state in the preceding state and the ancients did not ignore observation,
and there is always something of the preceding state in the succeeding
state and we have still theological and metaphysical habits of mind,
theological and metaphysical "residues," and perhaps it will be always
thus; but for theology to decline before metaphysics and metaphysics before
science is progress.

Over and above this, Comte in the last portion of his life--as if to prove
his doctrine of residues and to furnish an example--founded a sort of
religion, a pseudo-religion, the religion of humanity. Humanity must be
worshipped in its slow ascent towards intellectual and moral perfection
(and, in consequence, we should specially worship humanity to come; but
Comte might reply that humanity past and present is venerable because it
bears in its womb the humanity of the future). The worship of this new
religion is the commemoration and veneration of the dead. These last
conceptions, fruits of the sensibility and of the imagination of Auguste
Comte, have no relation with the basis of his doctrine.

RENOUVIER.--After him, by a vigorous reaction, Renouvier restored
the philosophy of Kant, depriving it of its too symmetrical, too minutely
systematic, too scholastic character and bringing it nearer to facts; from
him was to come the doctrine already mentioned, "pragmatism," which
measures the truth of every idea by the moral consequence that it contains.

TAINE.--Very different and attaching himself to the general ideas of
Comte, Hippolyte Taine believed only in what has been observed,
experimented, and demonstrated; but being also as familiar with Hegel as
with Comte, with Spencer as with Condillac, he never doubted that the need
of going beyond and escaping from oneself was also a fact, a human fact
eternal among humanity, and of this fact he took account as of a fact