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It was on my tongue to tell him of M. le Comte's mad resolve to fare forth alone; to beg him to stop it. But I remembered how blameworthy I myself had held the equery for interfering with M. Étienne, and I made up my mind that no word of cavil at my lord should ever pass my lips. I lagged across the court at Vigo's heels, silent. M. Étienne was standing in the doorway.
The theory which has hitherto been generally accepted by mythologists, even by those who profess Comte's great principle of historical evolution, is that man began with special fetishes, that these were combined in comprehensive types to form polytheistic hierarchies, and hence he rose by an analogous process to a more or less vague conception of monotheism.
The phrenological study of Mind thus supposes as its necessary preparation the whole of the Association psychology. This great mistake is not a mere hiatus in M. Comte's system, but the parent of serious errors in his attempt to create a Social Science.
He observed that when a people is progressing, every step it takes causes an acceleration in the rate of progress. And he anticipated Comte's famous "law" of the three stages of intellectual evolution, though without giving it the extensive and fundamental significance which Comte claimed for it.
He avowed that there was no more to say. He declared that should his wife go hence the fountains of his soul would dry up, his mind would famish, and the light of his life would go out in darkness. The gods were envious of such love as this. Comte's mate passed away. He was stricken dumb; the calamity was too great for speech or tears.
The psychology of modern savages is no clew to the minds of the people who wrought tools of stone in the world of the mammoth and the RHINOCEROS TICHIRHINUS. If the first stage of man's development, which was of such critical importance for his destinies, was pre-animistic, Comte's law of progress fails, for it does not cover the ground.
Afterwards Morin emptied his pockets, which were always full of Positivist tracts and pamphlets, manifestos, answers and so forth, in which Comte's doctrines were extolled as furnishing the only possible basis for the new, awaited religion.
Comte's wife was pretty and she was astute as most pretty women are. John Fiske, in his lecture on "Communal Life," says that astute persons add nothing of value to the community in which they live their mission being to be the admired glass of fashion for the non-cogitabund. The value of astuteness is that it protects us from the astute.
At the same time I re-read Mill's "Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy", and also went through a pretty severe study of Comte's Philosophic Positive. I had entirely given up the use of prayer, not because I was an Atheist but because I was still a Theist. It seemed to me to be absurd to pray, if I believed in a God who was wiser and better than myself.
She always remained at a respectful distance from complete adherence to Comte's scheme, but she was never tired of protesting that he was a really great thinker, that his famous survey of the Middle Ages in the fifth volume of the Positive Philosophy was full of luminous ideas, and that she had thankfully learned much from it.
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