co-ordinated, if we have found any errors they are in things which do
not affect his main conclusions. The chain of causation by which he
connects the spiritual and temporal life of each era with one another
and with the entire series, will be found, we think, in all essentials,
irrefragable. When local or temporary disturbing causes have to be taken
into the account as modifying the general movement, criticism has more
to say. But this will only become important when the attempt is made to
write the history or delineate the character of some given society on M.
Comte's principles.

Such doubtful statements, or misappreciations of states of society, as
we have remarked, are confined to cases which stand more or less apart
from the principal line of development of the progressive societies. For
instance, he makes greatly too much of what, with many other Continental
thinkers, he calls the Theocratic state. He regards this as a natural,
and at one time almost an universal, stage of social progress, though
admitting that it either never existed or speedily ceased in the two
ancient nations to which mankind are chiefly indebted for being
permanently progressive. We hold it doubtful if there ever existed what
M. Comte means by a theocracy. There was indeed no lack of societies in
which, the civil and penal law being supposed to have been divinely
revealed, the priests were its authorized interpreters. But this is the
case even in Mussulman countries, the extreme opposite of theocracy. By
a theocracy we understand to be meant, and we understand M. Comte to
mean, a society founded on caste, and in which the speculative,
necessarily identical with the priestly caste, has the temporal
government in its hands or under its control. We believe that no such
state of things ever existed in the societies commonly cited as
theocratic. There is no reason to think that in any of them, the king,
or chief of the government, was ever, unless by occasional usurpation,
a member of the priestly caste.[18] It was not so in Israel, even in the
time of the Judges; Jephtha, for example, was a Gileadite, of the tribe
of Manasseh, and a military captain, as all governors in such an age and
country needed to be. Priestly rulers only present themselves in two
anomalous cases, of which next to nothing is known: the Mikados of Japan
and the Grand Lamas of Thibet: in neither of which instances was the
general constitution of society one of caste, and in