The general result of M. Comte's criticism on the revolutionary
philosophy, is that he deems it not only incapable of aiding the
necessary reorganization of society, but a serious impediment thereto,
by setting up, on all the great interests of mankind, the mere negation
of authority, direction, or organization, as the most perfect state, and
the solution of all problems: the extreme point of this aberration being
reached by Rousseau and his followers, when they extolled the savage
state, as an ideal from which civilization was only a degeneracy, more
or less marked and complete.
The state of sociological speculation being such as has been
described--divided between a feudal and theological school, now effete,
and a democratic and metaphysical one, of no value except for the
destruction of the former; the problem, how to render the social science
positive, must naturally have presented itself, more or less distinctly,
to superior minds. M. Comte examines and criticises, for the most part
justly, some of the principal efforts which have been made by individual
thinkers for this purpose. But the weak side of his philosophy comes out
prominently in his strictures on the only systematic attempt yet made by
any body of thinkers, to constitute a science, not indeed of social
phenomena generally, but of one great class or division of them.
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