece two weeks are devoted. 
 In the first honour is paid to the three chief names in 
 poetry and art Homer, ^Eschylus, and Phidias. In the 
 second week, the founders of philosophy are celebrated 
 Thales, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Archimedes, Hippocrates, 
 Apollonius, and Hipparchus. And the great struggle, 
 without which these men could never have been, is summed 
 up in the word Salamis. Three names Scipio, Caesar, 
 Trajan, suffice to immortalize the social achievements of 
 Rome in government and law. 
 
 Of the month of Monotheism, the first week is given 
 to Judaic theocracy, represented in the three types of 
 Abraham, Moses, and Solomon ; the second week to 
 Catholicism. St Paul, its founder, is followed by Charle- 
 magne, Alfred, Hildebrand, Godfrey, and St Bernard. 
 The third week is that of Islam and its founder, special 
 mention being made of the great battle that ended the 
 military strife between Islam and its great rival the 
 battle in which Cervantes was a soldier. The last week is 
 consecrated to the Western revolution in its entirety, the 
 period at once organic and critical in which political 
 anarchy went side by side with reconstruction, bringing 
 out the immediate elements of the final system, both in 
 the spiritual and temporal order. Dante, Descartes, and 
 Frederic, are taken as the types of this revolutionary and 
 reconstructive movement. 
 
 The festivals of the last four of the thirteen months 
 display Humanity as a living and acting force, as a super- 
 intending Providence, as our shelter and protectress against
 
 304 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 the dangers and fatalities of life. Of Positive Religion 
 Love is the Principle. With that we begin. A mother's 
 love is the surrounding atmosphere of our early life : the 
 love of wife, sister, daughter, follows : and these implant 
 the memories which keep alive the hopes and the affections 
 which save us from moral death. Love is not limited " to 
 its more vehement and selfish forms, the desire of youth 
 for beauty, the consuming love of the mother for the 
 infant. It leads beyond these to the tranquil and purer 
 manifestations of the spirit, the love of a father for a son, 
 of a friend for a friend ; the love which can light up a face 
 upon the edge of the dark river, and can smile in the very 
 throes of pain." Such love is " the only thing which holds 
 out a tender defiance against change and suffering and 
 death. If we desire and endeavour not to sin against love, 
 not to nourish hate or strife, to hold out the hand again 
 and again to any message of sympathy or trust, not to 
 struggle for our own profit, not to reject tenderness, to 
 believe in the good faith and the good will of men : we are 
 then in the way. We may make mistakes, we may fail a 
 thousand times ; but the key of heaven is in our hands." * 
 Of this all-protecting, all-providing love, woman is the 
 source and centre. Who does not feel that when the time 
 comes for disbanding armies and for uniting the diminished 
 navies of the world into a single fleet for the police of the 
 seas, that women will have taken a leading part in bringing 
 that time near ? In this tenth month special note will be 
 taken of private meditation and prayer as the means of 
 keeping alive the influences of Home by due recognition 
 of those who have called out and strengthened the springs 
 of character and moral life. 
 
 The eleventh month brings before us the intellectual 
 * The passages quoted are from the Upton Letters.
 
 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 35 
 
 providence of Humanity. In the preceding month we 
 deal with the affections by which action is prompted. In 
 this month we are encouraged to think, in order to act 
 wisely. A special Festival of Art is placed here ; and 
 also a Festival of Science. Passion for ideal beauty, 
 strenuous search for the deepest and highest truth will be 
 fostered by the Religion of Humanity, and animated to 
 new life, not left as heretofore to casual and isolated efforts. 
 Yet these things, precious as they are, will be held subordi- 
 nate to the training of the young lives of each generation 
 and to the guidance of grown men and women in the 
 intricate problems and the new forms of social struggle 
 which each century is sure to bring. Intellectual energy, 
 like mechanical energy, is in constant risk of dissipation. 
 Waste of it is always going on ; and yet of all the treasures 
 that Humanity has at her disposal it is the most important 
 to economize. There is none too much of it. Our educat- 
 ing providence will guard us against the ever-recurring 
 temptation to indulge in the discussion of insoluble 
 problems, the spinning of endless conjectures as to the 
 origin of matter, as to space of four dimensions, as to the 
 abstract rights of man, as to the immortality of the soul, 
 and will concentrate our thought on the essential task of 
 making private and public life more perfect. During this 
 month, the most ancient form of spiritual power, that 
 which is exercised by the old men of the primitive tribe, 
 will be specially celebrated. 
 
