What I refer to in these words, is, on the one hand, the dogmatism and narrowness which so often mark M. Comte’s discussion of doctrines which he does not like, and reduce his expressions of opinion to mere passionate puerilities; as, for example, when he is arguing against the assumption of an ether, or when he is talking (I cannot call it arguing) against psychology, or political economy.  On the other hand, I allude to the spirit of meddling systematization and regulation which animates even the “Philosophic Positive,” and breaks out, in the latter volumes of that work, into no uncertain foreshadowing of the anti-scientific monstrosities of Comte’s later writings.

Those who try to draw a line of demarcation between the spirit of the “Philosophic Positive,” and that of the “Politique” and its successors, (if I may express an opinion from fragmentary knowledge of these last,) must have overlooked, or forgotten, what Comte himself labours to show, and indeed succeeds in proving, in the “Appendice General” of the “Politique Positive.”  “Des mon debut,” he writes, “je tentai de fonder le nouveau pouvoir spirituel que j’institue aujourd’hui.”  “Ma politique, loin d’etre aucunement opposee a ma philosophie, en constitue tellement la suite naturelle que celle-ci fut directement instituee pour servir de base a celle-la, comme le prouve cet appendice."[27]

This is quite true.  In the remarkable essay entitled “Considerations sur le Pouvoir spirituel,” published in March 1826, Comte advocates the establishment of a “modern spiritual power,” which, he anticipates, may exercise an even greater influence over temporal affairs, than did the Catholic clergy, at the height of their vigour and independence, in the twelfth century.  This spiritual power is, in fact, to govern opinion, and to have the supreme control over education, in each nation of the West; and the spiritual powers of the several European peoples are to be associated together and placed under a common direction or “souverainete spirituelle.”

A system of “Catholicism minus Christianity” was therefore completely organized in Comte’s mind, four years before the first volume of the “Philosophie Positive” was written; and, naturally, the papal spirit shows itself in that work, not only in the ways I have already mentioned, but, notably, in the attack on liberty of conscience which breaks out in the fourth volume:—­

“Il n’y a point de liberte de conscience en astronomie, en physique, en chimie, en physiologie meme, en ce sens que chacun trouverait absurde de ne pas croire de confiance aux principes etablis dans les sciences par les hommes competents.”

“Nothing in ultramontane Catholicism” can, in my judgment, be more completely sacerdotal, more entirely anti-scientific, than this dictum.  All the great steps in the advancement of science have been made by just those men who have not hesitated to doubt the “principles established in the sciences by competent persons;” and the great teaching of science—­the great use of it as an instrument of mental discipline—­is its constant inculcation of the maxim, that the sole ground on which any statement has a right to be believed is the impossibility of refuting it.