CHAP, ii COMTE S LIFE AND TEACHING 15 



had all been overthrown. The third, the introspective 

 method in psychology, is perhaps not strictly an alleged 

 guide to conduct ; but it stands in very close alliance 

 with the fourth. If simple interrogation of conscious- 

 ness teaches us truth in one great department of 

 knowledge, then simple interrogation of the voice of 

 conscience may well be expected to teach us duty, 

 and guide us safely in action. Comte, a more thorough- ^> 

 going empiricist and phenomenalist than his English * 

 colleagues, the Mills and Spencers, is resolved to have 

 nothing to do with the psychology of introspection. 

 Psychology is either a department of physiology, 

 phrenology perhaps ; or, as he says in his later treatise, 

 sociology is the true psychology, i.e. sociology gives us ^ 

 the one true doctrine of man. On the other hand, it 

 was the earlier treatise which offered us sociology in 

 lieu of ethics, which, as we may say, carried its aversion 

 to intuitionalism so far as to blot out of being the 

 science which intuitionalism had so deeply infected. 

 The later treatise recognises that ji science, of morals 

 ought to handle the problems of personal conduct, in 

 the light of the conditions of social well-being estab- 

 lished or defined by sociology. As being more complex, 

 the discussion of personal duty in morals a treatise 

 which Comte never was able to compose is placed 

 by him later than sociology in his list of the sciences. 

 / Beyond this statement of his alleged Law of the 

 Three Stages, Comte does not argue in favour of his 

 agnostic background. He takes it over from his pre- 

 decessors in the business of speculation, empiricists 

 and individualists of the ordinary type. Once he refers 

 to Kant, telling us that Kant had had a very fair 

 inkling of the biological view of human knowledge as 

 a thing absolutely relative to its environment being 



