240 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [PT. n 



that these are very extensive lacunae in a theorem which 

 professes to be the fundamental law of social progress. 



But this formula, as it stands, is not the whole of Comte s 

 fundamental law of history. With the advance from theolo 

 gical, through metaphysical, to positive conceptions of the 

 world, Comte couples an advance from military to industrial 

 life, through an ill-defined intermediate stage inserted, 

 doubtless, to complete the threefold parallelism which he 

 calls the &quot;legal&quot; stage. Thoroughly to explain what he 

 means by this &quot; legal &quot; stage of society, would require more 

 detail than I can here well indulge in. We must be content 

 with observing that he means to designate that epoch, which 

 indeed we have not yet left behind us, in which parlia 

 mentary legislation is thought competent to renovate society 

 artificially, in which it is supposed that legislatures can 

 make men rich by giving them paper-money, intellectual by 

 patronizing literature, temperate by closing dram-shops. As 

 this phase of opinion was very conspicuous in the eighteenth 

 century, coupled with metaphysical systems of political 

 ethics deduced from revolutionary theories of the &quot; inherent 

 rights of man,&quot; Comte links this whole set of doctrines 

 together, and makes a so-called metaphysico-legal stage in 

 social progress. But I cannot think this a happy generali 

 zation. This &quot; legal &quot; stage is, at the best, a phase of intel 

 lectual development, and to introduce it into the midst of a 

 purely social progress from military to industrial life, seems 

 too much like committing the logical fallacy known as cross- 

 division. Omitting this stage, then, and reducing Comte s 

 double formula to its lowest terms, the only ones, I think, 

 upon which he himself would invariably have insisted, we 

 have the following, as the Comtean law of progress : 



The progress of society is a gradual change from anthro 

 pomorphic to positive conceptions of the world, and from 

 military to industrial modes of life ; and the latter kind oj 

 change is determined ly the former. 



