a somewhat captious manner towards M. Comte; they have, perhaps,
concluded that this author could not have here required their assent,
strictly speaking, to a _law_, but that he used the term vaguely, as
many writers have done--meaning nothing more by it than a course of
events which has frequently been observed to take place; and under this
impression they may be more disposed to receive the measure of truth
contained in it than to cavil at the form of the statement. But indeed
M. Comte uses the language of science in no such vague manner; he
requires the same assent to this law that we give to any one of the
recognized laws of science--to that of gravitation for instance, to
which he himself likens it, pronouncing it, in a subsequent part of his
work, to have been as incontrovertibly established. Upon this law, think
what we may of it, M. Comte leans throughout all his progress; he could
not possibly dispense with it; on its stability depends his whole social
science; by it, as we have already intimated, he becomes master of the
past and of the future; and an appreciation of its necessity to him, at
once places us at that point of view from which M. Comte contemplates
our mundane affairs.

It is his object to put the scientific method in complete possession of
the whole range of human thought, especially of the department, hitherto
unreduced to subjection, of social phenomena. Now there is a great rival
in the field--theology--which, besides imparting its own supernatural
tenets, influences our modes of thinking on almost all social questions.
Theology cannot itself be converted into a branch of science; all those
tenets by which it sways the hopes and fears of men are confessedly
above the sphere of science: if science, therefore, is to rule
absolutely, it must remove theology. But it can only remove by
explaining; by showing how it came there, and how, in good time, it is
destined to depart. If the scientific method is entirely to predominate,