en, having
had, for the first time, a full opportunity of developing its
tendencies, and showing what it could not do, it failed so conspicuously
as to determine a partial reaction to the doctrines of feudalism and
Catholicism. Between these and the political metaphysics (meta-politics
as Coleridge called it) of the Revolution, society has since oscillated;
raising up in the process a hybrid intermediate party, termed
Conservative, or the party of Order, which has no doctrines of its own,
but attempts to hold the scales even between the two others, borrowing
alternately the arguments of each, to use as weapons against whichever
of the two seems at the moment most likely to prevail.

Such, reduced to a very condensed form, is M. Comte's version of the
state of European opinion on politics and society. An Englishman's
criticism would be, that it describes well enough the general division
of political opinion in France and the countries which follow her lead,
but not in England, or the communities of English origin: in all of
which, divine right died out with the Jacobites, and the law of nature
and natural rights have never been favourites even with the extreme
popular party, who preferred to rest their claims on the historical
traditions of their own country, and on maxims drawn from its law books,
and since they outgrew this standard, almost always base them on general
expediency. In England, the preference of one form of government to
another seldom turns on anything but the practical consequences which it
produces, or which are expected from it. M. Comte can point to little of
the nature of metaphysics in English politics, except "la metaphysique
constitutionnelle," a name he chooses to give to the conventional
fiction by which the occupant of the throne is supposed to be the source
from whence all power emanates, while nothing can be further from the
belief or intention of anybody than that such should really be the case.
Apart from this, which is a matter of forms and words, and has no
connexion with any belief except belief in the proprieties, the severest
criticism can find nothing either worse or better, in the modes of
thinking either of our conservative or of our liberal party, than a
particularly shallow and flimsy kind of positivism. The working classes
indeed, or some portion of them, perhaps still rest their claim to
universal suffrage on abstract right, in addition to more substantial
reasons, and thus far