ORGANIZATION OF THE SCIENCES 



clearly that, whether rightly or wrongly coor- 

 dinated, the presentation of scientific know- 

 ledge and method as a whole must greatly 

 have widened people's conceptions, he does not 

 explicitly recognize that this presentation of 

 scientific knowledge and method as a whole 

 was, in spite of the wrong coordination, a step 

 sufficient of itself to change and renovate the 

 entire attitude of philosophy. He tells us that 

 persons like Professor Huxley, Professor Tyn- 

 dall, and himself stand substantially in the same 

 position in which they would have stood had 

 Comte never written ; that, "declining his re- 

 organization of scientific doctrine, they possess 

 this scientific doctrine in its preexisting state, 

 as the common heritage bequeathed by the past 

 to the present." And elsewhere he tells us 

 that Comte " designated by the term " Posi- 

 tive Philosophy ' all that definitely established 

 knowledge which men of science have been 

 gradually organizing into a coherent body of 

 doctrine." It seems to me, on the other hand, 

 that the coherent body of doctrine was the very 

 thing which no scientific thinker had ever so 

 much as attempted to construct, though Bacon, 

 no doubt, foresaw the necessity of some such 

 construction. M. Littre may well inquire what 

 is meant by the great scientific minds whose 

 traditions Comte is said to have followed. 

 " Does it mean the philosophers ? Why, they 



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