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all reforms, and in all progressions, the most vehement opposition arises from within. Hildebrand's enterprise of raising the Catholic clergy to be the head of society in Europe was counteracted by none so formidably as by the priesthood; and in like manner, it is the savans who now oppose, with violent prejudice and passion, the organization of science which alone can give it the social influence that it ought to be obtaining. It is not ambition that they want, but enlargement and elevation. The partial perfection of our positive knowledge may easily deceive both the public and the workers as to the real value of most of the contributors, each of whom has probably furnished an extremely minute and easy portion to the vast elaboration; and it is not always understood by the public that, owing to the extreme restriction of pursuit, any savant who may have won honour in some single inquiry, may not be above mediocrity in any view, even in connection with science. In the theological case, the clergy were superior to religion; in the scientific case, on the contrary, the doctors are inferior to the doctrine. The evil is owing to the undue protraction of a state of things inevitable and indispensable in its day.

We have seen that when modern science was detached from the scholastic philosophy, there was a provisional necessity for a system of scientific speciality; and that because the formation of the different sciences was successive, in proportion to the complexity of their phenomena, the positive spirit could in no way have elicited the attributes of each case but by a partial and exclusive institution of different orders of abstract speculation. But the very purpose of this introductory system indicated its transitory nature, by limiting its office to the interval preceding the incorporation of rational positivity with all the great elementary categories,-the boundary being thus fixed at the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as my survey has shown. The two great legislators of positive philosophy, Bacon and Descartes, saw how merely provisional was this ascendency of the analytical over the synthetical spirit: and under their influence the savans of those two centuries pursued their inquiries avowedly with the view of accumulating materials for the ultimate construction of a philosophical system, however imperfect their notion of such a system might be. If this spontaneous tendency had been duly grounded, the preparatory stage would have come to its natural close on the advent of biological science; and, during the last half-century, the discovery of the scientific place of the intellectual and moral faculties would have been received as completing the system of natural philosophy, up to the threshold of social science, and as constituting an order of speculation in which, from the nature of the phenomena, the spirit of generality must overrule the spirit of detail. But the habits of special pursuit were too strong to be withstood at the right point; and the preparatory stage has been extended to the most disastrous degree, and even erected

into an absolute and indefinite state of affairs. It even appears as if the radical distinction were to be effaced between the analytical and the synthetical spirit, both of which are necessary in all positive speculation, and which should alternately guide the intellectual evolution, individual and social, under the exigencies proper to each

the one seizing the differences and the other the resemblances: the one dividing, and the other co-ordinating; and therefore the one destined to the elaboration of materials, and the other to the construction of edifices. When the masons will endure no architects, they aim at changing the elementary economy of the human understanding. Through this protraction of the preparatory stage, the positive philosophy cannot be really understood by any student, placed in any part of the present vicious organization of scientific labour. The savans of each section acquire only isolated fragments of knowledge, and have no means of comparing the general attributes of rational positivity exhibited by the various orders of phenomena, according to their natural arrangement. Each mind may be positive within the narrow limits of its special inquiry, while the slave of the ancient philosophy in all the rest. Each may exhibit the fatal contrast between the advancement of some partial conceptions, and the disgraceful triteness of all the rest and this is the spectacle actually afforded by the learned academies of our day, by their very constitution. The characteristic parcelling out of these societies,-a reproduction of their intellectual dispersion,increases the mischief of this state of things by facilitating the rise of ordinary minds, which are less likely to amend the scientific constitution than to be jealous of a philosophical superiority of which they feel themselves incapable. It is lamentable that, at a time when the state of human affairs offers every other encouragement to the active pursuit of generalities, science, in which alone the whole solution lies, should be so degraded by the incompetence of its interpreters as that it now seems to prescribe intellectual restriction, and to condemn every attempt at generalization. The demerit of the classes of savans implicated in the case varies in proportion to the independence and simplicity of the phenomena with which they are respectively engaged. The geometers are the most special and empirical of all; and the mischief began with them. We have seen how, though positivism arose in the mathematical province, the geometers see nothing before them but a future extension of their analysis to all phenomena whatever; and how the absolute character of the old philosophy is more thoroughly preserved among them than any other class, from their greater intellectual restriction. The biologists, on the contrary, whose speculations are necessarily dependent on all the rest of natural philosophy, and relating to a subject in which all artificial decomposition implies a spontaneous future combination, would be the least prone to dispersive errors, and the best disposed for philo

