ORGANIZATION OF THE SCIENCES 



to characterize this classification as the best 

 which, with our present resources, it is possible 

 to frame. And, indeed, if we compare it with 

 some of the most ambitious preceding classi- 

 fications, such as those of Oken and Hegel, 

 or even with the less pretentious but more use- 

 ful systems of D'Alembert, Stewart, Ampere, 

 Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Cournot, its supe- 

 riority is at once apparent. The arrangement 

 seems so natural and obvious that it has not 

 unfrequently been characterized by able critics 

 as "just the sort of classification that would 

 naturally arise in any reflecting mind on a re- 

 view of the subject." We should not forget, 

 however, that it never had arisen in any of the 

 reflecting minds which reviewed the subject pre- 

 vious to Comte. 



But Comte, who viewed everything in a his- 

 torical light, intended that his classification 

 should be something more than a convenient 

 plan for arriving at philosophic generality 

 through the study of the separate abstract sci- 

 ences. He regarded it also as a kind of philo- 

 sophic tableau or conspectus of the progress of 

 the human mind from anthropomorphic toward 

 scientific conceptions of natural phenomena. 

 According to him, the order in which he ar- 

 ranged the sciences was the order in which they 

 had respectively been constituted as sciences, — 

 in which they had passed from the theological 



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