the moon and night, &c., &c. Man is carrying on processes of abstract reasoning in thus reducing the number of wills animating phenomena and organizing them into classes. Later we shall see in Monotheism, the last stage of Theologism, that owing to advancing knowledge brought about by conception predominating over perception, these wills are reduced to one. To render this one will equal to the task of regulating all things connected with man and the world, all kinds of attributes are conceived as belonging to it-attributes which render it both anomolous and inconsistent. The god of Monotheism is a human being lifted up to the transcendent stage. The Monotheist conception was one which not only did not collide with, but it favoured the growth of the conception of Law which, first formulated by the Philosophers of Polytheist Greece and Rome, was popularized by Catholicism.

That there were certain uniformities in the external order was felt long before Greco-Roman times in Egypt and India, and also in China. But Thales was the founder of ancient Science and it is to Greek Geometers, from the great Archimides downwards, that we are indebted for the conception of mathematical laws which form the base of all physical science. With the advance of science, or organized knowledge, from the purely physical to the human sciences, the existence of Monotheism is, on its intellectual side, ever more and more imperilled. The domain of Theologism thus becomes narrowed to some outlying province which human knowledge has not yet laid claims to,

but is encroaching upon it and rendering its ownership precarious. Ultimately it is seen and felt that Theologism must give away before the widespread conception of Law-law in the physical and law in the human order-a conception which renders Monotheism not only a vain but, what is more, a useless belief.

Man's theory of the external order did not pass at once from the Theological to the Positive stage -his conceptions were not sufficiently matured and could only become so through the Metaphysical, or transitional phase. He could not, at one leap, pass from the theory that God wills that phenomena should happen in such and such a way, to the bare statement of the observed uniformities and resemblances in that order. Only by and through the Metaphysical stage was this possible. Man in that stage attributed to phenomena certain entities, principles, and affinites. Nature, in Metaphysical Physics, was said to abhor a vacuum (the abhorrence ceased at an elevation of thirty feet); opium had a dormitive principle, (see Molière's plays); gold an auriferous principle; certain gasses, fluids, or solids had an affinity There was vis for (or united with) each other.

inertia, an immaterial principle, a life principle, a death principle, a phlogistic principle, a caloric principle &c. And when these principles, the existence of which was unquestioned, proved unequal or insufficient as explanations, then the entity Nature was brought in to account for what human ingenuity No one who had not discovered or divined. knows anything of the progress of human knowledge

but is familiar with these phrases, which explain nothing and need themselves to be explained.

In the third and last stage-the Positive, man endeavours to interpret the external and human orders by and through their ascertained laws only. He seeks to find out how phenomena occur, not why they occur, and discards all search after causes first or final, the knowledge of such causes being inaccessible. He no longer looks for Wills and Entities in the world; the conceptions God and Nature are to him equally gratuitous and unmeaning. He no longer seeks to explain the world but to observe and understand it, to note and record the uniformities and resemblances which pervade phenomena.

He no more seeks by praise or petitions, to many wills, or one, for the laws under which he lives to be made favourable to him, but he accepts the facts of the external order and regulates his life by them. He can modify those laws in their secondary if not in their primary aspects, and he sets about discovering how to do this for the benefit of himself and his fellows. In fine, he conquers Nature by obeying her, as Bacon aptly says. He accepts the Inevitable and bows with reverence, if not with awe, before it, recognizing, as was recognized in Greece, that Fate is before and above all the gods. This recognition made, his time is free for useful problems, problems which bear upon human well-being and are calculated to raise and ennoble Humanity.

Such, in outline, is Comte's Laws of the Three Stages. All the sciences bear marks of their

passage through the Three Stages. The corollary to it is his Classification of the Sciences, commencing with Mathematics and closing with Sociology. The rise and growth of Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry, which form Cosmology, the External order, (Comte treats Mathematics as the Logic of all the Physical Sciences)-of Biology and Sociology, or the Human order, are traced by Comte in a way of which we can give but a faint conception here. It is obvious to the reader that all knowledge can be classified as either Astronomical, Physical, Chemical, Biological, or Sociological. There are no facts which cannot be placed under one or the other of these categories, rising from the simplest and most general facts about number and form to the most complex and special phenomena of Social Science. The Sciences as they rise in the scale are characterized by decreasing generality and increasing dignity. The facts which form their subject matter have these qualities. Comte shows that the Sciences rose in this way, and that their historical development coincides with their dogmatical arrangement. It is obvious to the reader that Mathematics deal with simple problems, those of number and form; Astronomy with problems of number and form no longer simple because complicated with motion; Physics with the problems of Astronomy and Mathematics complicated with those peculiar to it of weights, velocities, &c.; Chemistry, which treats of composition and decomposition, is occupied with Astronomical and Physical problems compli

d with those which are proper to Chemistry alone;

Biology deals with Astronomical, Physical and Chemical problems rendered still more complex with the phenomena of living bodies; and Sociology deals with problems which are Astronomical, Physical, Chemical, Biological and, most complex of all, Sociological also. Thus ever more and more complex do phenomena grow as they rise in the scale. And, it is seen at once, that for a man to be a competent Sociologist he must have had an Encyclopædic training in all the methods of the preceding sciences, that he must be a perfect master of their fundamental principles and relations. Now the methods increase with the complexity of the Sciences. In Astronomy we can use Observation merely. In Chemistry Experiment is superadded to Observation. The method of Comparison has full scope in Biology, while Sociology reveals its own newly discovered method of Historic Filiation. Sociology, or the science of the Social Organism, had no existence until Comte formulated its method, revealed its principles and laid its basis on all the preceding sciences. Henceforth its fundamental truths are as verifiable as those of the other sciences by those competently educated. The Statical part of Sociology was laid by Aristotle, and hardly any improvement was possible in his survey of those permanent fundamental relationships comprised in the Family, Language, Government, &c. which are implied by the existence of all societies worthy of the name. Of Social Dynamics, which deal with the laws of human progress, Aristotle knew nothing. Such laws could not be formulated until modern times when human