Note 13 — VIII.
Reading edition
I am glad to observe that Mr. Congreve, in the criticism with which he has favoured me in the number of the Fortnightly Review for April 1869, does not venture to challenge the justice of the claim I make for Hume. He merely suggests that I have been wanting in candour in not mentioning Comte's high opinion of Hume. After mature reflection I am unable to discern my fault. If I had suggested that Comte had borrowed from Hume without acknowledgment; or if, instead of trying to express my own sense of Hume's merits with the modesty which becomes a writer who has no authority in matters of philosophy, I had affirmed that no one had properly appreciated him, Mr. Congreve's remarks would apply: but as I did neither of these things, they appear to me to be irrelevant, if not unjustifiable. And even had it occurred to me to quote M. Comte's expressions about Hume, I do not know that I should have cited them, inasmuch as, on his own showing, M. Comte occasionally speaks very decidedly touching writers of whose works he has not read a line. Thus, in Tome VI. of the "Philosophie Positive," p. 619, M. Comte writes: "Le plus grand des métaphysiciens modernes, l'illustre Kant, a noblement mérité une éternelle admiration en tentant, le premier, d'échapper directement a l'absolu philosophique par sa célèbre conception de la double réalité, à la fois objective et subjective, qui indique un si juste sentiment de la saine philosophie."
But in the "Préface Personnelle" in the same volume, p. 35, M. Comte tells us:—"Je n'ai jamais lu, en aucune langue, ni Vico, ni Kant, ni Herder, ni Hegel, &c.; je ne connais leurs divers ouvrages que d'après quelques relations indirectes et certains extraits fort insuffisants."
Who knows but that the "&c." may include Hume? And in that case what is the value of M. Comte's praise of him?