When Comte was writing, the progressive movement in Europe was towards increase of liberty in all its forms, national, civic, political, and economical.  On one hand there was the agitation for the release of oppressed nationalities, on the other the growth of liberalism in England and France.  The aim of the liberalism of that period was to restrict the functions of government; its spirit was distrust of the state.  As a political theory it was defective, as modern Liberals acknowledge, but it was an important expression of the feeling that the interests of society are best furthered by the free interplay of individual actions and aims.  It thus implicitly contained or pointed to a theory of Progress sharply opposed to Comte’s:  that the realisation of the fullest possible measure of individual liberty is the condition of ensuring the maximum of energy and effectiveness in improving our environment, and therefore the condition of attaining public felicity.  Right or wrong, this theory reckons with fundamental facts of human nature which Comte ignored.

7.

Comte spent the later years of his life in composing another huge work, on social reorganisation.  It included a new religion, in which Humanity was the object of worship, but made no other important addition to the speculations of his earlier manhood, though he developed them further.

The Course of Positive Philosophy was not a book that took the public by storm.  We are told by a competent student of social theories in France that the author’s name was little known in his own country till about 1855, when his greatness began to win recognition, and his influence to operate. [Footnote:  Weill, Hist. du mouvement social, p. 21.] Even then his work can hardly have been widely read.  But through men like Littre and Taine, whose conceptions of history were moulded by his teaching, and men like Mill, whom he stimulated, as well as through the disciples who adopted Positivism as a religion, his leading principles, detached from his system, became current in the world of speculation.

[Footnote:  The influence of Comte.  The manner in which ideas filter through, as it were, underground and emerge oblivious of their source is illustrated by the German historian Lamprecht’s theory of historical development.  He surveyed the history of a people as a series of what he called typical periods, each of which is marked by a collective psychical character expressing itself in every department of life.  He named this a diapason.  Lamprecht had never read Comte, and he imagined that this principle, on which he based his kulturhistorische Methode, was original.  But his psychical diapason is the psychical consensus of Comte, whose system, as we have seen, depended on the proposition that a given social organisation corresponds in a definite way to the contemporary stage of mental development; and Comte had derived the principle from Saint-Simon.  Cf. his pamphlet Die kulturhistorische Methode (1900).  The succession of “typical period” was worked out for Germany in his History of the German People.]