slightly and partially,
a rather serious drawback which enabled them to impose their own
constructions with the greater ease. Hegel's method of a PRIORI
synthesis was enjoined by his philosophical theory; but in Comte we also
find a tendency to a PRIORI treatment. He expressly remarks that
the chief social features of the Monotheistic period might almost be
constructed a PRIORI.

The law of the Three Stages is discredited. It may be contended that
general Progress depends on intellectual progress, and that theology,
metaphysics, and science have common roots, and are ultimately
identical, being merely phases in the movement of the intelligence. But
the law of this movement, if it is to rank as a scientific hypothesis,
must be properly deduced from known causes, and must then be verified
by a comparison with historical facts. Comte thought that he fulfilled
these requirements, but in both respects his demonstration was
defective. [Footnote: Criticism of Comte's assumption that civilisation
begins with animism: Weber's criticisms from this point of view are
telling (Le Rythme du progres, 73-95). He observes that if Comte had
not left the practical and active side of intelligence in the shade and
considered only its speculative side, he could not have formulated
the law of the Three Stages. He would have seen that "the positive
explanation of phenomena has played in every period a preponderant role,
though latent, in the march of the human mind." Weber himself suggests
a scheme of two states (corresponding to the two-sidedness of the
intellect), technical and speculative, practical and theoretical,
through the alternation of which intellectual progress has been
effected. The first stage was probably practical (he calls it
proto-technic). It is to be remembered that when Comte was constructing
his system palaeontology was in its infancy.]

The gravest weakness perhaps in his historical sketch is the gratuitous
assumption that man in the earliest stage of his existence had animistic
beliefs and that the first phase of his progress was controlled by
fetishism. There is no valid evidence that fetishism is not a relatively
late development, or that in the myriads of years stretching back beyond
our earliest records, during which men decided the future of the human
species by their technical inventions and the discovery of fire, they
had any views which could be called religious or theological. The
psychology of modern savage