experience. The distinctive attributes of the two are summed up by M.
Comte in the expression, that concrete science relates to Beings, or
Objects, abstract science to Events.[2]

The concrete sciences are inevitably later in their development than the
abstract sciences on which they depend. Not that they begin later to be
studied; on the contrary, they are the earliest cultivated, since in our
abstract investigations we necessarily set out from spontaneous facts.
But though we may make empirical generalizations, we can form no
scientific theory of concrete phaenomena until the laws which govern and
explain them are first known; and those laws are the subject of the
abstract sciences. In consequence, there is not one of the concrete
studies (unless we count astronomy among them) which has received, up to
the present time, its final scientific constitution, or can be accounted
a science, except in a very loose sense, but only materials for science:
partly from insufficiency of facts, but more, because the abstract
sciences, except those at the very beginning of the scale, have not
attained the degree of perfection necessary to render real concrete
sciences possible.

Postponing, therefore, the concrete sciences, as not yet formed, but
only tending towards formation, the abstract sciences remain to be
classed. These, as marked out by M. Comte, are six in number; and the
principle which he proposes for their classification is admirably in
accordance with the conditions of our study of Nature. It might have
happened that the different classes of phaenomena had depended on laws
altogether distinct; that in changing from one to another subject of
scientific study, the student left behind all the laws he previously
knew, and passed under the dominion of a totally new set of
uniformities. The sciences would then have been wholly independent of