effectively to bear on conduct.

M. Comte is equally free from the error of considering any practical
rule or doctrine that can be laid down in politics as universal and
absolute. All political truth he deems strictly relative, implying as
its correlative a given state or situation of society. This conviction
is now common to him with all thinkers who are on a level with the age,
and comes so naturally to any intelligent reader of history, that the
only wonder is how men could have been prevented from reaching it
sooner. It marks one of the principal differences between the political
philosophy of the present time and that of the past; but M. Comte
adopted it when the opposite mode of thinking was still general, and
there are few thinkers to whom the principle owes more in the way of
comment and illustration.

Again, while he sets forth the historical succession of systems of
belief and forms of political society, and places in the strongest light
those imperfections in each which make it impossible that any of them
should be final, this does not make him for a moment unjust to the men
or the opinions of the past. He accords with generous recognition the
gratitude due to all who, with whatever imperfections of doctrine or
even of conduct, contributed materially to the work of human
improvement. In all past modes of thought and forms of society he
acknowledged a useful, in many a necessary, office, in carrying mankind
through one stage of improvement into a higher. The theological spirit
in its successive forms, the metaphysical in its principal varieties,
are honoured by him for the services they rendered in bringing mankind
out of pristine savagery into a state in which more advanced modes of
belief became possible. His list of heroes and benefactors of mankind
includes, not only every important name in the scientific movement, from