which does not tend to the good of mankind. It is precisely on a level
with any idle amusement, and should be condemned as waste of time, if
carried beyond the limit within which amusement is permissible. And
whoever devotes powers of thought which could render to Humanity
services it urgently needs, to speculations and studies which it could
dispense with, is liable to the discredit attaching to a well-grounded
suspicion of caring little for Humanity. But who can affirm positively
of any speculations, guided by right scientific methods, on subjects
really accessible to the human faculties, that they are incapable of
being of any use? Nobody knows what knowledge will prove to be of use,
and what is destined to be useless. The most that can be said is that
some kinds are of more certain, and above all, of more present utility
than others. How often the most important practical results have been
the remote consequence of studies which no one would have expected to
lead to them! Could the mathematicians, who, in the schools of
Alexandria, investigated the properties of the ellipse, have foreseen
that nearly two thousand years afterwards their speculations would
explain the solar system, and a little later would enable ships safely
to circumnavigate the earth? Even in M. Comte's opinion, it is well for
mankind that, in those early days, knowledge was thought worth pursuing
for its own sake. Nor has the "foundation of Positivism," we imagine, so
far changed the conditions of human existence, that it should now be
criminal to acquire, by observation and reasoning, a knowledge of the
facts of the universe, leaving to posterity to find a use for it. Even
in the last two or three years, has not the discovery of new metals,
which may prove important even in the practical arts, arisen from one of
the investigations which M. Comte most unequivocally condemns as idle,
the research into the internal constitution of the sun? How few,
moreover, of the discoveries which have changed the face of the world,
either were or could have been arrived at by investigations aiming