and others have expressed to the full their obligations to Comte, even when defining their increasing differences from him, others have been secretly helping themselves to Comte, and living on the results.

All in all, there is, I should say, a considerable tinge of Comtism through our present speculative literature. It is not, however, of those among us who have only in a general way received this tinge, as they might have received a tinge from any other powerful intellectual influence of the time, that I speak under the name of the British Comtists. Under this name I have in view a few writers and thinkers who in a more express manner adhere to Comte, or to an acknowledged adaptation of him. Even here, however, there are degrees. One may distinguish, even within Comte's own life-time, two Comtisms, of which those who were inclined to be Comtists had the option. There was the "Earlier Comtism," if I may so call it, represented in his completed Cours de Philosophie Positive; in which, though there was extravagance enough of opinion and expression to shock the British mind, there was still a reining-in of the intellect on this side of delirium. But this was ere long developed into the "Later Comtism;" in which, impelled by a sudden revelation that his system was deficient as yet on the sentimental side, the author suddenly broke down one of its gables, and did pass on, without his hat, into what irreverent lookers-on must really call delirium and moonlight. Out from that gable he built, as it were, a spacious verandah for a new Religion, attached to his Positive Philosophy under the name of the Culte Systématique de l'Humanité. Here there might be

busts of 365 selected eminent men of the past (a large proportion being, of course, Frenchmen), ranged in niches, as gods for ordinary daily worship throughout the year; besides more colossal busts of greater gods for the weeks and months; and a striking peculiarity of four black busts of History's most retrograde scoundrels, at quarterly intervals, to serve as devils, or desirable objects of execration: while within all, in a secret alcove, one might practise the sweetest and keenest of all forms of the worship of Humanity—the worship of Woman-by praying habitually to one's own mother, or wife!

Some form even of the later or sacerdotal Comtism, I believe, does exist among us, in perfect earnest, and without seeking to conceal itself; but, as might be expected, it is chiefly the earlier or purely speculative Comtism, and that with modifications, that has any following in Britain. If I reckon MR. LEWES and MISS MARTINEAU among British Comtists in this sense, it must be only in as far as they themselves, in translating or expounding Comte, have signified their adhesion to his principles. Miss Martineau has had a career of thought and activity of her own too marked to make it conceivable that it can have merged absolutely in Comtism; and Mr. Lewes is too able and spirited a man, too cultured, of too frank and quick sympathies in all fine directions, that we should tie him down very stringently to his own enthusiastic expression, that "in the Cours de Philosophie Positive we have the grandest, because on the whole, the truest system which Philosophy has yet produced."* Still, there is a

* Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy, Library Edition,

p. 662.

considerable amount of effective British Comtism among us-of that philosophy which abjures and protests against Metaphysics, or the thought of the supernatural in any form whatsoever, as by this time proved rubbish, and would direct the ploughshare of the human mind, in respect of the study of Man, exclusively to Physiology and Sociology.

Into this British Comtism have been absorbed, I think, all the relics, worth reckoning, of what was once native British Secularism. Absorption into Comtism has been an elevation for it.

To be named in close connexion with the British Comtists, though not decisively as one of them, is the late MR. BUCKLE. His great idea, that for which he lived and died, was the possibility of a Science of History. There was a paramount obligation of the human mind in the present age to the study of History in a scientific. manner, with all possible aids from Physiology and the other sciences, in order to the discovery and establishment of a new body of truths bearing on the social well-being. In prosecuting this idea Mr. Buckle himself put forth a number of more or less suggestive conjectures and criticisms, and revealed also certain strong idiosyncrasies-in particular, his passion for liberty of thought, and his abomination of the theological spirit in all times and countries. There was a breaking away in him, too—as is often interestingly the case with enthusiastic Empiricists of his type-into a consolatory private transcendentalism of his own, accessible from his general system by a wicket to which he only had the key. But, on the whole, it must have been chiefly owing to the small amount of public

familiarity in this country with exercises of speculation in the same general direction, and particularly with Comte's, that Mr Buckle's doctrines ran about with such a clamour of rejection and acceptance. As far as I know, all that was essential in them might have been cut out of a corner of Comte, or out of that with a portion of Mill in addition-though I do not mean to say the author got at them by any such immediate method; and there was a crudity about his statements of them, an incoherence, and a sort of slap-dash contemptuousness towards whole centuries and civilizations of the past, on account of their using battle-axes, burning witches, wearing shoe-ties, or some trifle of that sort, from which the more comprehensive genius of Comte kept him free. It was Mr. Buckle's intellectual courage, his pugnacity for ideas that had roused and inviogorated himself, that was his main merit. In our country it is a great merit, because still a rare one, Thinking, therefore, how largely he possessed it, and how prematurely and sadly he was cut off while others who have no such virtue are left, the words may occur to us:

"How well could we have spared for thee, young swain,

Enow of such as for their bellies' sake

Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold!"

III

I will now name together two writers, not because they can be constituted into a class, but because each of them is so important individually that there is a propriety, on that account, in connecting them.

Associated with Mr. Mill by a mutual respect, which has taken opportunities of expressing itself, and also by substantial adhesion in principle, is MR. ALEXANDER BAIN. His contribution to Philosophy is mainly his large system of Psychology in two volumes, entitled The Senses and the Intellect and The Emotions and the Will. It is perhaps the richest Natural History of the Human Mind in the language-the most fully mapped out, and the. most abundant in happy detail and illustration. The author decidedly belongs to the school of Empiricism, and he roots his Psychology, more strenuously and extensively, I think, than any British psychologist since Hartley, in Physiology. But, from the fact that his Physiology is that of the present day, he does this with greater intelligibility and effect. He does not indeed reject from Psychology the method of the observation and registration of the phænomena of Mind, as flitting, however generated, in a supposed inner chamber of Consciousness; but he takes care to assert at the outset that this inner chamber is a mere phantasy or trick of the mind. Sweeping away even the imaginary sensorium, or central receptacle for impressions, of the older physiologists, he views Mind as presenting itself in nerve-currents, the recoverability of nerve-currents, and the associability of nerve-currents, on and on, in ever-increasing complexity and in ever-varying combinations. Beginning, therefore, with Brain and Nerve as the seats of the nerve-currents, and educing thence those simplest and most rudimentary states of mind which consist of instinctive muscular move ments and sensations of the five senses, he proceeds to show how, out of these, by the processes of recoverability