ce of CONTINUOUS
progress, which is a different thing.

A second point in which Comte in his view of Progress differed from
the French philosophers of the preceding age is this. Condorcet and his
predecessors regarded it exclusively from the eudaemonic point of view.
The goal of Progress for them was the attainment of human felicity. With
felicity Comte is hardly more concerned than Hegel. The establishment
of a fuller harmony between men and their environment in the third stage
will no doubt mean happiness. But this consideration lies outside the
theory, and to introduce it would only intrude an unscientific
element into the analysis. The course of development is determined
by intellectual ideas, and he treats these as independent of, and
indifferent to, eudaemonic motives.

A third point to be noted is the authoritarian character of the regime
of the future. Comte's ideal state would be as ill to live in for any
unfortunate being who values personal liberty as a theocracy or any
socialistic Utopia. He had as little sympathy with liberty as Plato
or as Bossuet, and less than the eighteenth century philosophers. This
feature, common to Comte and the Saint-Simonians, was partly due to the
reaction against the Revolution, but it also resulted from the logic of
the man of science. If sociological laws are positively established as
certainly as the law of gravitation, no room is left for opinion; right
social conduct is definitely fixed; the proper functions of every member
of society admit of no question; therefore the claim to liberty is
perverse and irrational. It is the same argument which some modern
exponents of Eugenics use to advocate a state tyranny in the matter of
human breeding.

When Comte was writing, the progressive movement in Europe was towards
increase of liberty in all its forms, national, civic, political, and
economical. On one hand there was the agitation for the release of
oppressed nationalities, on the other the growth of liberalism in
England and France. The aim of the liberalism of that period was to
restrict the functions of government; its spirit was distrust of the
state. As a political theory it was defective, as modern Liberals
acknowledge, but it was an important expression of the feeling that
the interests of society are best furthered by the free interplay of
individual actions and aims. It thus implicitly contained or pointed to
a theory of Progress sharply opposed to Comte's: that the