144 COSMIC nilLOSOPHY. [pt. i. 



their master's personal shortcomings than by his permanently 

 valuable contributions to philosophy. Notonlythe disciple, 

 but also the impartial critic, may fairly urge that the Positive 

 Philosophy is something greater than Comte, just as the dif- 

 ferential calculus is something greater than Newton or Leib- 

 nitz. If Newton, in his old nge, had become so far lost to 

 all seme of scientific propriety as to apply his method of 

 fluxions to the solution of physiological or ethical problems, 

 much discredit would have attached to Newton, but none to 

 the method of fluxions. Succeeding inquirers would have 

 criticized him in the light of his own principles, and would 

 have felt obliged to mourn the decadence of his godlike in- 

 tellect, but the question would have been mainly a personal 

 one, affecting in no way our estimate of the Newtonian 

 mathematics. In like manner, when we characterize Comte's 

 later speculations as vagaries hardly compatible with sanity, 

 we cast no discredit upon the Positive Philosophy, since our 

 whole argument implies that these speculations were con- 

 ducted in utter disregard of those canons of research which 

 it is the chief glory of the Positive Philosophy to have insti- 

 tuted. It is one of Comte's most legitimate claims to im- 

 mortal remembrance that, with greater authority and far 

 wider scientific resources than Bacon, he succeeded in intro- 

 ducing the objective method into departments of research 

 where previously metaphysical interpretations had reigned 

 supreme and unquestioned. For this he must ever be 

 regarded as one of the worthiest among the " servants and 

 interpreters of Nature." And it is mainly because of his 

 pre-eminence as an inaugurator of scientific method that it 

 has become customary to identify with Positivism every 

 philosophy which, like the system expounded in this work, 

 seeks to give synthetic expression to the ripest scientific 

 thought of our age. If the question were only one of method, 

 we might acquiesce in this identification. But, as I have 

 already plainly indicated and shall presently show more fully 



