There is no need to analyze further M. Comte’s second view of universal history.  The best chapter is that on the Romans, to whom, because they were greater in practice than in theory, and for centuries worked together in obedience to a social sentiment (though only that of their country’s aggrandizement), M. Comte is as favourably affected, as he is inimical to all but a small selection of eminent thinkers among the Greeks.  The greatest blemish in this chapter is the idolatry of Julius Caesar, whom M. Comte regards as one of the most illustrious characters in history, and of the greatest practical benefactors of mankind.  Caesar had many eminent qualities, but what he did to deserve such praise we are at a loss to discover, except subverting a free government:  that merit, however, with M. Comte, goes a great way.  It did not, in his former days, suffice to rehabilitate Napoleon, whose name and memory he regarded with a bitterness highly honourable to himself, and whose career he deemed one of the greatest calamities in modern history.  But in his later writings these sentiments are considerably mitigated:  he regards Napoleon as a more estimable “dictator” than Louis Philippe, and thinks that his greatest error was re-establishing the Academy of Sciences!  That this should be said by M. Comte, and said of Napoleon, measures the depth to which his moral standard had fallen.

The last volume which he published, that on the Philosophy of Mathematics, is in some respects a still sadder picture of intellectual degeneracy than those which preceded it.  After the admirable resume of the subject in the first volume of his first great work, we expected something of the very highest order when he returned to the subject for a more thorough treatment of it.  But, being the commencement of a Synthese Subjective, it contains, as might be expected, a great deal that is much more subjective than mathematical.  Nor of this do we complain:  but we little imagined of what nature this subjective matter was to be.  M. Comte here joins together the two ideas, which, of all that he has put forth, are the most repugnant to the fundamental principles of Positive Philosophy.  One of them is that on which we have just commented, the assimilation between Positivism and Fetishism.  The other, of which we took notice in a former article, was the “liberte facultative” of shaping our scientific conceptions to gratify the demands not solely of objective truth, but of intellectual and aesthetic suitability.  It would be an excellent thing, M. Comte thinks, if science could be deprived of its secheresse, and directly associated with sentiment.  Now it is impossible to prove that the external world, and the bodies composing it, are not endowed with feeling, and voluntary agency.  It is therefore highly desirable that we should educate ourselves into imagining that they are.  Intelligence it will not do to invest them with, for some distinction must be maintained between simple activity and life.