TWO:If Plato stands at the very antipodes of Fourier and St. Simon, he is connected by a real relationship with those thinkers who, like Auguste Comte and Mr. Herbert Spencer, have based their social systems on a wide survey of physical science and human history. It is even probable that his ideas have exercised a decided though not a direct influence on the two writers whom we have named. For Comte avowedly took many of his proposed reforms from the organisation of mediaeval Catholicism, which was a translation of philosophy into dogma and discipline, just as Positivism is a re-translation of theology into the human thought from which it sprang. And Mr. Spencers system, while it seems to be the direct antithesis of Platos, might claim kindred with it through the principle of differentiation and integration, which, after passing from Greek thought into political economy and physiology, has been restored by our illustrious countryman to something more than its original generality. It has also to be observed that the application of very abstract truths to political science needs to be most jealously guarded, since their elasticity increases in direct proportion to their width. When one thinker argues from the law of increasing specialisation to a vast extension of governmental interference with personal liberty, and another thinker to its restriction within the narrowest possible limits, it seems time to consider whether experience and expediency are not, after all, the safest guides to trust.
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