There are many things eminently characteristic of M. Comte's second
career, in this revision of the results of his first. Under the head of
Biology, and for the better combination of that science with Sociology
and Ethics, he found that he required a new system of Phrenology, being
justly dissatisfied with that of Gall and his successors. Accordingly he
set about constructing one _è priori_, grounded on the best enumeration
and classification he could make of the elementary faculties of our
intellectual, moral, and animal nature; to each of which he assigned an
hypothetical place in the skull, the most conformable that he could to
the few positive facts on the subject which he considered as
established, and to the general presumption that functions which react
strongly on one another must have their organs adjacent: leaving the
localities avowedly to be hereafter verified, by anatomical and
inductive investigation. There is considerable merit in this attempt,
though it is liable to obvious criticisms, of the same nature as his own
upon Gall. But the characteristic thing is, that while presenting all
this as hypothesis waiting for verification, he could not have taken its
truth more completely for granted if the verification had been made. In
all that he afterwards wrote, every detail of his theory of the brain is
as unhesitatingly asserted, and as confidently built upon, as any other
doctrine of science. This is his first great attempt in the "Subjective
Method," which, originally meaning only the subordination of the pursuit
of truth to human uses, had already come to mean drawing truth itself
from the fountain of his own mind. He had become, on the one hand,
almost indifferent to proof, provided he attained theoretic coherency,
and on the other, serenely confident that even the guesses which
originated with himself could not but come out true.

There is one point in his later view of the sciences, which appears to