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III

More significant, perhaps, than any list of the names of those who have noticed the similarities is the long series of social thinkers of the last hundred years who testify to this kinship in a different and more effective manner. Indeed, still more surprising than the neglect of the similarities in the two original doctrines is the similar failure to notice the surprising number of leading figures who succeeded in combining in their own thought ideas derived from Hegel and Comte. Again, I can quote only a few of the names which belong here.17.16 But if I tell you that the list includes Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and probably Ludwig Feuerbach in Germany, Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, and Emile Durkheim in France, Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy--and I should probably add Benedetto Croce and John Dewey from the living--you will begin to see how far this influence reaches. When later I shall have occasion to show how we can trace to the same source such widespread intellectual movements as that peculiarly unhistorical approach to history which paradoxically is called historicism, much of what has been known as sociology during the last hundred years, and especially its most fashionable and most ambitious branch, the sociology of knowledge, you will perhaps understand the importance which I attach to this combined influence.

Before addressing myself to my main task, I must go through one more preliminary: I ought, in fairness, to acquaint you with a serious deficiency with which I approach it. So far as Comte is concerned, it is true that I strongly disagree with most of his views. But this disagreement is still of a kind which leaves room for profitable discussion because there exists at least some common basis. If it is true that criticism is worthwhile only when one approaches one's object with at least this degree of sympathy, I am afraid I cannot claim this qualification with regard to Hegel. Concerning him I have always felt, not only what his greatest British admirer said, that his philosophy was ``a scrutiny of thought so profound that it was for the most part unintelligible,''17.17 but also what John Stuart Mill experienced, who ``found by actual experience ...that conversancy with him tends to deprave one's intellect.''17.18 I ought to warn you, therefore, that I do not pretend to understand Hegel. But, fortunately for my task, a comprehension of his system as a whole is not necessary. I think I know well enough those parts of his doctrines which have, or are supposed to have, influenced the development of the social sciences. Indeed, they are so well known that my task will consist largely in showing that many of the developments commonly ascribed to Hegel's influence might well in fact be due to Comte's. It seems to me that it is largely the support which the Hegelian tradition received from this quarter that accounts for the otherwise inexplicable fact that in the social sciences Hegelian thought and language continued to rule long after, in the other fields of science, the rule of his philosophy had been superseded by that of exact science.


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Next: IV Up: Comte and Hegel Previous: II   Contents