One of his favourite aphorisms is the strange
one, that the living are more and more governed by the dead. As is not
uncommon with him, he introduces the dictum in one sense, and uses it in
another. What he at first means by it, is that as civilization advances,
the sum of our possessions, physical and intellectual, is due in a
decreasing proportion to ourselves, and in an increasing one to our
progenitors. The use he makes of it is, that we should submit ourselves
more and more implicitly to the authority of previous generations, and
suffer ourselves less and less to doubt their judgment, or test by our
own reason the grounds of their opinions. The unwillingness of the human
intellect and conscience, in their present state of "anarchy," to sign
their own abdication, lie calls "the insurrection of the living against
the dead." To this complexion has Positive Philosophy come at last!
Worse, however, remains to be told. M. Comte selects a hundred volumes
of science, philosophy, poetry, history, and general knowledge, which he
deems a sufficient library for every positivist, even of the theoretic
order, and actually proposes a systematic holocaust of books in
general--it would almost seem of all books except these.
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