rsal education and will draw up the final code of ethics. They will
be able, more effectively than the Church, to protect the interests of
the lower classes.

Comte's conviction that the world is prepared for a transformation
of this kind is based principally on signs of the decline of the
theological spirit and of the military spirit, which he regarded as the
two main obstacles to the reign of reason. Catholicism, he says, is now
no more than "an imposing historical ruin." As for militarism, the epoch
has arrived in which serious and lasting warfare among the ELITE nations
will totally cease. The last general cause of warfare has been the
competition for colonies. But the colonial policy is now in its
decadence (with the temporary exception of England), so that we need not
look for future trouble from this source. The very sophism, sometimes
put forward to justify war, that it is an instrument of civilisation, is
a homage to the pacific nature of modern society.

We need not follow further the details of Comte's forecast of the
Positive period, except to mention that he did not contemplate a
political federation. The great European nations will develop each
in its own way, with their separate "temporal" organisations. But he
contemplated the intervention of a common "spiritual" power, so that all
nationalities "under the direction of a homogeneous speculative class
will contribute to an identical work, in a spirit of active European
patriotism, not of sterile cosmopolitanism."

Comte claimed, like Saint-Simon, that the data of history,
scientifically interpreted, afford the means of prevision. It is
interesting to observe how he failed himself as a diviner; how utterly
he misapprehended the vitality of Catholicism, how completely his
prophecy as to the cessation of wars was belied by the event. He lived
to see the Crimean war. [Footnote: He died in 1857.] As a diviner he
failed as completely as Saint-Simon and Fourier, whose dream that the
nineteenth century would see the beginning of an epoch of harmony and
happiness was to be fulfilled by a deadly struggle between capitalism
and labour, the civil war in America, the war of 1870, the Commune,
Russian pogroms, Armenian massacres, and finally the universal
catastrophe of 1914.

5.

For the comprehension of history we have perhaps gained as little from
Comte's positive laws as from Hegel's metaphysical categories. Both
thinkers had studied the facts of history only