usly absurd
conceptions and theories which ever were solemnly propounded by
thoughtful men. "We think M. Comte as great as either of these
philosophers, and hardly more extravagant. Were we to speak our whole
mind, we should call him superior to them: though not intrinsically, yet
by the exertion of equal intellectual power in a more advanced state of
human preparation; but also in an age less tolerant of palpable
absurdities, and to which those he has committed, if not in themselves
greater, at least appear more ridiculous.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See the Chapter on Efficient Causes in Reid's "Essays on the Active
Powers," which is avowedly grounded on Newton's ideas.

[2] Mr Herbert Spencer, who also distinguishes between abstract and
concrete sciences, employs the terms in a different sense from that
explained above. He calls a science abstract when its truths are merely
ideal; when, like the truths of geometry, they are not exactly true of
real things--or, like the so-called law of inertia (the persistence in
direction and velocity of a motion once impressed) are "involved" in
experience but never actually seen in it, being always more or less
completely frustrated. Chemistry and biology he includes, on the
contrary, among concrete sciences, because chemical combinations and
decompositions, and the physiological action of tissues, do actually
take place (as our senses testify) in the manner in which the scientific
propositions state them to take place. We will not discuss the logical
or philological propriety of either use of the terms abstract and
concrete, in which twofold point of view very few of the numerous
acceptations of these words are entirely defensible: but of the two
distinctions M. Comte's answers to by far the deepest and most vital
difference. Mr Spencer's is open to the radical objection, that it
classifies truths not according to their subject-matter or their mutual
relations, but according to an unimportant difference in the manner in
which we come to know them. Of what consequence is it that the law of
inertia (considered as an exact truth) is not generalized from our
direct perceptions, but inferred by combining with the movements which
we see, those which we should see if it were not for the disturbing
causes? In either case we are equally certain that it _is_ an exact
truth: for every dynamical law is perfectly fulfilled even when it seems
to be counteracted. There must, we shoul