s is no clew to the minds of the people who
wrought tools of stone in the world of the mammoth and the RHINOCEROS
TICHIRHINUS. If the first stage of man's development, which was of such
critical importance for his destinies, was pre-animistic, Comte's law of
progress fails, for it does not cover the ground.

In another way, Comte's system may be criticised for failing to cover
the ground, if it is regarded as a philosophy of history. In accordance
with "the happy artifice of Condorcet," he assumes that the growth of
European civilisation is the only history that matters, and discards
entirely the civilisations, for instance, of India and China. This
assumption is much more than an artifice, and he has not scientifically
justified it. [Footnote: A propos of the view that only European
civilisation matters it has been well observed that "human history is
not unitary but pluralistic": F. J. Teggart, The Processes of History,
p. 24 (1918).]

The reader of the PHILOSOPHIE POSITIVE will also observe that Comte
has not grappled with a fundamental question which has to be faced in
unravelling the woof of history or seeking a law of events. I mean the
question of contingency. It must be remembered that contingency does not
in the least affect the doctrine of determinism; it is compatible with
the strictest interpretation of the principle of causation. A particular
example may be taken to show what it implies. [Footnote: On contingency
and the "chapter of accidents" see Cournot, Considerations sur la marche
des idees et des evenements dans les temps modernes (1872), i. 16 sqq.
I have discussed the subject and given some illustrations in a short
paper, entitled "Cleopatra's Nose," in the Annual of the Rationalist
Press Association for 1916.]

It may plausibly be argued that a military dictatorship was an
inevitable sequence of the French Revolution. This may not be true, but
let us assume it. Let us further assume that, given Napoleon, it was
inevitable that he should be the dictator. But Napoleon's existence was
due to an independent causal chain which had nothing whatever to do with
the course of political events. He might have died in his boyhood by
disease or by an accident, and the fact that he survived was due to
causes which were similarly independent of the causal chain which, as we
are assuming, led necessarily to an epoch of monarchical government. The
existence of a man of his genius and character at the given moment