In other countries during the earlier decades of the century a similar
movement of thought is discernible, though it was not carried out
anywhere with the same philosophical thoroughness as in Germany. In
France the organic idea did not find any very powerful representative
till the time of Comte, and even in his expression of it there is a
certain ambiguity. In his well-known law of development, indeed, he
seems to reproduce the individualistic doctrine of the eighteenth
century, and to deny the reality of the _universal_, both in its
theological and its philosophical form. But already in the last volume
of his _Positive Philosophy_, when he begins to deal with human
society, he maintains that “the individual man is an abstraction,
and that there is nothing real but humanity”; and in his _Positive
Politics_ he treats this unity of mankind as not only real, but divine.
In that work, moreover, he makes another step. Rejecting at once the
obstructions of the individualists and those of the socialists, he
rises to the conception of a social organism, which gives play to
the competitive energy of individuals, and yet binds them together
in its own more comprehensive life. In England, before the close of
the eighteenth century, the same spirit had found a representative
in Burke, who rejected entirely the idea of a social contract, and
maintained that the State is based on an unconscious reason of
society, which is far wiser than the conscious reason of even the
wisest individuals. In general, however, the spiritualistic movement
of the earlier part of the century took, among the English-speaking
people, rather a poetic and literary than a philosophical form.
And the imperfect attempts of Coleridge to transplant German ideas
into England—attempts followed up with signal energy by Frederic
Denison Maurice—hardly constitute an exception to this rule. In
this connection, also, as one who partly grasped the organic idea of
social life and its development, but who gave it a somewhat imperfect
and even contradictory expression, I may mention a later writer,
Thomas Carlyle, whose imaginative genius and moral enthusiasm did
much to breathe a new life into history. Though not a philosopher in
any technical sense, he was, like his friend Emerson, a vehicle of
philosophical ideas, and he contributed greatly to scatter the seed of
idealism upon British soil. His Calvinistic pessimism, indeed, makes a
curious contrast with the fearless optimism of the new country which is
characteristic of Emerson; but whether great men are to be regarded as
“heroes to be worshipped,” according to the teaching of the one, or as
“representative men,” who are to be followed because they express what
all are thinking, according to the ideas of the other, we are led, in
both cases, to a deeper view of the solidarity of human society and of
its spiritual basis.