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The tracing of influences is the most treacherous ground in the history of thought, and we have in the last chapter already so much sinned against the canons of caution in this field that we shall now be brief. Yet the curious course which Comte's influence took is so important for the understanding of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, and the cause of so many still prevailing misconceptions about his role, that a few more words about it are indispensable. In France, as already observed, Comte's immediate influence on thinkers of importance was small. But, as J. S. Mill points out, ``the great treatise of M. Comte was scarcely mentioned in French literature or criticism, when it was already working powerfully on the minds of many British students and thinkers.''16.92 It was this influence on Mill himself and a few other leading English thinkers which became decisive for Comte's effect on European thought.16.93 Mill himself, in the sixth book of his Logic, which deals with the methods of the moral sciences, became little more than an expounder of Comtian doctrine. The philosopher George Lewes and George Eliot are some of the better known names of Comte's English adherents. And nothing could be more characteristic of the tremendous impact of Comte on England than that the same Miss Martineau who in her younger years had been the faithful and most successful popularizer of Ricardo's economics, should become, not only the translator and most skillful condenser of Comte's work, but also one of his most enthusiastic disciples. As important almost as Mill himself for the spreading of positivist views among students of social phenomena was their adoption by the historian H. T. Buckle, although in this case the influence of Comte was reinforced and perhaps outweighed by that of Quetelet.

It was largely through the medium of these English writers that Comtian positivism made its entry into Germany.16.94 Mill's Logic, Buckle's and Lecky's historical works, and later Herbert Spencer, made Comte's ideas familiar to many who were often completely unaware of their source. And although it is perhaps doubtful whether many of the German scholars who in the second half of the nineteenth century professed views closely similar to Comte's had derived them directly from him, there were probably in no other country a greater number of influential men who tried to reform the social sciences on essentially Comtian lines. No other country seems at that time to have been more receptive of new ideas, and positivist thought together with Quetelet's new statistical methods was definitely the fashion of the period and was accepted in Germany with corresponding enthusiasm.16.95 The curious phenomenon that there (and elsewhere) positivist influences should have so readily combined with that of Hegel will require separate investigation.

We have no space here more than briefly to mention the successors who in France at last took up the Comtian tradition. Before we mention the sociologists proper we must at least mention the names of Taine and Renan, both, incidentally, representatives of that curious combination of Comtian and Hegelian thought to which we have just referred. Of the sociologists almost all the best-known ones (with the exception of Tarde), Espinas, Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim, Simiand, stand directly in the Comtian tradition, although in their case, too, this has in part come back to France via Germany and with the modifications which it there experienced.16.96To attempt to trace this later influence of Comte on French thought during the Third Republic would mean writing a history of sociology in the country where for a time it gained the greatest influence. Many of the best minds who devoted themselves to social studies were here attracted by the new science, and it is perhaps not too much to suggest that the peculiar stagnation of French economics during that period is at least partly due to the predominance of the sociological approach to social phenomena.16.97

That Comte's direct influence remained confined to comparatively few, but that through these very few it extended exceedingly far, is even more true of the present generation than it was of earlier ones. There will be few students of the social sciences now who have ever read Comte or know much about him. But the number of those who have absorbed most of the important elements of his system through the intermediation of a few very influential representatives of his tradition, such as Henry Carey and T. Veblen 16.98 in America, J. K. Ingram, W. Ashley and L. T. Hobhouse16.99 in England, and K. Lamprecht16.100 and K. Breysig in Germany, is very large indeed. Why this influence of Comte should so frequently have been much more effective in an indirect manner, those who have attempted to study his work will have no difficulty in understanding.


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Next: Part Three Comte and Up: Sociology: Comte and His Previous: IX   Contents