ohere and
correspond. The conception that the coming age was to be a period of
organisation like the Middle Ages, and the idea of the government of
savants, are pure Saint-Simonian doctrine. And the fundamental idea of
a POSITIVE philosophy had been apprehended by Saint-Simon long before he
was acquainted with his youthful associate.

But Comte had a more methodical and scientific mind, and he thought that
Saint-Simon was premature in drawing conclusions as to the reformation
of societies and industries before the positive philosophy had been
constructed. He published--he was then only twenty-two--in 1822 a
"Plan of the scientific operations necessary for the re-organisation
of society," which was published under another title two years later by
Saint-Simon, and it was over this that the friends quarrelled. This work
contains the principles of the positive philosophy which he was soon to
begin to work out; it announces already the "law of the Three Stages."

The first volume of the "Cours de philisophie positive" appeared in
1830; it took him twelve years more to complete the exposition of his
system. [Footnote: With vol. vi., 1842.]

2.

The "law of Three Stages" is familiar to many who have never read a line
of his writings. That men first attempted to explain natural phenomena
by the operation of imaginary deities, then sought to interpret them by
abstractions, and finally came to see that they could only be understood
by scientific methods, observation, and experiment--this was a
generalisation which had already been thrown out by Turgot. Comte
adopted it as a fundamental psychological law, which has governed
every domain of mental activity and explains the whole story of
human development. Each of our principal conceptions, every branch of
knowledge, passes successively through these three states which he names
the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive or scientific. In
the first, the mind invents; in the second, it abstracts; in the third,
it submits itself to positive facts; and the proof that any branch of
knowledge has reached the third stage is the recognition of invariable
natural laws.

But, granting that this may be the key to the history of the sciences,
of physics, say, or botany, how can it explain the history of man, the
sequence of actual historical events? Comte replies that history has
been governed by ideas; "the whole social mechanism is ultimately
based on opinions." Thus man's his