accomplished it in the last three volumes of his Treatise. But the term
Positive is not, any more than Metaphysical, always used by M. Comte in
the same meaning. There never can have been a period in any science when
it was not in some degree positive, since it always professed to draw
conclusions from experience and observation. M. Comte would have been
the last to deny that previous to his own speculations, the world
possessed a multitude of truths, of greater or less certainty, on social
subjects, the evidence of which was obtained by inductive or deductive
processes from observed sequences of phaenomena. Nor could it be denied
that the best writers on subjects upon which so many men of the highest
mental capacity had employed their powers, had accepted as thoroughly
the positive point of view, and rejected the theological and
metaphysical as decidedly, as M. Comte himself. Montesquieu; even
Macchiavelli; Adam Smith and the political economists universally, both
in France and in England; Bentham, and all thinkers initiated by
him,--had a full conviction that social phaenomena conform to invariable
laws, the discovery and illustration of which was their great object as
speculative thinkers. All that can be said is, that those philosophers
did not get so far as M. Comte in discovering the methods best adapted
to bring these laws to light. It was not, therefore, reserved for M.
Comte to make sociological inquiries positive. But what he really meant
by making a science positive, is what we will call, with M. Littré,
giving it its final scientific constitution; in other words, discovering
or proving, and pursuing to their consequences, those of its truths
which are fit to form the connecting links among the rest: truths which
are to it what the law of gravitation is to astronomy, what the
elementary properties of the tissues are to physiology, and we will add
(though M. Comte did not) what the laws of association are to
psychology. This is an operation which, when accomplished, puts an end
to the empirical period, and enables the science to be conceived as a