376 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIX. No. 479. 



selves as alleged; it only appears so to the 

 outsider. Tet, it is necessary that our 

 higher duties should he held up to view 

 'lest we forget.' Moreover, the time has 

 come for the gathering of the new material 

 unless we are to sink back into a shallow 

 rumination of the old. The American 

 biologist stands ready to expand his do- 

 minion into the old world, if he be given 

 the means, and when he shall be through 

 with his work, the facts and records will 

 be in such a shape that the philosopher can 

 rear a structure upon them that will stand. 



The means by which he may be put in 

 this enviable position have been set forth in 

 another connection* and need not occupy 

 us here. Leonhaed Stejneger. 



Washington, D. C, 

 November 14, 1903. 



SGIENTIFIG BOOKS. 

 The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. 

 By L. Levy-Bruhl. Authorized translation, 

 to which is prefixed an introduction by 

 Feederic Harrison. New York, G. P. Put- 

 nam's Sons. 1903. Pp. xiv + 363. 8°. 

 Anything that will help to make the phi- 

 losophy of Auguste Comte known to the read- 

 ers of English can not fail to be useful. The 

 English translation, therefore, of a work on 

 that subject by such a man as M. Levy-Bruhl, 

 the well-known author of the ' History of 

 Modern Philosophy in France,' and who 

 ' writes as a student and not an adherent of 

 Comte,' is especially welcome. 



It will probably be one day regarded as the 

 most remarkable anomaly in the history of 

 science that the work which formed the turn- 

 ing point from metaphysical to scientific phi- 

 losophy — the ' Positive Philosophy ' of Auguste 

 Comte — remained three quarters of a cen- 

 tury without being translated into the English 

 language. This singular circumstance has 

 led to some very peculiar results, and accounts 

 for the totally false idea that the English- 

 * Carnegie Inst. Yearbook, No. 1, pp. 241-266, 

 ' Plan for a Biological Survey of the Palearctic 

 Region,' by Leonhard Stejneger and Gerrit S. 

 Miller, Jr. 



speaking world entertains with regard to 

 Comte and his doctrines. Many suppose that 

 be was a very bad, irreligious man. An 

 eminent divine recently stated from the pulpit 

 that ' Comte, the great French philosopher, 

 taught that religion was only a phase of super- 

 stition that belonged to the childhood of the 

 race and would be outgrown.' Interrogated 

 as to where Comte taught this doctrine, he was 

 unable to cite any work or passage. The fact 

 is that Comte had a strong religious nature, 

 and one of his aphorisms was that ' man is 

 becoming more and more religious.' 



Others, like Huxley (who does not seem to 

 have read the ' Positive Philosophy '), see 

 nothing of value in Comte's system. A com- 

 mon opinion is that it is a sort of utopia, and 

 Comte's name is frequently associated with 

 that of Fourier. Scarcely any one has the 

 idea that he was a scientific man in the ac- 

 cepted sense of the expression, although he 

 was by profession a mathematician. 



The fact that Comte wrote another and later 

 work, his ' Politique Positive,' in which he 

 drew up a program of social regeneration and 

 founded a cult, created the general impression 

 that he was only a dreamer. His zealous fol- 

 lowers from the standpoint of the cult saw 

 to it that this work should be translated into 

 English. There is no doubt that this did 

 incalculable harm to Comte's entire system. 

 For, in the first place, as M. Levy-Bruhl 

 clearly shows, it is impossible to understand 

 the ' Politique Positive ' without an acquaint- 

 ance with the ' Philosophic Positive.' If 

 Levy-Bruhl had done nothing else than to dis- 

 pel the illusion that the ' Politique Positive ' 

 was an after-thought, the product of a diseased 

 mind, and a mere dream of a fanatic, it would 

 have fully justified his writing this book. 

 The few who have read the ' Philosophie 

 Positive,' and especially those who have also 

 read the five early papers written from 1819 

 to 1825, know already that the 'Politique 

 Positive ' was contemplated by Comte from the 

 beginning, and was steadily kept in mind dur- 

 ing all the patient years that it required to 

 write the ' Philosophie Positive.' That work 

 was to be simply the necessary preparation and 

 scientific foundation for his final great con- 



