HYPOTHESES. I 



We need not extend our illustration to other cases, as for 

 instance to the propagation of light, sound, heat, electricity, 

 &c. through space, or any of the other phenomena which have 

 been found susceptible of explanation by the resolution of their 

 observed laws into more general laws. Enough has been 

 said to display the difference between the kind of explana- 

 tion and resolution of laws which is chimerical, and that of 

 which the accomplishment is the great aim of science ; and to 

 show into what sort of elements the resolution must be effected, 

 if at all. 



3. As, however, there is scarcely any one of the prin- 

 ciples of a true method of philosophizing which does not 

 require to be guarded against errors on both sides, I must 

 enter a caveat against another misapprehension, of a kind 

 directly contrary to the preceding. M. Comte, among other 

 occasions on which he has condemned, with some asperity, any 

 attempt to explain phenomena which are " evidently primor- 

 dial," (meaning, apparently, no more than that every peculiar 

 phenomenon must have at least one peculiar and therefore 

 inexplicable law,) has spoken of the attempt to furnish any 

 explanation of the colour belonging to each substance, " la 

 couleur elementaire propre a chaque substance," as essentially 

 illusory. " No one," says he, " in our time attempts to 

 explain the particular specific gravity of each substance or 

 of each structure. Why should it be otherwise as to the 

 specific colour, the notion of which is undoubtedly no less 

 primordial ?"* 



Now although, as he elsewhere observes, a colour must 

 always remain a different thing from a weight or a sound, 

 varieties of colour might nevertheless follow, or correspond 

 to, given varieties of weight, or sound, or some other pheno- 

 menon as different as these are from colour itself. It is one 

 question what a thing is, and another what it depends on ; 

 and though to ascertain the conditions of an elementary phe- 

 nomenon is not to obtain any new insight into the nature of 



* Cours de Philosophic Positive, ii. 656. 



