tual and temporal powers.

It is evident that these views transformed the theory of Condorcet into
a more acceptable shape. So long as the medieval tract of time appeared
to be an awkward episode, contributing nothing to the forward movement
but rather thwarting and retarding it, Progress was exposed to the
criticism that it was an arbitrary synthesis, only partly borne out by
historical facts and supplying no guarantees for the future. And so
long as rationalists of the Encyclopaedic school regarded religion as
a tiresome product of ignorance and deceit, the social philosophy
which lay behind the theory of Progress was condemned as unscientific;
because, in defiance of the close cohesion of social phenomena, it
refused to admit that religion, as one of the chief of those phenomena,
must itself participate and co-operate in Progress.

Condorcet had suggested that the value of history lies in affording
data for foreseeing the future. Saint-Simon raised this suggestion to a
dogma. But prevision was impossible on Condorcet's unscientific method.
In order to foretell, the law of the movement must be discovered, and
Condorcet had not found or even sought a law. The eighteenth
century thinkers had left Progress a mere hypothesis based on a very
insufficient induction; their successors sought to lift it to the rank
of a scientific hypothesis, by discovering a social law as valid as the
physical law of gravitation. This was the object both of Saint-Simon and
of Comte.

The "law" which Saint-Simon educed from history was that epochs of
organisation or construction, and epochs of criticism or revolution,
succeed each other alternately. The medieval period was a time of
organisation, and was followed by a critical, revolutionary period,
which has now come to an end and must be succeeded by another epoch of
organisation. Having discovered the clew to the process, Saint-Simon
is able to predict. As our knowledge of the universe has reached or
is reaching a stage which is no longer conjectural but POSITIVE in all
departments, society will be transformed accordingly; a new PHYSICIST
religion will supersede Christianity and Deism; men of science will play
the role of organisers which the clergy played in the Middle Ages.

As the goal of the development is social happiness, and as the working
classes form the majority, the first step towards the goal will be
the amelioration of the lot of the working classes. This will be
the princi