work--perhaps the most lucid and powerful of the whole--where, in order
to demonstrate the necessity of his new science of Sociology, M. Comte
enters into a review of the two great political parties which, with more
or less distinctness, divide every nation of Europe; his intention being
to show that both of them are equally incompetent to the task of
organizing society. We shall render our quotation as brief as the
purpose of exposition will allow:--

"It is impossible to deny that the political world is
intellectually in a deplorable condition. All our ideas of
_order_ are hitherto solely borrowed from the ancient system of
religious and military power, regarded especially in its
constitution, catholic and feudal; a doctrine which, from the
philosophic point of view of this treatise, represents
incontestably the _theologic_ state of the social science. All
our ideas of _progress_ continue to be exclusively deduced from
a philosophy purely negative, which, issuing from
Protestantism, has taken in the last age its final form and
complete development; the doctrines of which constitute, in
reality, the _metaphysic_ state of politics. Different classes
of society adopt the one or the other of these, just as they
are disposed to feel chiefly the want of conservation or that
of amelioration. Rarely, it is true, do these antagonist
doctrines present themselves in all their plenitude, and with
their primitive homogeneity; they are found less and less in
this form, except in minds purely speculative. But the
monstrous medley which men attempt in our days of their
incompatible principles, cannot evidently be endowed with any
virtue foreign to the elements which compose it, and tends
only, in fact, to their mutual neutralization.