His philosophy of general history is recast, and in many respects changed; we cannot but say, greatly for the worse.  He gives much greater development than before to the Fetishistic, and to what he terms the Theocratic, periods.  To the Fetishistic view of nature he evinces a partiality, which appears strange in a Positive philosopher.  But the reason is that Fetish-worship is a religion of the feelings, and not at all of the intelligence.  He regards it as cultivating universal love:  as a practical fact it cultivates much rather universal fear.  He looks upon Fetishism as much more akin to Positivism than any of the forms of Theology, inasmuch as these consider matter as inert, and moved only by forces, natural and supernatural, exterior to itself:  while Fetishism resembles Positivism in conceiving matter as spontaneously active, and errs only by not distinguishing activity from life.  As if the superstition of the Fetishist consisted only in believing that the objects which produce the phaenomena of nature involuntarily, produce them voluntarily.  The Fetishist thinks not merely that his Fetish is alive, but that it can help him in war, can cure him of diseases, can grant him prosperity, or afflict him with all the contrary evils.  Therein consists the lamentable effect of Fetishism—­its degrading and prostrating influence on the feelings and conduct, its conflict with all genuine experience, and antagonism to all real knowledge of nature.

M. Comte had also no small sympathy with the Oriental theocracies, as he calls the sacerdotal castes, who indeed often deserved it by their early services to intellect and civilization; by the aid they gave to the establishment of regular government, the valuable though empirical knowledge they accumulated, and the height to which they helped to carry some of the useful arts.  M. Comte admits that they became oppressive, and that the prolongation of their ascendancy came to be incompatible with further improvement.  But he ascribes this to their having arrogated to themselves the temporal government, which, so far as we have any authentic information, they never did.  The reason why the sacerdotal corporations became oppressive, was because they were organized:  because they attempted the “unity” and “systematization” so dear to M. Comte, and allowed no science and no speculation, except with their leave and under their direction.  M. Comte’s sacerdotal order, which, in his system, has all the power that ever they had, would be oppressive in the same manner; with no variation but that which arises from the altered state of society and of the human mind.

M. Comte’s partiality to the theocracies is strikingly contrasted with his dislike of the Greeks, whom as a people he thoroughly detests, for their undue addiction to intellectual speculation, and considers to have been, by an inevitable fatality, morally sacrificed to the formation of a few great scientific intellects,—­principally Aristotle, Archimedes, Apollonius, and Hipparchus.  Any one who knows Grecian history as it can now be known, will be amazed at M. Comte’s travestie of it, in which the vulgarest historical prejudices are accepted and exaggerated, to illustrate the mischiefs of intellectual culture left to its own guidance.