was
a contingency which profoundly affected the course of history. If he
had not been there another dictator would have grasped the helm, but
obviously would not have done what Napoleon did.

It is clear that the whole history of man has been modified at every
stage by such contingencies, which may be defined as the collisions
of two independent causal chains. Voltaire was perfectly right when he
emphasised the role of chance in history, though he did not realise what
it meant. This factor would explain the oscillations and deflections
which Comte admits in the movement of historical progression. But the
question arises whether it may not also have once and again definitely
altered the direction of the movement. Can the factor be regarded as
virtually negligible by those who, like Comte, are concerned with the
large perspective of human development and not with the details of an
episode? Or was Renouvier right in principle when he maintained "the
real possibility that the sequence of events from the Emperor Nerva to
the Emperor Charlemagne might have been radically different from what it
actually was"? [Footnote: He illustrated this proposition by a fanciful
reconstruction of European history from 100 to 800 A.D. in his UCHRONIE,
1876. He contended that there is no definite law of progress: "The true
law lies in the equal possibility of progress or regress for societies
as for individuals."]

6.

It does not concern us here to examine the defects of Comte's view of
the course of European history. But it interests us to observe that
his synthesis of human Progress is, like Hegel's, what I have called a
closed system. Just as his own absolute philosophy marked for Hegel the
highest and ultimate term of human development, so for Comte the coming
society whose organisation he adumbrated was the final state of humanity
beyond which there would be no further movement. It would take time
to perfect the organisation, and the period would witness a continuous
increase of knowledge, but the main characteristics were definitely
fixed. Comte did not conceive that the distant future, could he survive
to experience it, could contain any surprises for him. His theory of
Progress thus differed from the eighteenth century views which vaguely
contemplate an indefinite development and only profess to indicate some
general tendencies. He expressly repudiated this notion of INDEFINITE
progress; the data, he said, justify only the inferen