We are afraid, notwithstanding all his protestations, M. Comte will be simply classed amongst the Destructives, so little applicable to the generality of minds is that mode of thought, to establish which (and it is for this we blame him) he calls, and so prematurely, for so great sacrifices.

The fifth volume—­the most remarkable, we think, of the whole—­contains that historical survey which has been more than once alluded to in the foregoing extracts.  This volume alone would make the fortune of any expert Parisian scribe who knew how to select from its rich store of original materials, who had skill to arrange and expound, and, above all, had the dexterity to adopt somewhat more ingeniously than M. Comte has done, his abstract statements to our reminiscences of historical facts.  Full of his own generalities, he is apt to forget the concrete matter of the annalist.  Indeed, it is a peculiarity running through the volume, that generalizations, in themselves of a valuable character, are shown to disadvantage by an unskilful alliance with history.

We will make one quotation from this portion of the work, and then we must leave M. Comte.  In reviewing the theological progress of mankind, he signalizes three epochs, that of Fetishism, of Polytheism, and of Monotheism.  Our extract shall relate to the first of these, to that primitive state of religion, or idolatry, in which things themselves were worshipped; the human being transferring to them immediately a life, or power, somewhat analogous to its own.

“Exclusively habituated, for so long a time, to a theology eminently metaphysic, we must feel at present greatly embarrassed in our attempt to comprehend this gross primitive mode of thought.  It is thus that fetishism has often been confounded with polytheism, when to the latter has been applied the common expression of idolatry, which strictly relates to the former only; since the priests of Jupiter or Minerva would, no doubt, have as justly repelled the vulgar reproach of worshipping images, as do the Catholic doctors of the present day a like unjust accusation of the Protestants.  But though we are happily sufficiently remote from fetishism to find a difficulty in conceiving it, yet each one of us has but to retrace his own mental history, to detect the essential characters of this initial state.  Nay, even eminent thinkers of the present day, when they allow themselves to be involuntarily ensnared (under the influence, but partially rectified, of a vicious education) to attempt to penetrate the mystery of the essential production of any phenomenon whose laws are not familiar to them, they are in a condition personally to exemplify this invariable instinctive tendency to trace the generation of unknown effects to a cause analogous to life, which is no other, strictly speaking, than the principle of fetishism....

“Theologic philosophy, thoroughly investigated, has always necessarily for its