V.
THE AWAKENING IN THE YEARS 1856–1862.
Auguste Comte had failed in his study of human institutions, and above all in his study of the origin of morality. But we must not forget that he wrote his "Positive Philosophy" and "Positive Politics" long before the years 1856–1862, which, as was already remarked, suddenly broadened the horizon of science and rapidly raised the level of the general conceptions of educated men.
The series of epoch-making, fundamental works which appeared in the course of those five or six years, dealing in quite a new way with all the principal branches of knowledge, accomplished so complete a revolution in all our ways of looking at Nature, at life in general, and at the life of human societies, that no similar revolution has ever taken place in the whole history of science in the last twenty centuries.
What the Encyclopaedists had dimly perceived or only foreboded, what a few only of the greatest minds of the first part of the nineteenth century had succeeded in disentangling with so much difficulty, became all of a sudden a matter of general knowledge—a certitude, rich in results. And this new knowledge was won, by the application of the inductive scientific method, with such a fullness and in so comprehensive a form that henceforth every other method of research appeared incomplete, false, and purposeless.
Let us ponder for a moment over these results, the better to be able to appreciate the next attempt at a synthetic philosophy which was made by Herbert Spencer.
In the course of those six years, Grove, Clausius, Helmholtz, Joule, and a whole phalanx of physicists and astronomers—including Kirchhoff, who, by his wonderful discovery of the spectral analysis, enabled us to find out the chemical composition of the stars—broke the spell that forbade till then to men of
