realisation of
the fullest possible measure of individual liberty is the condition
of ensuring the maximum of energy and effectiveness in improving our
environment, and therefore the condition of attaining public felicity.
Right or wrong, this theory reckons with fundamental facts of human
nature which Comte ignored.

7.

Comte spent the later years of his life in composing another huge work,
on social reorganisation. It included a new religion, in which Humanity
was the object of worship, but made no other important addition to the
speculations of his earlier manhood, though he developed them further.

The Course of Positive Philosophy was not a book that took the public by
storm. We are told by a competent student of social theories in France
that the author's name was little known in his own country till about
1855, when his greatness began to win recognition, and his influence to
operate. [Footnote: Weill, Hist. du mouvement social, p. 21.] Even then
his work can hardly have been widely read. But through men like Littre
and Taine, whose conceptions of history were moulded by his teaching,
and men like Mill, whom he stimulated, as well as through the disciples
who adopted Positivism as a religion, his leading principles, detached
from his system, became current in the world of speculation.

[Footnote: The influence of Comte. The manner in which ideas filter
through, as it were, underground and emerge oblivious of their source
is illustrated by the German historian Lamprecht's theory of historical
development. He surveyed the history of a people as a series of what
he called typical periods, each of which is marked by a collective
psychical character expressing itself in every department of life. He
named this a diapason. Lamprecht had never read Comte, and he imagined
that this principle, on which he based his kulturhistorische Methode,
was original. But his psychical diapason is the psychical consensus of
Comte, whose system, as we have seen, depended on the proposition that
a given social organisation corresponds in a definite way to the
contemporary stage of mental development; and Comte had derived the
principle from Saint-Simon. Cf. his pamphlet Die kulturhistorische
Methode (1900). The succession of "typical period" was worked out for
Germany in his History of the German People.]

He laid the foundations of sociology, convincing many minds that the
history of civilisation is subject to general laws, or, i