The detail of the social organization which positive science will impose need not concern us here. So far as economic life is concerned, it still resembles in many respects the earlier Saint-Simonian plans, particularly insofar as the leading role of the bankers in guiding industrial activity is concerned.16.77 But he dissents from the later outright socialism of the Saint-Simonians. Private property is not to be abolished, but the rich become the ``necessary depositaries of the public capitals''16.78 and the owning of property is a social function.16.79 This is not the only point in which Comte's system resembles the later authoritarian socialism which we associate with Prussia rather than socialism as we used to know it. In fact, in some passages this resemblance to Prussian socialism, even down to the very words used, is really amazing. Thus when he argues that in the future society the ``immoral'' concept of individual rights will disappear and there will be only duties,16.80 or that in the new society there will be no private persons but only state functionaries of various units and grades,16.81 and that in consequence the most humble occupation will be ennobled by its incorporation into the official hierarchy just as the most obscure soldier has his dignity as a result of the solidarity of the military organism,16.82 or finally when, in the concluding section of the first sketch of the future order, he discovers a ``special disposition toward command in some and toward obedience in others'' and assures us that in our innermost heart we all know ``how sweet it is to obey,''16.83 we might match almost every sentence with identical statements of recent German theoreticians who laid the intellectual foundations of the doctrines of the Third Reich.16.84 Having been led by his philosophy to take over from the reactionary Bonald the view that the individual is ``a pure abstraction''16.85and society as a whole a single collective being, he is of necessity led to most of the characteristic features of a totalitarian view of society.
The later development of all this into a new religion of humanity with a fully developed cult is outside our subject. Needless to say that Comte, who was so completely a stranger to the one real cult of humanity, tolerance (which he would admit only in indifferent and doubtful matters) ,16.86 was not the man to make much of that idea, which in itself does not lack a certain greatness. For the rest we cannot better summarize this last phase of Comte's thought than by the well-known epigram of Thomas Huxley, who described it as ``Catholicism minus Christianity.''