If  you  read  Mr.  Harrison,  and  if  you  are  also,  as  I  pre-


324  COLLEGE  AND   THE  FUTURE

sume  your  presence  here  indicates,  saturated  with  that
new  wine  of  more  spacious  knowledge  that  has  been  given
the  world  during  the  last  fifty  years,  you  will  have  been
greatly  impressed  by  the  peculiar  limitations  of  the  posi-
tivist  conception  of  the  future.  So  far  as  I  can  gather,
Comte  was,  for  all  practical  purposes,  totally  ignorant  of
that  remoter  past  outside  the  past  that  is  knovm  to  us
by  history;  or  if  he  was  not  totally  ignorant  of  its  exis-
tence, he  was,  and  conscientiously  remained,  ignorant  of
its  relevancy  to  the  history  of  humanity.  In  the  narrow
and  limited  past  he  recognized  men  had  always  been  like
the  men  of  to-day;  in  the  future  he  could  not  imagine
that  they  would  be  anything  more  than  men  like  the  men
of  to-day.  He  perceived,  as  we  all  perceive,  that  the  old
social  order  was  breaking  up,  and  after  a  richly  suggestive
and  incomplete  analysis  of  the  forces  that  were  breaking
it  up  he  set  himself  to  plan  a  new  static  social  order  to
replace  it.  If  you  will  read  Comte,  or,  what  is  much
easier  and  pleasanter,  if  you  will  read  Mr.  Frederic  Har-
rison, you  will  find  this  conception  constantly  apparent —
that  there  was  once  a  stable  condition  of  society  with
humanity,  so  to  speak,  sitting  down  in  an  orderly  and
respectable  manner;  that  humanity  has  been  stirred  up
and  is  on  the  move,  and  that  finally  it  will  sit  down  again
on  a  higher  plane,  and  for  good  and  all,  cultured  and
happy,  in  the  reorganized  positivist  state.  And  since  he
could  see  nothing  beyond  man  in  the  future,  there,  in  that
millennial  fashion,  Comte  had  to  end.  Since  he  could  im-
agine nothing  higher  than  man,  he  had  to  assert  that
humanity,  and  particularly  the  future  of  humanity,  was
the  highest  of  all  conceivable  things.
