ch. viii.] ORGANIZATION OF THE SCIENCES. 195 



the less pretentious but more useful systems of D'Alembert, 

 Stewart, Ampere, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Cournot ; its 

 superiority is at once apparent. The arrangement seems so 

 natural and obvious that it has not unfrequently been cha- 

 racterized by able critics as "just the sort of classification 

 that would naturally arise in any reflecting mind on a review 

 of the subject." We should not forget, however, that it 

 never had arisen in any of the reflecting minds which re- 

 viewed the subject previous to Comte. 



But Comte, who viewed everything in a historical 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 sciences. He 

 regarded it also as a kind of philosophic tableau or con- 

 spectus of the progress of the human mind from anthropo- 

 morphic toward scientific conceptions of natural phenomena. 

 According to him, the order in which he arranged the 

 sciences was the order in which they had respectively been 

 constituted as sciences, — in which they had passed from the 

 theological or metaphysical into the scientific stage. Thus 

 mathematics, he tells us, has been a science, in the strict sense 

 of the word, from time immemorial ; but he omits to tell us 

 that pure mathematics, dealing solely with number and form, 

 and not involving conceptions of force, could never have 

 been in the theological stage. It was only the phenomena 

 of force which to primitive men must have seemed to require 

 nn anthropomorphic explanation. The action of the human 

 will, by the analogy of which external events were explained, 

 may be a mechanical, but it is not a geometrical or algebraic 

 phenomenon. When we come to mechanics, there is room to 

 construct volitional explanations. Nevertheless in mechanics 

 there are so few traces of such explanations, since the dawn 

 of history, that Comte thinks it may have always been a 

 positive science ; and he quotes approvingly Adam Smith's 

 remark that nowhere do we ever hear of a god of Weight. 



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