another. What he at first means by it, is that as civilization advances,
the sum of our possessions, physical and intellectual, is due in a
decreasing proportion to ourselves, and in an increasing one to our
progenitors. The use he makes of it is, that we should submit ourselves
more and more implicitly to the authority of previous generations, and
suffer ourselves less and less to doubt their judgment, or test by our
own reason the grounds of their opinions. The unwillingness of the human
intellect and conscience, in their present state of "anarchy," to sign
their own abdication, lie calls "the insurrection of the living against
the dead." To this complexion has Positive Philosophy come at last!

Worse, however, remains to be told. M. Comte selects a hundred volumes
of science, philosophy, poetry, history, and general knowledge, which he
deems a sufficient library for every positivist, even of the theoretic
order, and actually proposes a systematic holocaust of books in
general--it would almost seem of all books except these. Even that to
which he shows most indulgence, poetry, except the very best, is to
undergo a similar fate, with the reservation of select passages, on the
ground that, poetry being intended to cultivate our instinct of ideal
perfection, any kind of it that is less than the best is worse than
none. This imitation of the error, we will call it the crime, of the
early Christians--and in an exaggerated form, for even they destroyed
only those writings of pagans or heretics which were directed against
themselves--is the one thing in M. Comte's projects which merits real
indignation. When once M. Comte has decided, all evidence on the other
side, nay, the very historical evidence on which he grounded his
decision, had better perish. When mankind have enlisted under his
banner, they must burn their ships. There is, though in a less offensive
form, the same overweening presumption in a suggestion he makes, that
all species of animals and plants which are useless to man should be