674 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



adopted by some of the young and active minds of the present times. 

 The French even deny him the merit of originality, and repudiate his 

 system, probably because they know more of the man than we do. 

 But we shall leave M. Pasteur to discuss it : " The fundamental prin- 

 ciple of Auguste Comte is to set aside all metaphysical inquiry into 

 first and final causes, to reduce all ideas and all theories to fact, and to 

 restrict the character of certainty to experimental demonstration. His 

 system includes a classification of the sciences, and a pretended law of 

 history expressed by the assertion that the conceptions of the human 

 mind pass successively through three states the theological, the meta- 

 physical, and the scientific or positive. 



" M. Littre was full of praises of this system and of its author. In 

 his eyes Auguste Comte was a man destined to hold a great place in 

 posterity, and the positive philosophy was one of those products of a 

 century or more which change the level of human thought. If he had 

 been asked what he esteemed most in the laborious efforts of his life, 

 Littre would doubtless have replied that it was his sincere and perse- 

 vering apostolate of positivism. It is not uncommon to find the most 

 learned of men deluded as to their own chief merits. I confess, there- 

 fore, that I have formed an estimate of the work of Auguste Comte 

 differing widely from that of M. Littre. The causes of this divergence 

 are the result of the very nature of the inquiries which occupied his 

 life and of those which have exclusively occupied mine. 



" The labors of M. Littre were directed to researches in history, 

 language, and scientific and literary erudition. The subject of these 

 studies lies entirely in facts belonging to the past, to which nothing 

 can be added, from which nothing can be subtracted. The method 

 of observation to be followed in them can seldom lead to strict 

 demonstrations. Scientific experiment, on the contrary, admits no 

 others. 



" The experimentalist in the conquest of nature is continually op- 

 posed to facts not yet manifest, and which exist in the potential rudi- 

 ments of natural laws. The unknown, within the limits of the possi- 

 ble, and not of the past, is his domain ; and to explore it he employs 

 that marvelous experimental method, of which it may be said with 

 truth, not that it suffices for all things, but that it rarely deceives 

 those who use it aright. The mistake of Auguste Comte and M. 

 Littre was to confound this method with the simple method of obser- 

 vation. Unused to experimental philosophy, they use the word ' ex- 

 perience ' in its ordinary signification, which is by no means its mean- 

 ing in scientific language. The daily tasks of the man of science lead 

 him to seek the idea of progress in an idea of invention. I find no 

 invention in positivism. The mere gradation of the human intellect 

 and the classification of the sciences have no claim to the title." 



M. Littre found a certain repose of mind in the absolute denial by 

 the positivists of all metaphysical truth. He was, in fact, what is now 



