A chaos is a sorry sight; a chaos of the soul a still sorrier spectacle than a chaos of worlds! Epochs of moral and social crises, even while they bring on and prepare for mankind eras of mighty progress, throw also great and potent intellects into chaos. {308} Under the seduction of a noble ambition, and the delusion of a partial success, they enthusiastically attach themselves to some special subject, some incomplete idea; vain of their shallow and confused systems, or rather of the brilliant coloring in which they invest them, they pretend to explain and regulate man and the world, and yet are nothing more than their superficial and presumptuous observers. Among these "great lost ones of humanity," (I borrow a phrase of their own,) M. Comte was one of the most disinterested and the most sincere. The sincerity and the courage evinced by him in expressing his convictions led him on from inconsequence to inconsequence; in his benighted course he caught glimpses occasionally of grand ideas, and of these he apprehended neither the scope nor the connection: first it was an idea of a science excluding all idea of religion; and then a certain idea of a religion reconciled with and intimately united with the idea of science; turn by turn he gave himself up to the one and to the other with a blind and a daring devotedness. {309} Had he appeared in Greece at the great era of philosophy, or in France in the seventeenth century, in the midst of the great Christian controversy, he would have been taxed with insanity--at the one epoch, not only by Plato but by Aristotle; at the other, not only by Bossuet but by Spinoza. In our days he has been more fortunate: he attached himself passionately to the method of observation of facts, which is the very character of science, and although his observations were superficial, inexact, and incomplete--although he fell into the strangest inconsistencies--the fundamental principle of his system, and the coincidence of his primary ideas with the method and the tendency of the physical sciences, the darling study of our age, have given him more importance and more influence than were really his due. ------------------------------- {310} Fifth Meditation. Pantheism. No two essays at philosophy are more dissimilar--I should indeed say more contradictory--than Pantheism and Positivism. What Positivism declares to be impossible, Pantheism seeks to accomplish; what Positivism forbids man to seek, Pantheism promises to give him. It is the fundamental principle of Positivism to confine the human mind to the finite world, its facts and its laws; Pantheism aspires at a knowledge and a comprehension of Infinity, and of the relations of the finite with Infinity. "I have explained God, God's nature and his attributes," says Spinoza. [Footnote 62] [Footnote 62: Ethics, 1st part; of God: Appendix, vol. i, p. 39. French translation by M. Saisset.] {311}