of history can be
made a science, should suspend his judgment until he has read these
volumes of M. Comte. We do not affirm that they would certainly change
his opinion; but we would strongly advise him to give them a chance.

We shall not attempt the vain task of abridgment, a few words are all we
can give to the subject. M. Comte confines himself to the main stream of
human progress, looking only at the races and nations that led the van,
and regarding as the successors of a people not their actual
descendants, but those who took up the thread of progress after them.
His object is to characterize truly, though generally, the successive
states of society through which the advanced guard of our species has
passed, and the filiation of these states on one another--how each grew
out of the preceding and was the parent of the following state. A more
detailed explanation, taking into account minute differences and more
special and local phaenomena, M. Comte does not aim at, though he does
not avoid it when it falls in his path. Here, as in all his other
speculations, we meet occasional misjudgments, and his historical
correctness in minor matters is now and then at fault; but we may well
wonder that it is not oftener so, considering the vastness of the field,
and a passage in one of his prefaces in which he says of himself that he
_rapidly_ amassed the materials for his great enterprise (vi. 34). This
expression in his mouth does not imply what it would in that of the
majority of men, regard being had to his rare capacity of prolonged and
concentrated mental labour: and it is wonderful that he so seldom gives
cause to wish that his collection of materials had been less "rapid."
But (as he himself remarks) in an inquiry of this sort the vulgarest
facts are the most important. A movement common to all mankind--to all
of them at least who do move--must depend on causes affecting them all;
and these, from the scale on which they operate, cannot require abstruse
research to bring them to light: they are not only seen, but best seen,
in the most obvious, most universal, and most undisputed phaenomena.
Accordingly M. Comte lays no claim to new views respecting the mere
facts of history; he takes them as he finds them, builds almost
exclusively on those concerning which there is no dispute, and only
tries what positive results can be obtained by combining them. Among
the vast mass of historical observations which he has grouped and