directly at the object! Would the mariner's compass ever have been found
by direct efforts for the improvement of navigation? Should we have
reached the electric telegraph by any amount of striving for a means of
instantaneous communication, if Franklin had not identified electricity
with lightning, and Ampère with magnetism? The most apparently
insignificant archaeological or geological fact, is often found to throw
a light on human history, which M. Comte, the basis of whose social
philosophy is history, should be the last person to disparage. The
direction of the entrance to the three great Pyramids of Ghizeh, by
showing the position of the circumpolar stars at the time when they were
built, is the best evidence we even now have of the immense antiquity of
Egyptian civilization.[24] The one point on which M. Comte's doctrine
has some colour of reason, is the case of sidereal astronomy: so little
knowledge of it being really accessible to us, and the connexion of that
little with any terrestrial interests being, according to all our means
of judgment, infinitesimal. It is certainly difficult to imagine how any
considerable benefit to humanity can be derived from a knowledge of the
motions of the double stars: should these ever become important to us it
will be in so prodigiously remote an age, that we can afford to remain
ignorant of them until, at least, all our moral, political, and social
difficulties have been settled. Yet the discovery that gravitation
extends even to those remote regions, gives some additional strength to
the conviction of the universality of natural laws; and the habitual
meditation on such vast objects and distances is not without an
aesthetic usefulness, by kindling and exalting the imagination, the
worth of which in itself, and even its re-action on the intellect, M.
Comte is quite capable of appreciating. He would reply, however, that
there are better means of accomplishing these purposes. In the same
spirit he condemns the study even of the solar system, when extended to
any planets but those which are visible to the naked eye, and which