co-ordinated and coherent body of doctrine. This is what had not yet
been done for sociology; and the hope of effecting it was, from his
early years, the prompter and incentive of all M. Comte's philosophic
labours.

It was with a view to this that he undertook that wonderful
systematization of the philosophy of all the antecedent sciences, from
mathematics to physiology, which, if he had done nothing else, would
have stamped him, in all minds competent to appreciate it, as one of the
principal thinkers of the age. To make its nature intelligible to those
who are not acquainted with it, we must explain what we mean by the
philosophy of a science, as distinguished from the science itself. The
proper meaning of philosophy we take to be, what the ancients understood
by it--the scientific knowledge of Man, as an intellectual, moral, and
social being. Since his intellectual faculties include his knowing
faculty, the science of Man includes everything that man can know, so
far as regards his mode of knowing it: in other words, the whole
doctrine of the conditions of human knowledge. The philosophy of a
Science thus comes to mean the science itself, considered not as to its
results, the truths which it ascertains, but as to the processes by
which the mind attains them, the marks by which it recognises them, and
the co-ordinating and methodizing of them with a view to the greatest
clearness of conception and the fullest and readiest availibility for
use: in one word, the logic of the science. M. Comte has accomplished
this for the first five of the fundamental sciences, with a success
which can hardly be too much admired. We never reopen even the least
admirable part of this survey, the volume on chemistry and biology
(which was behind the actual state of those sciences when first written,
and is far in the rear of them now), without a renewed sense of the
great reach of its speculations, and a conviction that the way to a