as the law of gravitation. Everything
in human society has passed, as has the individual man, through the
theological and then through the metaphysical stage, and so arrives at
the positive stage. In this last stage of thought nothing either of
superstition or of speculation will survive. Theology and metaphysics
Comte repeatedly characterises as the two successive stages of
nescience, unavoidable as preludes to science. Equally unavoidable is it
that science shall ultimately prevail in their place. The advance of
science having once begun, there is no possibility but that it will
ultimately possess itself of all. One hears the echo of this confidence
in Haeckel also. There is a persistence about the denial of any
knowledge whatsoever that goes beyond external facts, which ill comports
with the pretensions of positivism to be a philosophy. For its final
claim is not that it is content to rest in experimental science. On the
contrary, it would transform this science into a homogeneous doctrine
which is able to explain everything in the universe. This is but a _tour
de force_. The promise is fulfilled through the denial of the reality of
everything which science cannot explain. Comte was never willing to face
the fact that the very existence of knowledge has a noumenal as well as
a phenomenal side. The reasonableness of the universe is certainly a
conception which we bring to the observation of nature. If we did not
thus bring it with us, no mere observation of nature would ever give it
to us. It is impossible for science to get rid of the conception of
force, and ultimately of cause. There can be no phenomenon which is not
a manifestation of something. The very nomenclature falls into hopeless
confusion without these conceptions. Yet the moment we touch them we
transcend science and pass into the realm of philosophy. It is mere
juggling with words to say that our science has now become a philosophy.

The adjective 'positive' contains the same fallacy. Apparently Comte
meant by the choice of it to convey the sense that he would limit
research to phenomena in their orders of resemblance, co-existence and
succession. But to call the inquiry into phenomena positive, in the
sense that it alone deals with reality, to imply that the inquiry into
causes deals with that which has no reality, is to beg the question.
This is not a premise with which he may set out in the evolution of his
system.

Comte denied the accusation of mat