for grouping phaenomena. This appears very curiously in his chapters on
the philosophy of Chemistry. He recommends, as a judicious use of "the
degree of liberty left to our intelligence by the end and purpose of
positive science," that we should accept as a convenient generalization
the doctrine that all chemical composition is between two elements only;
that every substance which our analysis decomposes, let us say into four
elements, has for its immediate constituents two hypothetical
substances, each compounded of two simpler ones. There would have been
nothing to object to in this as a scientific hypothesis, assumed
tentatively as a means of suggesting experiments by which its truth may
be tested. With this for its destination, the conception, would have
been legitimate and philosophical; the more so, as, if confirmed, it
would have afforded an explanation of the fact that some substances
which analysis shows to be composed of the same elementary substances
in the same proportions, differ in their general properties, as for
instance, sugar and gum.[10] And if, besides affording a reason for
difference between things which differ, the hypothesis had afforded a
reason for agreement between things which agree; if the intermediate
link by which the quaternary compound was resolved into two binary ones,
could have been so chosen as to bring each of them within the analogies
of some known class of binary compounds (which it is easy to suppose
possible, and which in some particular instances actually happens);[11]
the universality of binary composition would have been a successful
example of an hypothesis in anticipation of a positive theory, to give
a direction to inquiry which might end in its being either proved or
abandoned. But M. Comte evidently thought that even though it should
never be proved--however many cases of chemical composition might always
remain in which the theory was still as hypothetical as at first--so
long as it was not actually disproved (which it is scarcely in the
nature of the case that it should ever be) it would deserve to be