PHILOSOPHY AS AN ORGANON 



general principles on which thinking should be 

 conducted. In such a condition — owing to the 

 discredit which the manifest failure of meta- 

 physics has for the time being cast upon phi- 

 losophy in general — are too many of our sci- 

 entific savants of the present century ; whose 

 narrowness of mind, in dealing with philosophic 

 questions, Comte was never weary of pointing 

 out and tracing to its true source in the defec- 

 tive mastery of logical methods. The cure for 

 this narrowness is to be found in a philosophic 

 education which shall ensure familiarity with all 

 logical methods by studying each in connection 

 with that order of phenomena with which it is 

 most especially fitted to deal. 



According to Comte, the resources which the 

 mind has at its disposal for the inductive inves- 

 tigation of phenomena are three in number, — 

 namely, Observation, Experiment, and Compar- 

 ison. Strictly speaking, experiment and com- 

 parison are only more elaborate modes of ob- 

 servation ; but they are nevertheless sufficiently 

 distinct from simple observation to make it 

 desirable, for practical purposes, to rank them 

 as separate processes. Concisely stated, the dif- 

 ference is as follows : In simple observation, 

 we merely collate the phenomena, as they are 

 presented to us. In experiment, we follow the 

 Baconian rule of artificially varying the circum- 



