ry of the race,--religious, aesthetic, industrial, metaphysical,
social? We cannot, with M. Cousin, undertake to solve the
problem,--Given three terms, the finite, the infinite, and the relation
between the two, what will be the development of human thought, first,
in the experience of individuals, and, secondly, in the history of
society?[72] All such problems are too high for us. The history of the
human race must be ascertained from the authentic records and extant
monuments of the past, not constructed by theories, or divined by _a
priori_ speculations.

But M. Comte does appeal, in the second instance, to history in
confirmation of his views. He is far from affirming, however, that the
progress of the race, under the operation of his great law of
development, has been either uniform or invariable; on the contrary, he
admits, with regard to India, China, and other nations, comprising
probably the majority of mankind, whose state, intellectually and
socially, has been stationary for ages, that they afford little or no
evidence in support of his theory; and for this, among other reasons, he
confines himself to the history of what he calls the _elite_, or
advanced guard of humanity, and in this way makes it a very "_abstract_"
history indeed![73] Beginning with Greece, as the representative of
ancient civilization, and surveying the history of the Roman empire, and
of its successors in Western Europe, he endeavors to show that the
actual progress of humanity has been, on the whole, in conformity with
his general law. He gives no historical evidence, however, of the
prevalence of Fetishism in primitive times; _that_ is an inference
merely, depending partly on his theory of cerebral organization, and
partly on the assumption that in the savage state, which is
gratuitously supposed to have been the primitive condition of man,
there must have been a tendency to regard every object, natural or
artificial, as endowed with life and intelligence. Polytheism, again, he
conceives to have been a step in advance, an improvement on the
preexisting state of things, instead of being, as it really was, a
declension from a purer and better faith, an aberration from the light
of Nature, not less than from the lessons of Revelation. He conceives
Monotheism, whether as taught, to the Jews by Moses, or to the world at
large by Christ and his apostles, to have been the natural product of
man's unaided intelligence; and he assumes this, with