It is a pleasure to perceive Mr. Huxley open his clear little essay with what we may hold, perhaps, to be the manly and orthodox view of the character and products of the French writer, Auguste Comte. “In applying the name of ‘the new philosophy’ to that estimate of the limits of philosophical inquiry which he” (Professor Huxley), “in common with many other men of science, holds to be just,” the Archbishop of York confounds, it seems, this new philosophy with the Positive philosophy of M. Comte; and thereat Mr. Huxley expresses himself as greatly astonished. Some of us, for our parts, may be inclined at first to feel astonished at Mr. Huxley’s astonishment; for the school to which, at least on the philosophical side, Mr. Huxley seems to belong, is even notorious for its prostration before Auguste Comte, whom, especially, so far as method and systematization are concerned, it regards as the greatest intellect since Bacon. For such, as it was the opinion of Mr. Buckle, is understood to be the opinion also of Messrs. Grote, Bain, and Mill. In fact, we may say that such is commonly and currently considered the characteristic and distinctive opinion of that whole perverted or inverted reaction which has been called the _Revulsion_. That is to say, to give this word a moment’s explanation, that the Voltaires and Humes and Gibbons having long enjoyed an immunity of sneer at man’s blind pride and wretched superstition—at _his_ silly non-natural honor and _her_ silly non-natural virtue—a reaction had set in, exulting in poetry, in the splendor of nature, the nobleness of man, and the purity of woman, from which reaction again we have, almost within the last decennium, been revulsively, as it were, called back,—shall we say by some “bolder” spirits—the Buckles, the Mills, &c.?—to the old illumination or enlightenment of a hundred years ago, in regard to the weakness and stupidity of man’s pretensions over the animality and materiality that limit him. Of this revulsion, then, as said, a main feature, especially in England, has been prostration before the vast bulk of Comte; and so it was that Mr. Huxley’s protest in this reference, considering the philosophy he professed, had that in it to surprise at first. But if there was surprise, there was also pleasure; for Mr. Huxley’s estimate of Comte is undoubtedly the right one. “So far as I am concerned,” he says, “the most reverend prelate” (the Archbishop of York) “might dialectically hew M. Comte in pieces as a modern Agag, and I should not attempt to stay his hand; for, so far as my study of what specially characterizes the Positive philosophy has led me, I find therein little or nothing of any scientific value, and a great deal which is as thoroughly antagonistic to the very essence of science as anything in ultramontane Catholicism.” “It was enough,” he says again, “to make David Hume turn in his grave, that here, almost within earshot of his house, an instructed audience should have listened without a