authentic objects, namely, “the things which do appear.” Comte brought to the task of this “positive” organisation of life a comprehensive acquaintance with the results and the general methods of all the sciences, and a noticeable facility in classified and generalised statement. These qualities, joined with an ardour of conviction and an insistence of advocacy that lent their possessor something of the character of the prophet and the apostle, earned for the new cause an attention sufificient not only to found a new sect, intense in cohesion, if limited in numbers, but to spread the contagion of its general empirical view wide through a world interested in the theory of knowledge, however indifferent to the religious powers claimed for the new doctrine. A philosophy insisting on the sole credibility of scientific evidence, and chiefly busied in formulating scientific truths in generalisations so rarefied as to seem from their unexpectedness like new scientific discoveries, naturally appealed to many a scientific expert, but still more to the ever-swelling throng of general readers who fed upon scientific “results,” and gradually formed the public now known to the venders of “popular science.”
So matters stood, in the world that was balancing between the interests of philosophy and of religion, till about the middle of the century. At that juncture, following upon the latest developments in the sciences, particularly in the field of biology, Herbert Spencer appeared with his project of a “Synthetic Philosophy,” based on the principle of Evolution carried out to cosmic extent. This view presently
