534 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 
Section F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 
PRESIDENT OF TEE SecTION.—Sir Henry H. Cunyneuame, K.O.B. 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
AutHoucH the theories of Auguste Comte as to the progress of the sciences are 
in many respects open to question, yet he made two contributions of especial 
value to our ideas on that subject. In the first place, he was one of the earliest 
writers who maintained that the social and, political sciences are subject to laws 
just as exact, though more complicated, as the laws which govern the physical 
sciences; and, in the next place, he formulated the celebrated principle of the 
three phases of thought. According to this view all sciences commence with a 
theological stage, they pass through a metaphysical stage, and end by becoming 
positive. 
In a primitive state of civilisation man attributes all phenomena to the 
exercise of volition; in a more advanced stage of thought he endeavours to 
attribute them to ‘ virtues’ or ‘agencies.’ The third stage is reached when he 
ceases to speculate, and uses general principles rather as modes of classifying 
phenomena than of explaining them. An example may be taken from theories 
regarding the nature of fire. At first, fire both celestial and terrestrial wherever 
it occurred was believed to be due to the direct action of a god. Under Aristotle 
and the Greeks the phenomena of heat, burning, and dryness were attributed 
to a principle, one of the characteristics of which was a tendency to fly up to 
the circle of the stars. But in modern times, owing to the labours of the 
chemists and physicists, it has been explained as a violent motion of molecules. 
Of its ultimate character we are still ignorant, but the study of heat has passed 
into a positive stage, in which great progress has been made in classifying its 
properties and extending our knowledge of them. 
The history of ontology is an example of a study which for centuries was in 
the theological stage, but which emerged from that condition and entered the 
metaphysical stage chiefly through the labours of the schoolmen. From their 
time onwards it steadily evolved along the lines laid down by the realists on 
the one hand, and the conceptualists on the other, until an attempt at a union 
of their systems was made by Hegel. But even Hegelism is only metaphysical. 
We know nothing of what he means by his absolute, which might be the god of 
Averrhoes or Spinoza on the one hand, or the matter of La Mettrie on the other. 
The philosophy of the absolute is mere metaphysics. 
Positive philosophy or science is at best a classification of phenomena; of 
ultimate causes we can know nothing. Our knowledge, as is finely said by Byron, 
is but an exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance; 
though immense progress in knowledge of phenomena is made by the transaction. 
One of the signs that a science has passed into the positive stage is that 
it has been subjected to the laws of mathematics. Mechanics, physics, 
chemistry, and electricity have Jong since been treated mathematically, 
