It does not concern us here to examine the defects of Comte’s view of the course of European history.  But it interests us to observe that his synthesis of human Progress is, like Hegel’s, what I have called a closed system.  Just as his own absolute philosophy marked for Hegel the highest and ultimate term of human development, so for Comte the coming society whose organisation he adumbrated was the final state of humanity beyond which there would be no further movement.  It would take time to perfect the organisation, and the period would witness a continuous increase of knowledge, but the main characteristics were definitely fixed.  Comte did not conceive that the distant future, could he survive to experience it, could contain any surprises for him.  His theory of Progress thus differed from the eighteenth century views which vaguely contemplate an indefinite development and only profess to indicate some general tendencies.  He expressly repudiated this notion of indefinite progress; the data, he said, justify only the inference of continuous progress, which is a different thing.

A second point in which Comte in his view of Progress differed from the French philosophers of the preceding age is this.  Condorcet and his predecessors regarded it exclusively from the eudaemonic point of view.  The goal of Progress for them was the attainment of human felicity.  With felicity Comte is hardly more concerned than Hegel.  The establishment of a fuller harmony between men and their environment in the third stage will no doubt mean happiness.  But this consideration lies outside the theory, and to introduce it would only intrude an unscientific element into the analysis.  The course of development is determined by intellectual ideas, and he treats these as independent of, and indifferent to, eudaemonic motives.

A third point to be noted is the authoritarian character of the regime of the future.  Comte’s ideal state would be as ill to live in for any unfortunate being who values personal liberty as a theocracy or any socialistic Utopia.  He had as little sympathy with liberty as Plato or as Bossuet, and less than the eighteenth century philosophers.  This feature, common to Comte and the Saint-Simonians, was partly due to the reaction against the Revolution, but it also resulted from the logic of the man of science.  If sociological laws are positively established as certainly as the law of gravitation, no room is left for opinion; right social conduct is definitely fixed; the proper functions of every member of society admit of no question; therefore the claim to liberty is perverse and irrational.  It is the same argument which some modern exponents of Eugenics use to advocate a state tyranny in the matter of human breeding.