own phraseology, we should say, it is a metaphysical
conception. It adds another to the cases constantly occurring, of the
human mind being made the measure of Nature. We are obliged to think in
sequence; it is the law of our minds that we must consider subjects
separately, one after another: _therefore_ Nature must be
serial--_therefore_ the sciences must be classifiable in a succession.
See here the birth of the notion, and the sole evidence of its truth.
Men have been obliged when arranging in books their schemes of education
and systems of knowledge, to choose _some_ order or other. And from
inquiring what is the best order, have naturally fallen into the belief
that there is an order which truly represents the facts--have persevered
in seeking such an order; quite overlooking the previous question
whether it is likely that Nature has consulted the convenience of
book-making.

For German philosophers, who hold that Nature is "petrified
intelligence," and that logical forms are the foundations of all things,
it is a consistent hypothesis that as thought is serial, Nature is
serial; but that M. Comte, who is so bitter an opponent of all
anthropomorphism, even in its most evanescent shapes, should have
committed the mistake of imposing upon the external world an arrangement
which so obviously springs from a limitation of the human consciousness,
is somewhat strange. And it is the more strange when we call to mind
how, at the outset, M. Comte remarks that in the beginning "_toutes les
sciences sont cultivees simultanement par les memes esprits_;" that
this is "_inevitable et meme indispensable_;" and how he further remarks
that the different sciences are "_comme les diverses branches d'un tronc
unique_." Were it not accounted for by the distorting influence of a
cherished hypothesis, it would be scarcely possible to understand how,
after recognising truths like these, M. Comte should have persisted in
attempting to construct "_une echelle encyclopedique_."

The metaphor which M. Comte has here so inconsistently used to express
the relations of the sciences--branches of one trunk--is an
approximation to the truth, though not the truth itself. It suggests the
facts that the sciences had a common origin; that they have been
developing simultaneously; and that they have been from time to time
dividing and subdividing. But it does not suggest the yet more important
fact, that the divisions and subdivisions thus arising do