 In the twelfth month the holders of capital will be seen 
 in their true place as Captains of Industry. To realize the 
 providential character of their great social function, we 
 have only to call to mind the disasters following on the 
 absence of wisdom in the management of capital. When 
 avarice or mad ambition drives the capitalist to rash and 
 
 x
 
 306 COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 foolhardy adventures, ending in chaos, what shipwreck of 
 happiness to millions, what diffusion of universal mistrust, 
 what floodgates of ill-will unfastened ! Within due measure 
 capital must be concentrated, and there must be personal 
 responsibility for its use. To imagine that complicated 
 operations in the financial world (and on this all other 
 industrial operations depend) can be conducted by casual 
 committees chosen by an ignorant democracy, is one of 
 the wildest hallucinations that ever deluded mankind. 
 
 And, finally, the thirteenth and last month of the 
 Positivist year brings before us the dependence of each 
 one of us on the entire assemblage of our fellow-citizens. 
 Here, again, what we owe to those who work faithfully is 
 brought home to us by the few who are false to their trust. 
 An uncemented drain-pipe, letting fever into a household ; 
 a plate on a railway loosely laid ; a signal missed or mis- 
 interpreted ; a safety lamp in a coal mine neglected ; a 
 girder in a bridge badly painted ; bad brickwork ; bad 
 gasfitting ; bad plumbing all such things pointing to the 
 countless evils that follow when the sentinel of the indus- 
 trial army is asleep at his post do but emphasize the 
 enormous preponderance of cases when he does not sleep ; 
 when, by his care and faithful work, each one of us is 
 saved from destruction and danger. Two festivals adorn 
 this last of the months. First, the Festival of Inventors, 
 many of them workmen, very few of them either philo- 
 sophers or capitalists, who, possessing a few elements 
 of theoretic knowledge, large practical experience, and 
 vigorous imagination, devise new forms of applying and 
 economizing force, and thus help mankind forward to the 
 mastery of the world. Again, in the Festival of St. 
 Francis, with whose followers may be joined in our 
 thoughts the memory of the mendicant in Scott's
 
 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 307 
 
 Antiquary, we have recognition of lives unfit for any 
 special industrial office, debarred from the scientific emi- 
 nence that would have given them spiritual ascendency, 
 yet capable, in their poverty and dependence, of exercising 
 beneficent influence on those around them. 
 
 And then, at the end of all, we commemorate the Dead 
 of all nations and tongues, of every place, every station 
 thinkers, rulers, workmen, mother, wife, child all who 
 have lived, have loved, have wrought, have left memories 
 behind them, which, on this last night of the year, we call 
 back to life. We do not judge : we leave that high 
 function to others. We think of the two rivers in 
 Dante's Paradise the river of forgetfulness, the river of 
 goodwill. We bathe in the first, which wipes all memories 
 away. We drink of the second, which restores the happy 
 memories, the remembrance of bright companionship, of 
 kind and friendly service. These last friends we judge 
 not ; but it may be that we judge ourselves. We may 
 think that we might have done more to make their lives 
 happy; we might have uttered the forgiving word, for 
 want of which it may be that a taint of bitterness stayed 
 with them to the end. Irrevocable Death forbids this now. 
 All the more shall we widen and strengthen our sym- 
 pathies for the future, for those who remain with us still. 
 Never let us forget that our chief purpose in holding com- 
 munion with the Dead is that we may feel, think, and act 
 more justly and more kindly towards the Living. 
 
 THE END 
 
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