All this is, in a sense, true: but we confess our
sympathy with those who feel towards it like the man in the story, who
being asked whether he admitted that six and five make eleven, refused
to give an answer until he knew what use was to be made of it. The
doctrine is one of a class of truths which, unless completed by other
truths, are so liable to perversion, that we may fairly decline to take
notice of them except in connexion with some definite application. In
justice to M. Comte it should be said that he does not wish this
intellectual dominion to be exercised over an ignorant people. Par from
him is the thought of promoting the allegiance of the mass to scientific
authority by withholding from them scientific knowledge. He holds it the
duty of society to bestow on every one who grows up to manhood or
womanhood as complete a course of instruction in every department of
science, from mathematics to sociology, as can possibly be made general:
and his ideas of what is possible in that respect are carried to a
length to which few are prepared to follow him. There is something
startling, though, when closely looked into, not Utopian or chimerical,
in the amount of positive knowledge of the most varied kind which he
believes may, by good methods of teaching, be made the common
inheritance of all persons with ordinary faculties who are born into the
world: not the mere knowledge of results, to which, except for the
practical arts, he attaches only secondary value, but knowledge also of
the mode in which those results were attained, and the evidence on which
they rest, so far as it can be known and understood by those who do not
devote their lives to its study.
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