We do not think him equally successful in
showing a natural connexion between the theological mode of thought and
the military system of society: but since they both belong to the same
age of the world--since each is, in itself, natural and inevitable, and
they are together modified and together undermined by the same cause,
the progress of science and industry, M. Comte is justified in
considering them as linked together, and the movement by which mankind
emerge from them as a single evolution.
These propositions having been laid down as the first principles of
social dynamics, M. Comte proceeds to verify and apply them by a
connected view of universal history. This survey nearly fills two large
volumes, above a third of the work, in all of which there is scarcely a
sentence that does not add an idea. We regard it as by far his greatest
achievement, except his review of the sciences, and in some respects
more striking even than that. We wish it were practicable in the compass
of an essay like the present, to give even a faint conception of the
extraordinary merits of this historical analysis. It must be read to be
appreciated. Whoever disbelieves that the philosophy of history can be
made a science, should suspend his judgment until he has read these
volumes of M.
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