Such is the scheme of Comte. The very breadth of it possesses an attraction; and if viewed merely as a logic of the sciences, it may justly command attention. Many of the analyses which he supplies of the methods and history of science are masterly; and his generalisations, even when hasty, are fertile in suggestion. He was a most original and powerful thinker; scientific rather than artistic. But his philosophy, viewed as a whole, is a grand system of materialism which is silent about God, spirit, personal immortality; diametrically opposed to Christianity, in that it makes man’s social duty higher than his individual, science the only revelation, demonstration the only authority, nature’s laws the only providence, and obedience to them the only piety; and destroys Christianity by destroying the possibility of its proof. In later life this distinguished man, feeling the unutterable yearnings of the religious sentiment, and the necessity that his philosophy should afford satisfaction to them, invented the system of religion developed in his catechism;(881) in which, in a manner analogous to that employed by Feuerbach or St. Simon, he regarded the collective humanity as the true God, the proper object of worship and reverence; and marked out a church and a cult, the caricature of the Catholic church, in which the world’s heroes should receive canonization. The probability of mental derangement palliates the absurdity of this system in the originator, but throws the burden of responsibility from the master upon those who are insane enough to adopt it. We have traced two of the schools which flourished in the second quarter of this century. Another remains, which has incurred from opponents the charge of pantheism, viz. the idealist school, commonly called the Eclectic; (44) which was especially dominant in France, and in the university of Paris, during the rule of the Orleans dynasty. Viewed as a philosophy it is a very noble one. Implying, as its name denotes, an attempt to reap the harvest of the industry of all preceding schools of philosophy, it was the chief means of restoring intellectual and spiritual belief to France, and of creating the great movement of historical study which marks that period of French literature. Commencing with a reaction against the materialist and sensationalist school, it sought, by imitating the mode by which Reid had refuted the philosophical scepticism of Hume, to find a method for restoring belief in spiritual realities; and afterwards, when its chief leader Cousin(882) had been exiled to Germany, he brought back an acquaintance with the successive speculative schools which existed there.