y
in the study of the sciences, for acquaintance with the methods of those
which are elementary is the best preparation for the pursuit of the higher
ones. In arithmetic and geometry we study positivity at its source; in the
sociological spirit it finds its completion.

Mathematics entered on its positive stage at quite an early period,
chemistry and biology only in recent times, while, in the highest and most
complicated science, the metaphysical (negative, liberal, democratic,
revolutionary) mode of thought is still battling with the feudalism of the
theological mode. To make sociology positive is the mission of the second
half of Comte's work, and to this goal his philosophical activity had been
directed from the beginning. Comte rates the efforts of political economy
very low, with the exception of the work of Adam Smith, and will not let
them pass as a preparation for scientific sociology, holding that they are
based on false abstractions. Psychology, which is absent from the above
enumeration, is to form a branch of biology, and exclusively to use the
objective method, especially phrenology (to the three faculties of the
soul, "heart, character, and intellect," correspond three regions of the
brain). Self-observation, so Comte, making an impossibility out of a
difficulty, teaches, can at most inform us concerning our feelings and
passions, and not at all concerning our own thinking, since reflection
brings to a stop the process to which it attends, and thus destroys its
object. The sole source of knowledge is external sense-perception. In his
_Positive Polity_ Comte subsequently added a seventh fundamental science,
ethics or anthropology.

Sociology,[1] the elevation of which to the rank of a positive science is
the principal aim of our philosopher, uses the same method as the natural
sciences, namely, the interrogation and interpretation of experience by
means of induction and deduction, only that here the usual relation of
these two instruments of knowledge is reversed. Between inorganic and
organic philosophy, both of which proceed from the known to the unknown,
there is this difference, that in the former the advance is from the
elements, as that which alone is directly accessible, to the whole which is
composed of them, while in the latter the opposite is the case, since here
the whole is better known than the individual parts of which it consists.
Hence, in inorganic science the laws of the composite phenome