Part 22

I am glad to observe that Mr. Congreve, in the criticism with which he has favoured me in the number of the Fortnightly Review for April 1869, does not venture to challenge the justice of the claim I make for Hume. He merely suggests that I have been wanting in candour in not mentioning Comte's high opinion of Hume. After mature reflection I am unable to discern my fault. If I had suggested that Comte had borrowed from Hume without acknowledgment; or if, instead of trying to express my own sense of Hume's merits with the modesty which becomes a writer who has no authority in matters of philosophy, I had affirmed that no one had properly appreciated him, Mr. Congreve's remarks would apply: but as I did neither of these things, they appear to me to be irrelevant, if not unjustifiable. And even had it occurred to me to quote M. Comte's expressions about Hume, I do not know that I should have cited them, inasmuch as, on his own showing, M. Comte occasionally speaks very decidedly touching writers of whose works he has not read a line. Thus, in Tome VI. of the "Philosophie Positive," p. 619, M. Comte writes: "Le plus grand des metaphysiciens modernes, l'illustre Kant, a noblement merite une eternelle admiration en tentant, le premier, d'echapper directement a l'absolu philosophique par sa celebre conception de la double realite, a la fois objective et subjective, qui indique un si juste sentiment de la saine philosophie."

But in the "Preface Personnelle" in the same volume, p. 35, M. Comte tells us:--"Je n'ai jamais lu, en aucune langue, ni Vico, ni Kant, ni Herder, ni Hegel, &c.; je ne connais leurs divers ouvrages que d'apres quelques relations indirectes et certains extraits fort insuffisants."

Who knows but that the "&c." may include Hume? And in that case what is the value of M. Comte's praise of him?

Now and always I quote the second edition, by Littre.

"Philosophie Positive," ii. p. 440.

"Le brillant mais superficiel Cuvier."--Philosophie Positive, vi. p. 383.

"Philosophie Positive," iii. p. 369.

Ibid. p. 387.

Hear the late Dr. Whewell, who calls Comte "a shallow pretender," so far as all the modern sciences, except astronomy, are concerned; and tells us that "his pretensions to discoveries are, as Sir John Herschel has shown, absurdly fallacious."--"Comte and Positivism," Macmillan's Magazine, March 1866.

"Philosophie Positive," i. pp. 8, 9.

"Philosophie Positive," iii. p. 188.

The word "positive" is in every way objectionable. In one sense it suggests that mental quality which was undoubtedly largely developed in M. Comte, but can best be dispensed with in a philosopher; in another, it is unfortunate in its application to a system which starts with enormous negations; in its third, and specially philosophical sense, as implying a system of thought which assumes nothing beyond the content of observed facts, it implies that which never did exist, and never will.

"Philosophie Positive," i. p. 56.

"Philosophie Positive," i. p. 99.

Ibid., i. p. 77.

"Philosophie Positive," i. p. 78.

Loc. cit., Preface Speciale, pp. i. ii.

Mr. Congreve leaves out these important words, which show that I refer to the spirit, and not to the details of science.

IX.

ON A PIECE OF CHALK.

A LECTURE TO WORKING MEN.

If a well were to be sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as "chalk."

Not only here, but over the whole county of Norfolk, the well-sinker might carry his shaft down many hundred feet without coming to the end of the chalk; and, on the sea-coast, where the waves have pared away the face of the land which breasts them, the scarped faces of the high cliffs are often wholly formed of the same material. Northward, the chalk may be followed as far as Yorkshire; on the south coast it appears abruptly in the picturesque western bays of Dorset, and breaks into the Needles of the Isle of Wight; while on the shores of Kent it supplies that long line of white cliffs to which England owes her name of Albion.

Were the thin soil which covers it all washed away, a curved band of white chalk, here broader, and there narrower, might be followed diagonally across England from Lulworth in Dorset, to Flamborough Head in Yorkshire--a distance of over 280 miles as the crow flies.

From this band to the North Sea, on the east, and the Channel, on the south, the chalk is largely hidden by other deposits; but, except in the Weald of Kent and Sussex, it enters into the very foundation of all the south-eastern counties.

Attaining, as it does in some places, a thickness of more than a thousand feet, the English chalk must be admitted to be a mass of considerable magnitude. Nevertheless, it covers but an insignificant portion of the whole area occupied by the chalk formation of the globe, which has precisely the same general characters as ours, and is found in detached patches, some less, and others more extensive, than the English.

Chalk occurs in north-west Ireland; it stretches over a large part of France,--the chalk which underlies Paris being, in fact, a continuation of that of the London basin; it runs through Denmark and Central Europe, and extends southward to North Africa; while, eastward, it appears in the Crimea and in Syria, and may be traced as far as the shores of the Sea of Aral, in Central Asia.

If all the points at which true chalk occurs were circumscribed, they would lie within an irregular oval about 3,000 miles in long diameter--the area of which would be as great as that of Europe, and would many times exceed that of the largest existing inland sea--the Mediterranean.