Making
allowance for the effects of his exuberant growth in self-conceit, we
perceive almost as much improvement in his feelings, as deterioration in
his speculations, compared with those of the Philosophie Positive. Even
the speculations are, in some secondary aspects, improved through the
beneficial effect of the improved feelings; and might have been more so,
if, by a rare good fortune, the object of his attachment had been
qualified to exercise as improving an influence over him intellectually
as morally, and if he could have been contented with something less
ambitious than being the supreme moral legislator and religious pontiff
of the human race.
When we say that M. Comte has erected his philosophy into a religion,
the word religion must not be understood in its ordinary sense. He made
no change in the purely negative attitude which he maintained towards
theology: his religion is without a God. In saying this, we have done
enough to induce nine-tenths of all readers, at least in our own
country, to avert their faces and close their ears. To have no religion,
though scandalous enough, is an idea they are partly used to: but to
have no God, and to talk of religion, is to their feelings at once an
absurdity and an impiety.
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