In the meantime, we must attempt something of a succinct statement of the ethical, social and religious system with which the name of Auguste Comte is associated.
It is clear that he was early impelled to a study of the principles on which society rests by the disorganisation into which his country had fallen, after the upheaval of the Revolution and the disasters of the Napoleonic era which succeeded it. It may even be the truth that his bold and subversive teaching in religious matters was due to a profound conviction that the virtue of the old ideals had been completely exhausted, and that if society was to be regenerated, it must be by a radical reformation of the theoretic conceptions on which it had been held to repose. Certainly there was a vast deal in the contemporary history of France to confirm Comte in his belief that Catholicism had spent its force. At a period of crisis in a nation's history, thinking men naturally look about them for some strong influence, for some commanding ideal which can serve as a rallying point in times of social dispersion, and help to keep the severing elements of the body politic together. But what had religion done for France in the hour of her trial? So little, that the country had to wade through blood in order to reach a measure of political emancipation which England had long enjoyed. In fact, it was the corruption of religion in the person of its official representatives, its intellectual degradation in the eyes of the thinkers, which helped to provoke the catastrophe. What wonder, then, that a mind so penetrating and alert as Comte's early arrived at the conclusion that the _ancien régime_ in religion, no less than in politics, must be abolished if progress was to be possible among men?
Comte, then, was essentially a social philosopher. His work, indeed, is encyclopaedic--not one whit less so than Spencer's--but the aim he persistently kept in view was the service of man by the reconstruction, through philosophy and religion, of the foundations on which civilisation rests. It is impossible not to be impressed by the grandeur of his conception, and the consuming energy with which he addressed himself to its realisation. He seems to recall to us Browning's Paracelsus, whose "vast longings" urged him forward to some surpassing achievement, to some heroic attempt