But we may suppose that they feel what is done to them, and desire and will what they themselves do.  Even intelligence, which we must deny to them in the present, may be attributed to them in the past.  Before man existed, the earth, at that time an intelligent being, may have exerted “its physico-chemical activity so as to improve the astronomical order by changing its principal coefficients.  Our planet may be supposed to have rendered its orbit less excentric, and thereby more habitable, by planning a long series of explosions, analogous to those from which, according to the best hypotheses, comets proceed.  Judiciously reproduced, similar shocks may have rendered the inclination of the earth’s axis better adapted to the future wants of the Grand Etre. A fortiori the Earth may have modified its own figure, which is only beyond our intervention because our spiritual ascendancy has not at its disposal a sufficient material force.”  The like may be conceived as having been done by each of the other planets, in concert, possibly, with the Earth and with one another.  “In proportion as each planet improved its own condition, its life exhausted itself by excess of innervation; but with the consolation of rendering its self-devotion more efficacious, when the extinction of its special functions, first animal, and finally vegetative, reduced it to the universal attributes of feeling and activity."[25] This stuff, though he calls it fiction, he soon after speaks of as belief (croyance), to be greatly recommended, as at once satisfying our natural curiosity, and “perfecting our unity” (again unity!) “by supplying the gaps in our scientific notions with poetic fictions, and developing sympathetic emotions and aesthetic inspirations:  the world being conceived as aspiring to second mankind in ameliorating the universal order under the impulse of the Grand Etre.”  And he obviously intends that we should be trained to make these fantastical inventions permeate all our associations, until we are incapable of conceiving the world and Nature apart from them, and they become equivalent to, and are in fact transformed into, real beliefs.

Wretched as this is, it is singularly characteristic of M. Comte’s later mode of thought.  A writer might be excused for introducing into an avowed work of fancy this dance of the planets, and conception of an animated Earth.  If finely executed, he might even be admired for it.  No one blames a poet for ascribing feelings, purposes, and human propensities to flowers.  Because a conception might be interesting, and perhaps edifying, in a poem, M. Comte would have it imprinted on the inmost texture of every human mind in ordinary prose.  If the imagination were not taught its prescribed lesson equally with the reason, where would be Unity?  “It is important that the domain of fiction should become as systematic as that of demonstration, in order that their mutual harmony may be conformable to their respective destinations, both equally directed towards the continual increase of unity, personal and social."[26]