Adolphe d' Assier

POSTHUMOUS HUMANITY

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION AND PLAN.

THE title of this essay will, perhaps, seem to certain
persons in conflict with the philosophical opinions
which I have all my life professed, as well as with
the great school () towards which the stndy of the
sciences had led me even before I hawd beard the
word of the master. (2) Let such persons be
reassured: the contradiction is but imaginary.
Besides the Elements of Analytical Geometry,
which his biographers omit to mention,
accepted of Auguste Comte's writings only his
Course of Positive Philosophy. And, furthermore,
I have had to reject certain passages wherein were
already revealed the familiar tendencies of the
" High-priest of Humanity"-tendencies to be
regretted in a work which will take rank among
the chief ones of this age, and which I regard as the
highest expression that philosophie thought has
ever attained. This system of expurgation naturally
traced my own programme, and the ideas I shall
now set forth are as far removed from the dreams of
mysticism as from the hallucinations of the spiritists.… (mehr)