is
own value as a scientific critic does he afford, by whom we are informed
that phrenology is a great science, and psychology a chimaera; that Gall
was one of the great men of his age, and that Cuvier was "brilliant but
superficial"![16] How unlucky must one consider the bold speculator who,
just before the dawn of modern histology--which is simply the
application of the microscope to anatomy--reproves what he calls "the
abuse of microscopic investigations," and "the exaggerated credit"
attached to them; who, when the morphological uniformity of the tissues
of the great majority of plants and animals was on the eve of being
demonstrated, treated with ridicule those who attempt to refer all
tissues to a "tissu generateur," formed by "le chimerique et
inintelligible assemblage d'une sorte de monades organiques, qui
seraient des lors les vrais elements primordiaux de tout corps
vivant;"[17] and who finally tells us, that all the objections against a
linear arrangement of the species of living beings are in their essence
foolish, and that the order of the animal series is "necessarily
linear,"[18] when the exact contrary is one of the best-established and
the most important truths of zoology. Appeal to mathematicians,
astronomers, physicists,[19] chemists, biologists, about the
"Philosophie Positive," and they all, with one consent, begin to make
protestation that, whatever M. Comte's other merits, he has shed no
light upon the philosophy of their particular studies.

To be just, however, it must be admitted that even M. Comte's most
ardent disciples are content to be judiciously silent about his
knowledge or appreciation of the sciences themselves, and prefer to base
their master's claims to scientific authority upon his "law of the three
states," and his "classification of the sciences." But here, also, I
must join issue with them as completely as others--notably Mr. Herbert
Spencer--have done before me. A critical examination of what M. Comte
has to say about the "law of the three states" brings out nothing but a
series of more or less contradictory statements of an imperfectly
apprehended truth; and his "classification of the sciences," whether
regarded historically or logically, is, in my judgment, absolutely
worthless.

Let us consider the law of "the three states" as it is put before us in
the opening of the first Lecon of the "Philosophie Positive:"--

"En etudiant ainsi le developpement total de l'intellig