ties as "principles" or "essences," but, moreover, such expressions as cause, will, or force. "Forces," he says,

66

are only movements." They are transferences of phenomena, and nothing more. Comte is indeed far from consistent in applying his own canon of Positive interpretation, from the simple impossibility of working such a canon, and discharging from the account of human knowledge what is really one-half, and that the most vital half, of the sum to be accounted for: still he deserves credit for having clearly seen that, if all our knowledge is only phenomenal, then we have no right to the use of language which phenomena never gave us and cannot give us. It is a pure delusion to speak of causation, and yet to empty the word of all meaning by making a cause nothing but an invariable antecedent. To the purely physical philosopher force can be nothing but a transition of conditions. Turn up the mere soil of physics in any direction, analyse to the last the complication of external phenomena, and force as a distinct reality is nowhere found. The springs of nature are viewless, and the mere scalpel of induction can never lay them bare. It is a true and important service to have thus stripped the physical basis of all metaphysical gloss, and to have exposed, as we shall afterwards more fully show, the real roots of the question between Positivism or mere Science and theological philosophy.

But Comte has done something more than extend and illuminate the inductive method. He has classified the sciences; and there is no one capable of appreciating the task who will be disposed to undervalue what he has done in this respect. Others may, to some extent, have anticipated him; but no one who

has really mastered his system of classification, the principles on which it is based, and the rich and frequently striking thoughts with which he has expounded its sequences, can entertain any question of his ability and originality as a scientific thinker. He possesses, indeed, a singular power of lighting up scientific conceptions, and bringing forth to view their rational co-ordination and harmony. He never loses himself amidst complexities; he never sinks into mere technical details which have no bearing on his subject; his store of knowledge, although he prematurely ceased to add to it, is vast and multifarious; and he seldom misses the apt example or illustration, while conveniently forgetting whatever does not suit him. With all that is false and one-sided in it, we know of few mental disciplines more bracing and exhilarating than the study of the Comtean hierarchy of sciences as expounded in the 'Cours de Philosophie Positive.'

In proceeding to his task, Comte first establishes a distinction between what he calls abstract science and concrete science. The former has for its object the discovery of the laws which regulate the whole phenomena in any department of knowledge; the latter contemplates the phenomena in detail or according to their actual appearance. Chemistry, for example, is an abstract science, Mineralogy is a concrete science. Physiology, or more correctly Biology, is an abstract science; Botany and Zoology are concrete sciences. Properly speaking, the name of science only belongs to the first or abstract class. The latter or concrete series are rather Classifications than Sciences. We only reach the province of science when we ascend beyond the description, or even the sorting or generalising, of mere

phenomena to their laws-the comprehensive order or combinations of order which the phenomena obey. Comte saw this, and has done a great deal to make others see it; but he did not, as we think, comprehend all that is involved in the transition through which alone a description or even a generalised notation of phenomena passes into science.

In

It is, of course, only with the class of abstract sciences, or sciences properly so called, that Positive Philosophy has to do. These are fundamental, the others are dependent and illustrative. The one gives us knowledge and the power that comes from knowledge. The others give only collections of facts. seeking for a principle on which to co-ordinate the series of abstract sciences, Comte has recourse to the simple idea of arranging them according to their respective generality and the degree of dependence which they bear to one another. The idea is simple enough, and it is absurd to claim any particular credit for it; but it is at least as absurd to cast any ridicule or discredit upon it. To begin with the most general or elementary branches and advance to the more complex and difficult what is this, some have said, but to follow the instinct of all sensible people,-what ninety-nine people out of a hundred would do? But the plain answer to this is that, not to speak of the ninety-nine, not even the hundredth philosopher had succeeded in exhibiting the physical sciences in a rational series before Comte. The simplicity of the idea upon which he worked, which guided his great faculty of co-ordination, does not detract from, but rather enhances, the merit of his scheme.

Starting with this idea, he comes primarily across

1

the great division of phenomena into organic and inorganic. Taking up the latter order as the more general and fundamental, we have the two sections of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The phenomena of the heavens are at once the most general and the most independent-for the law of dependence is found to follow strictly the law of priority and generality, and Comte everywhere makes a special point of exhibiting the relations of dependence in the ascending series. Dependence rises as the succession advances; there is everywhere an exact proportion between the two. Of all phenomena those of the heavens are obviously at once the most general and the most independent. And the science of Astronomy accordingly takes precedence of all others. The simplest terrestrial phenomenon, chemical or purely mechanical, is more compound than the most complex celestial phenomenon, and so the most difficult astronomical question is less complicated than that of the most simple terrestrial movement when all the determining circumstances are taken into account--the movement, for example, of a falling body. This clear consideration places celestial Physics or Astronomy at the head of all the natural sciences. Terrestrial Physics, on the same principle, falls into divisions, according to the merely mechanical or the chemical view of objects. All chemical phenomena are more complex than mechanical, or what we commonly call physical, and depend upon them without influencing them in return. All chemical action, for example, is conditioned by such influences as weight, heat, &c., while, moreover, presenting of itself definite characteristics which modify these. Physics, there

fore, or Natural Philosophy, in the special sense, precedes Chemistry, and follows Astronomy. These three sciences include all inorganic phenomena, and their rational order, according to the ascending complexity of the phenomena, is as we have stated. The next great department of science is Physiology, or the science of organic phenomena in their greatest generality, as presented in individual living beings. The simplest living object presents conditions more complicated than any merely chemical phenomenon, while it more or less involves all the conditions of the preceding phenomena.

Up to this point Comte's classification of the sciences appears perfect, with an obvious omission, which, as he himself says, would be prodigious if it were not intentional; he means, of course, the science of Mathematics, the most fundamental of all the sciences according to its character and its name. We need not enter particularly into the grounds on which he places Mathematics at the head of his series, because these grounds are not likely to be disputed. The phenomena of extension and of simple movement, which yield us respectively the sciences of Geometry and of rational Mechanics, are plainly the most abstract and generalised phenomena with which we have to deal, not to speak of the still more abstract character of the calculus, which is with Comte not only the fundamental base of all the sciences, but a logical instrument or method extending to all. On the clearest grounds, therefore, Mathematics stands at the head of the natural sciences-which may be ranged in the following order: Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Physiology.