the more elevated sentiments, and
the intellectual faculties; could it be rationally inferred from this
concession that human nature must necessarily develop itself after a
certain order or method, and especially in the precise way that is
indicated in M. Comte's law? Would it prove that Man must needs pass,
in the process of his mental and social development, through _three_
distinct and successive stages,--the preparatory Theological state, the
transitory Metaphysical state, and the final Positive state? Would it
prove that Religion must first exist as Fetishism, then as Polytheism,
then as Monotheism, and thereafter disappear from the earth altogether
on the advent of M. Comte? He seems to think that there is a real
connection between the cerebral theory and his great fundamental law;
but it is not easy for a common reader to discern or to explain it.
Considering the cranium, according to what he conceives to be the true
anatomical theory, as simply a prolongation of the vertebral
column,--the primitive centre of the whole nervous system,--he argues
that the functions, intellectual and emotional, which are proper to the
upper and anterior parts of it, are less energetic than the animal
propensities, whose organs lie in the lower and posterior region, just
in proportion as they are further removed from the spine; and that, for
this reason, the latter must first come into action, then the
intermediate organs of sentiment, and, last of all, the intellectual
powers. And this doctrine he applies to the verification both of his
otherwise admirable classification of the Sciences, and of his far more
doubtful law of human development. We conceive that if it were
applicable at all to the problem of human progress, it might possibly be
applied to indicate the probable development of an _individual mind_, in
the successive stages of infancy, youth, and manhood; but that it does
not admit of the same application to _the history of the race_,
otherwise than by the aid of a very fanciful analogy. We have no faith
in the _a priori_ methods of constructing the chart of human history,
and tracing the necessary course of social progress, which have recently
become so popular in Germany and France. We cannot, with M. Comte,
undertake to solve the problem,--Given three lobes of the brain,
representing the propensities, affections, and intellectual powers, but
differing from each other in size and situation, what will be the future
histo