In this way the right is taken from no one. The use of it is simply intrusted by those who are incompetent to the competent ones. This intrusting, freely accepted by all, lasts as long as the conditions which made it necessary. No moral order could be compatible with the “wandering liberty of minds at the present time,” if it were to persist indefinitely. It is not possible that any man, whether he be competent or not, should every day call into discussion the very bases of society. “Systematic tolerance cannot exist, and has never really existed, except on the subject of opinions which are regarded as indifferent or as doubtful.”[320] Such is the meaning of the celebrated passages on liberty of conscience with which Comte has so often been reproached. He had written it in 1822, and quoted it himself in the fourth volume of the _Cours de philosophie positive_,[321] never suspecting that anything could be said against it. “There is no liberty of conscience in astronomy, in physics, in chemistry, in physiology, in the sense that everyone would deem it absurd not to take on trust the principles established in these sciences by competent men. If it is otherwise in politics, it is because the old principles have fallen, and, as the new ones are not yet formed, there are, properly speaking, in this interval no established principles.” It is then in no way a question of imposing beliefs upon men of which they are not to judge, by a kind of spiritual despotism. Comte merely wishes to extend to politics, _considered as a positive science_, what is admitted in the other sciences by common consent. V. Without much trouble, it is easy to see whence originate the essential features of this philosophy of history. In so far as it represents the development of humanity as subject to a law of evolution, which causes it to go through a succession of phases whose order is rationally determined, in a word as _progress_, the leading-idea is due to Comte’s “spiritual father,” to Condorcet.