asses as it grows
to perfection; the first, the theological or imaginative stage, wherein
the mind inquires into final causes, and refers phenomena to special
providence; the second, the metaphysical, wherein the idea of supernatural
or personal causes being discarded, it seeks for abstract essences; the
third, the positive, wherein it rests content with generalized facts, and
does not ask for causes.(879) The first in its religious phase is
theistic; the second pantheistic; the third atheistic. The perfection of
science consists in reaching the third stage, wherein the knowledge is
strictly generalized from sensation. Having thus seized the law which
presides over intellectual development, and settled the limits of the
human reason to be confined to phenomena, agreeing in this respect with
the ideologists, and opposed to Cousin, he next offered a classification
of the sciences, commencing with the simplest, and showing that, as the
mind passes from the simple to the complex, the methods of investigation
multiply; accompanying his account by a delineation of the steps in each
case by which science attains perfection; and thus gradually ascending to
the science of man(880) and society, to which the preliminary
investigation had been the preface, designed to prepare the way for
showing how the science of society may be similarly brought into the
positive stage.

Such is the scheme of Comte. The very breadth of it possesses an
attraction; and if viewed merely as a logic of the sciences, it may justly
command attention. Many of the analyses which he supplies of the methods
and history of science are masterly; and his generalisations, even when
hasty, are fertile in suggestion. He was a most original and powerful
thinker; scientific rather than artistic. But his philosophy, viewed as a
whole, is a grand system of materialism which is silent about God, spirit,
personal immortality; diametrically opposed to Christianity, in that it
makes man's social duty higher than his individual, science the only
revelation, demonstration the only authority, nature's laws the only
providence, and obedience to them the only piety; and destroys
Christianity by destroying the possibility of its proof. In later life
this distinguished man, feeling the unutterable yearnings of the religious
sentiment, and the necessity that his philosophy should afford
satisfaction to them, invented the system of religion developed in his
catechism;(881) in whic