in other men. Men themselves are reducible to more inclusive species, and these to one single species. And so on from the organic to the inorganic, and at last to the cold universalism of Energy.
If evolution is an instrument of a supreme unity, if all varieties are reducible, if all chasms may be filled, if nature is continuous and uninterrupted, then what the scholastics used to call the ineffable individual disappears like a child's dream. The individual, the person, the man unique, the self, does not and cannot exist, is but a legend denied by science, destroyed by philosophy, abjured by thought. In short, while the individualist feels the need of affirming, accentuating, and increasing diversities, the monist, on the contrary, tends to attenuate, to forget and to deny all differences. Their interests are opposed. Their purposes are antipodal.
Thus the collectivism of sociology finds in monism its perfect metaphysical counterpart.
Positivism, like democracy, is a leveler. It ferrets out facts—tiny facts, by preference. The triumph of Comte was brought about by his enthronement of things. The higher activities of the spirit, sentiment and will, have been dispossessed; their place has been usurped by fact, by representation, by all that which is least personal. And positivism, in its search for law, has sought to remove all irregularity and all caprice. It
