Even that to
which he shows most indulgence, poetry, except the very best, is to
undergo a similar fate, with the reservation of select passages, on the
ground that, poetry being intended to cultivate our instinct of ideal
perfection, any kind of it that is less than the best is worse than
none. This imitation of the error, we will call it the crime, of the
early Christians--and in an exaggerated form, for even they destroyed
only those writings of pagans or heretics which were directed against
themselves--is the one thing in M. Comte's projects which merits real
indignation. When once M. Comte has decided, all evidence on the other
side, nay, the very historical evidence on which he grounded his
decision, had better perish. When mankind have enlisted under his
banner, they must burn their ships. There is, though in a less offensive
form, the same overweening presumption in a suggestion he makes, that
all species of animals and plants which are useless to man should be
systematically rooted out. As if any one could presume to assert that
the smallest weed may not, as knowledge advances, be found to have some
property serviceable to man.
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