COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



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nounces it a mere figment of the imagination. 

 So utterly foreign to Positivism is Mr. Spencer's 

 doctrine of the Unknowable, that M. Littre, 

 who is of all living men the most thoroughly 

 and consistently a Positivist, condemns it as a 

 baseless metaphysical speculation. 



Such is the celebrated " Law of the Three 

 Stages/' which is regarded by Positivists as one 

 of the greatest achievements of the human mind, 

 and which impartial criticism must regard as 

 an achievement of sufficient importance to have 

 wrought a complete revolution in the attitude 

 of modern philosophy. That it also contains 

 a large amount of truth, as a concise generali- 

 zation of historical facts, can be denied by no 

 competent student of history. But, while freely 

 conceding all this, it will appear, on a closer ex- 

 amination, that the doctrine in question is rather 

 a foreshadowing of the true statement than the 

 true statement itself; and that in one all-impor- 

 tant particular it is utterly inadmissible. Let 

 us begin by inquiring how far the progress of 

 human thought, with reference to the unknown 

 Cause or causes of phenomena, can be regarded 

 as divisible into stages, and in what sense Comte 

 really intended to assert that there are three 

 stages. It is important that both these points 

 should be determined, in order that our concep- 

 tion of the character of the speculative develop- 

 ment may be rendered sufficiently precise, and 

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