THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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be restored as such; and like him he took his conviction from a system of phases of history itself. So in spite of everything the soldier of Washington finally triumphs
over all kinds of inherited descent from Charlemagne; and through the historical consciousness which here seeks to signify progress, and by no means Restoration: ‘The
waters of the past have extinguished the fires of chivalry, and Nôtre Dame, a born ruin, became a real one.’ For history passes through three stages here: a theological
one which presents the world as having been created by gods, a metaphysical one which deduces it from abstract natural forces or from ideas, and a positive one which
grasps it through the analysis of facts and on the basis of immanent causes. Now modern industrial society is the positive one, therefore it has totally emerged from the
religious and semi­religious mythology of the first two stages, and therefore it can no longer return to the essentially religious­metaphysical idea of life at the heart of
feudalism. But it can still regain on the basis of knowledge the social and spiritual bond (substance) which formerly existed on the basis of faith. Industry and science
have taken the place of feudality and the Church, materiality that of religious metaphysics; but materiality itself demands a central structure in which — and here again
we have a secularized Middle Ages thought to have been detoxicated — it can distribute a variety of intelligent sacraments through the ‘capacité administrative’. Saint­
Simon's ‘Industrial System’, 1821, and above all his last work ‘New Christianity’, 1825, thus aspire to a strictly hierarchical division of industrial functions and a
centralized end to amateurish disruptive freedom, to freedom as anarchy. Intellectual authority, which was vested in the clergy in the Middle Ages, passes to the
researchers and scholars; the organized industrial state becomes — and moreover immortally, eternally — the ‘Church of Intelligence’. A social high priest, a kind of
industrial pope, will be at the head of it, the spirit of a rejuvenated Christianity will guide it. These are all ideas which recurred a generation later in the final period of
Auguste Comte's philosophy, and they fill over and over again the fantastic dream­weddings between sacred socialism and profane Vatican. Protestantism is here a
laxly individual half­measure, deism a laxly agnostic generality; without hierarchy there is no religion, and hence none of the new intelligence either. The English natural
scientist Huxley called this sort of thing Catholicism minus Christianity, and from the school of Comte there then came a correction which was a confirmation: the
positive future religion was Catholicism plus exact science. If this is true of Comte, it certainly is not true of Saint­Simon of course; his social papism was by