Comte’s conviction that the world is prepared for a transformation of this kind is based principally on signs of the decline of the theological spirit and of the military spirit, which he regarded as the two main obstacles to the reign of reason.  Catholicism, he says, is now no more than “an imposing historical ruin.”  As for militarism, the epoch has arrived in which serious and lasting warfare among the elite nations will totally cease.  The last general cause of warfare has been the competition for colonies.  But the colonial policy is now in its decadence (with the temporary exception of England), so that we need not look for future trouble from this source.  The very sophism, sometimes put forward to justify war, that it is an instrument of civilisation, is a homage to the pacific nature of modern society.

We need not follow further the details of Comte’s forecast of the Positive period, except to mention that he did not contemplate a political federation.  The great European nations will develop each in its own way, with their separate “temporal” organisations.  But he contemplated the intervention of a common “spiritual” power, so that all nationalities “under the direction of a homogeneous speculative class will contribute to an identical work, in a spirit of active European patriotism, not of sterile cosmopolitanism.”

Comte claimed, like Saint-Simon, that the data of history, scientifically interpreted, afford the means of prevision.  It is interesting to observe how he failed himself as a diviner; how utterly he misapprehended the vitality of Catholicism, how completely his prophecy as to the cessation of wars was belied by the event.  He lived to see the Crimean war. [Footnote:  He died in 1857.] As a diviner he failed as completely as Saint-Simon and Fourier, whose dream that the nineteenth century would see the beginning of an epoch of harmony and happiness was to be fulfilled by a deadly struggle between capitalism and labour, the civil war in America, the war of 1870, the Commune, Russian pogroms, Armenian massacres, and finally the universal catastrophe of 1914.

5.

For the comprehension of history we have perhaps gained as little from Comte’s positive laws as from Hegel’s metaphysical categories.  Both thinkers had studied the facts of history only slightly and partially, a rather serious drawback which enabled them to impose their own constructions with the greater ease.  Hegel’s method of a priori synthesis was enjoined by his philosophical theory; but in Comte we also find a tendency to a priori treatment.  He expressly remarks that the chief social features of the Monotheistic period might almost be constructed a priori.