dogma or an absolute principle, this criticism is just; but there is
also a Positive doctrine, without any pretension to being absolute,
which claims the direct participation of the governed in their own
government, not as a natural right, but as a means to important ends,
under the conditions and with the limitations which those ends impose.
The general result of M. Comte's criticism on the revolutionary
philosophy, is that he deems it not only incapable of aiding the
necessary reorganization of society, but a serious impediment thereto,
by setting up, on all the great interests of mankind, the mere negation
of authority, direction, or organization, as the most perfect state, and
the solution of all problems: the extreme point of this aberration being
reached by Rousseau and his followers, when they extolled the savage
state, as an ideal from which civilization was only a degeneracy, more
or less marked and complete.

The state of sociological speculation being such as has been
described--divided between a feudal and theological school, now effete,
and a democratic and metaphysical one, of no value except for the
destruction of the former; the problem, how to render the social science
positive, must naturally have presented itself, more or less distinctly,
to superior minds. M. Comte examines and criticises, for the most part
justly, some of the principal efforts which have been made by individual
thinkers for this purpose. But the weak side of his philosophy comes out
prominently in his strictures on the only systematic attempt yet made by
any body of thinkers, to constitute a science, not indeed of social
phenomena generally, but of one great class or division of them. We
mean, of course, political economy, which (with a reservation in favour
of the speculations of Adam Smith as valuable preparatory studies for
science) he deems unscientific, unpositive, and a mere branch of
metaphysics, that comprehensive category of condemnation in which he