r from being assured that the progress of humanity, under the
operation of his grand law of development, has been uniform and
invariable. The majority of the human race, the vast populations of
India, China, and Japan, have remained stationary; they are still in the
Theological stage, and consequently furnish no evidence in support of
his theory. For this reason he confines himself to the "elite" or
advance-guard of humanity, and in this way makes the history of humanity
a very "abstract history" indeed. Starting with Greece as the
representative of ancient civilization, passing thence to Roman
civilization, and onward to Western Europe, he attempts to show that the
actual progress of humanity has been, on the whole, in conformity with
his law. To secure, however, even this semblance of harmony between the
facts of history and his hypothetical law, he has to treat the facts
very much as Procrustes treated his victims,--he must stretch some, and
mutilate others, so as to make their forms fit the iron bed. The natural
organization of European civilization is distorted and torn asunder. "As
the third or positive stage had accomplished its advent in his own
person, it was necessary to find the metaphysical period just before;
and so the whole life of the Reformed Christianity, in embryo and in
manifest existence, is stripped of its garb of _faith_, and turned out
of view as a naked metaphysical phenomenon. But metaphysics, again, have
to be ushered in by theology; and of the three stages of theology
Monotheism is the last, necessarily following on Polytheism, as that,
again, on Fetichism. There is nothing for it, therefore, but to let the
mediaeval Catholic Christianity stand as the world's first monotheism,
and to treat it as the legitimate offspring and necessary development of
the Greek and Roman polytheism. This, accordingly, Comte actually does.
Protestantism he illegitimates, and outlaws from religion altogether,
and the genuine Christianity he fathers upon the faith of Homer and the
Scipios! Once or twice, indeed, it seems to cross him that there was
such a people as the Hebrews, and that they were not the polytheists
they ought to have been. He sees the fact, but pushes it out of his way
with the remark that the Jewish monotheism was 'premature.'"[42]

[Footnote 42: Martineau's Essays, pp. 61, 62.]

The signal defect of Comte's historical survey, however, is, that it
furnishes no evidence of the general prevalence o