l realities. Thus, if you asked Aristotle
why a vegetable grew, he would reply that it had a "nutritive soul," or
principle, which enabled it to assimilate food. If one asked why heavy
bodies fall, or why flame and smoke ascend, the answer would be because
everything tends to go to its _natural_ place, implying, thereby, that
there was some occult power or tendency in bodies to behave in certain
definite ways. Those were the days of the time-honoured legends about
Nature "abhorring a vacuum," tolerating no "breaks," and the wonders of
her "curative force". These phrases about abstractions were held to be
adequate explanations of any of the facts about nature or man.

At length, there came the period when men demanded a straightforward
answer to plain questions, and refused to acquiesce in the reply that
opium puts us to sleep because there is a _dormitive virtue_ resident
in it. The powers of observation and experiment having increased, it
became possible by scientific test and analysis to satisfy the desire
for a more immediate knowledge, and thus to discover, for example, that
water is water, not because it possesses the form of _aquosity_, as the
Scholastics would have said, but because it is chemically composed of
oxygen and hydrogen. This last stage Comte called the "positive," and
hence we perceive what he means when he calls his entire system by that
name. It marks his conviction that those methods which are so
successful in the discovery of truth in scientific matters should be
applied to the solution of the problems of sociology and religion. In
other words, "positive" and scientific are practically synonymous
terms, the system pledging its followers to hold nothing which is not
its own evidence, to abandon all attempts to know anything which is not
phenomenal, that is, an object of sense-experience, and consequently to
disavow metaphysics as practically equivalent to the unreal. Thus, for
Comte, sociology, of which he may truthfully be described as the
founder, is as much a science as chemistry or astronomy. It deals with
its subject-matter, man, in precisely the same way as the astronomer
with the stars. And the same is also true of religion.

Such is the famous _Law of the three States_, which has always been
treated by friend and foe as the key to the Comtean philosophy. It
only concerns us now to describe the use he made of it in abolishing
the belief in God, and thus attempting to revolutionis