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383 sophical order, if their education were in any agreement with their destination, and if they were not too apt to transfer to their own studies the conceptions and habits proper to inorganic research. Their influence is beneficial on the whole however, as counteracting, though too feebly, the ascendency of the geometers. Their progression has, accordingly, been more impeded than aided by the learned bodies, whose nature relates to a preparatory period when the inorganic philosophy, with its spirit and practice of detail, flourished alone. The Academy of Paris, for instance, which had no welcome for Bichat, and formed a junction with Bonaparte to persecute Gall, and failed to recognize the worth of Broussais, and admitted the brilliant but superficial Cuvier to a superiority over Lamarck and Blainville, has a much less complete and general sense of biological philosophy than prevails beyond its walls. These faults of the scientific class have become the more conspicuous from the new social importance that has been accorded to savans during the last half-century, and which has elicited at once their intellectual insufficiency and the moral inferiority which must attend it, since, in the speculative class, elevation of soul and generosity of feeling can hardly be developed without generality of ideas, through the natural affinity between narrow and desultory views and selfish dispositions. During a former period, when science began to be systematically encouraged, pensions were given to savans to enable them freely to carry on their work; a mode of provision which was suitable to the circumstances of the time. Since the revolutionary crisis, the system has been changed in some countries, and especially in France, by conferring on learned men useful office and its remuneration, by which they are rendered more independent. No inquiry was made, however, as to the fitness of the savans for the change. Education was one chief function thus appointed; and thus we find education in special subjects more and more engrossed by learned bodies; and pupils sent forth who are less and less prepared to recognize the true position of science in relation to human welfare. The end of this provisional state of things is, however, manifestly approaching. When science itself is found to be injured by the inaccuracy of observations, and by its too selfish connection with profitable industrial operations, a change must soon take place and no influence will then impede the renovation of modern science by a generalization which will bring it into harmony with the chief needs of our position. We may regard the savans, properly so called, as an equivocal class, destined to speedy elimination, inasmuch as they are intermediate between the engineers and the philosophers, uniting in an untenable way the speciality of occupation of the one, and the abstract speculative character of the other. Out of the aca

demies themselves the greater number of the savans will melt in among the poor engineers, to form a body practically offering to

direct the action of Man upon nature, on the principles specially required; while the most eminent of them will doubtless become the nucleus of a really philosophical class directly reserved to conduct the intellectual and moral regeneration of modern society, under the impulsion of a common positive doctrine. They will institute a general scientific education, which will rationally superintend all ulterior distribution of contemplative labours by determining the variable importance which, at each period, must be assigned to each abstract category, and therefore first granting the highest place to social studies, till the final reorganization shall be sufficiently advanced. As for the savans who are fit for neither class, they will abide outside of any genuine classification, till they can assume some social character, speculative or active, their special labours meantime being welcomed with all just appreciation; for those who are capable of generality can estimate the value of the special, while the understanding restricted to special pursuit can feel nothing but aversion for complete and therefore general conceptions. This fact easily explains the antipathy which these provisional leaders of our mental evolution entertain against all proposals and prophecies of true intellectual government, dreaded in proportion as its positivity renders it powerful against all usurpation. Turning to the consideration of philosophy during the last halfRecent Philo- century, we find its state no less lamentable than sophical pro- that of science. It might have been hoped that this element might have corrected the peculiar vice of the other, substituting the spirit of generality for that of speciality: but it has not been so. Instead of rebuking that vice, philosophy has given a dogmatic sanction to it by extending it to the class of subjects to which it is thoroughly repugnant. When science diverged from a worn-out philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, without being as yet able to furnish a basis for any other, philosophy, receding further and further from science, which it had before directed, restricted itself to the immediate formation of moral and social theories, which had no permanent relation to the only researches that could supply a true foundation, as to either method or doctrine. Since the separation took place, there has been in fact no philosopher, properly so called; no mind in which the spirit of generality has been habitually preponderant, whatever might be its direction,-theological, metaphysical, or positive. In this strict sense, Leibnitz might be called the last modern philosopher; since no one after him-not even the illustrious Kant, with all his logical power-has adequately fulfilled the conditions of philosophical generality, in agreement with the advanced state of intellectual progress. Except some bright exceptional presentiments of an approaching renovation, the last half-century has offered nothing better than a barren dogmatic sanction of the transitory state of things now existing. As however

gress.

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this vain attempt is the characteristic of what is called philosophy in our day, it is necessary to notice it.

We have seen that the general spirit of the primitive philosophy, which still lingers through time and change, chiefly consists in conceiving the study of Man, and especially intellectual and moral Man, as entirely independent of that of the external world, of which it is supposed to be the basis, in direct contrast with the true definitive philosophy. Since science has shown the marvellous power of the positive method, modern metaphysics has endeavoured to make its own philosophy congenial with the existing state of the human mind by adopting a logical principle equivalent to that of science, whose conditions were less and less understood. This procedure, very marked from the time of Locke onward, has now issued in dogmatically sanctioning, under one form or another, the isolation and priority of moral speculation, by representing this supposed philosophy to be, like science itself, founded on a collection of observed facts. This has been done by proposing, as analogous to genuine observation, which must always be external to the observer, that celebrated interior observation which can be only a parody on the other, and according to which the ridiculous contradiction would take place, of our reason contemplating itself during the common course of its own acts. This is the doctrine which was learnedly prescribed at the very time that Gall was irreversibly incorporating the study of the cerebral functions with positive science. Every one knows what barren agitation has followed upon this false principle, and how the metaphysical philosophy of the present day puts forth the grandest pretensions, which produce nothing better than translations and commentaries on the old Greek or scholastic philosophy, destitute of even an historical estimate of the corresponding doctrines, for want of a sound theory of the evolution of the human mind. The parody at first implicated only the logical principle; but it soon comprehended the general course of the philosophy. The speciality which belongs to inorganic researches alone, was transferred to this just when it ought to have been allowed to disappear even in its own domain of science. A philosophy worthy of the name would at once have indicated to scientific men, and especially to biologists, the enormous error they were committing by extending to the science of living bodies, in which all aspects are closely interconnected, a mode of research that was only provisionally admissible even in regard to inert bodies. That instead of this, the so-called philosophy should have argued from the error of the other case, and have applied it systematically to the study which has always been admitted to require unity and generality above all others, appears to me one of the most memorable examples on record of a disastrous metaphysical infatuation. Such is the decayed condition of the philosophical evolution in the nineteenth century. But its

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