ch. tiii] ORGANIZATION OF TEE SCIENCES. 199 



doubtless the occasion of many prayers to the " God of 

 Battles." The same persons who, in the regular recurrence 

 of the seasons, in the expansion of heated bodies, in the 

 explosion of fulminating compounds, in the darkness caused 

 by an eclipse, in short throughout the entire realm of in- 

 organic phenomena, see nothing but the operations of uniform 

 forces, nevertheless explain diseases, famines, and political 

 revolutions, upon the hypothesis of an overruling Providence 

 extraneous to the Cosmos ; announcing, perhaps, the doctrine 

 of a divine judgment upon sin, — which is indeed not a 

 fiction, but the mythologic version of a scientific truth. 



Not only (according to Comte) has deanthropomorphization 

 proceeded more rapidly in the simpler sciences than in the 

 more complex ones, but the generalization of causal agencies, 

 of which deanthropomorphization is the result, took place 

 earlier in the former than in the latter. This is to be seen by 

 comparing the dates at which the sciences respectively ceased 

 to be mere aggregations of empirical knowledge, and became 

 founded as sciences, in the strict sense of the word. Thus 

 astronomy, at least in its statical department, was a science in 

 the days of Hipparchos. Physics became a science when 

 Galileo discovered the law of falling bodies. Chemistry 

 became a science, about a hundred and seventy years later, 

 when Lavoisier overthrew the doctrine of phlogiston, and 

 detected the true principles of combustion. Biology did 

 not become a science until the very end of the eighteenth 

 century, when Bichat pointed out the relations between the 

 functions of organs and the properties of tissues. Finally 

 sociology has hardly yet become a science ; and many 

 educated persons still regard historical events as happening 

 in no determinate sequence, and stigmatize, as not only 

 chimerical but even impious, any attempt to formulate the 

 order of such events. 



Here it becomes desirable to pass from simple exposition 

 to criticism. In the Comtean views above set forth we must 



