ck. vn.] ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND VOSMISM. 169 



tent of explicitly or implicitly denying the independent 

 existence of a Power manifested in phenomena; while he 

 would, if consistent with his own principles, have regarded 

 such a denial as an overstepping of the limits within which 

 positive speculation should be confined ; it is none the less 

 true that he ignored the existence of any such Power as 

 completely as if he had held the extreme idealist doctrine 

 which pronounces 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 achieve- 

 ments 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 generalization of historical facts, can be 

 denied by no competent student of history But, while 

 freely conceding all this, it will appear, on a closer examina- 

 tion, that the doctrine in question is rather a foreshadowing 

 of the true statement than the true statement itself; and that 

 in one all-important 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 pheno- 

 mena, 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 conception of the character of 

 ihe speculative development may be rendered sufficiently 

 precise, and in order to ascertain how far Comte understood 

 that character. 



Upon this point, as upon many others, Comte has left on 

 record assertions which, if literally interpreted, simply cancel 



