240 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. ii. 



that these are very extensive lacunte in a theorem which 

 professes to he the fundamental law of social progress. 



But this formula, as it stands, is not the wliole of Comte's 

 fundamental law of history. With the advance fiom theolo- 

 gical, through metaphysical, to positive conceptions of the 

 world, Comte couples an advance from military to industrial 

 life, through an ill-defined intermediate stage — inserted, 

 doubtless, to complete the threefold parallelism — which he 

 calls the " legal " stage. Thoroughly to explain what he 

 means by this •' legal " stage of society, would require more 

 detail than I can here well indulge in. We must be content 

 with observing that he means to designate that epoch, which 

 indeed we have not yet left behind us, in which parlia- 

 mentary legislation is thought competent to renovate society 

 artificially, — in which it is supposed that legislatures can 

 Tiiake men rich by giving them paper-money, intellectual by 

 pa'"ronizing literature, temperate by closing dram-shops. As 

 th's phase of opinion was very conspicuous in the eighteenth 

 ceatury, coupled with metaphysical systems of political 

 ethics deduced from revolutionary theories of the " inherent 

 rights of man," Comte links this whole set of doctrines 

 together, and makes a so-called inetaphysico-legal stage in 

 social progress. But I cannot think this a happy generali- 

 /^ation. This "legal" stage is, at the Lest, a phase of intel- 

 -cctual development, and to introduce it into the midst of a 

 purely social progress from military to industrial life, seems 

 too much like committing the logical fallacy known as cross- 

 division. Omitting this stage, then, and reducing Comte's 

 double formula to its lowest terms, — the only ones, I think, 

 upon which he himself would invariably have insisted, — we 

 have the following, as the Comtean law of progress : — 



The progress of society is a cjradual change from arUhro- 

 fomorphic to positive conceptions of the ivorld, and from 

 military to industrial modes of life ; and the latter kivd oj 

 clumige is determiTied hy the former. 



