the serious consequences that may be produced by even, temporary errors
on such subjects, render it necessary in the case of ethics and
politics, still more than of mathematics and physics, that whatever
legal liberty may exist of questioning and discussing, the opinions of
mankind should really be formed for them by an exceedingly small number
of minds of the highest class, trained to the task by the most thorough
and laborious mental preparation: and that the questioning of their
conclusions by any one, not of an equivalent grade of intellect and
instruction, should be accounted equally presumptuous, and more
blamable, than the attempts occasionally made by sciolists to refute the
Newtonian astronomy. All this is, in a sense, true: but we confess our
sympathy with those who feel towards it like the man in the story, who
being asked whether he admitted that six and five make eleven, refused
to give an answer until he knew what use was to be made of it. The
doctrine is one of a class of truths which, unless completed by other
truths, are so liable to perversion, that we may fairly decline to take
notice of them except in connexion with some definite application. In
justice to M. Comte it should be said that he does not wish this
intellectual dominion to be exercised over an ignorant people. Par from
him is the thought of promoting the allegiance of the mass to scientific
authority by withholding from them scientific knowledge. He holds it the
duty of society to bestow on every one who grows up to manhood or
womanhood as complete a course of instruction in every department of
science, from mathematics to sociology, as can possibly be made general:
and his ideas of what is possible in that respect are carried to a
length to which few are prepared to follow him. There is something
startling, though, when closely looked into, not Utopian or chimerical,
in the amount of positive knowledge of the most varied kind which he
believes may, by good methods of teaching, be made the common
inheritance of all persons with ordinary faculties who are born into the