places all attempts at positive science which are not in his opinion
directed by a right scientific method. Any one acquainted with the
writings of political economists need only read his few pages of
animadversions on them (iv. 193 to 205), to learn how extremely
superficial M. Comte can sometimes be. He affirms that they have added
nothing really new to the original _aperçus_ of Adam Smith; when every
one who has read them knows that they have added so much as to have
changed the whole aspect of the science, besides rectifying and clearing
up in the most essential points the _aperçus_ themselves. He lays an
almost puerile stress, for the purpose of disparagement, on the
discussions about the meaning of words which are found in the best books
on political economy, as if such discussions were not an indispensable
accompaniment of the progress of thought, and abundant in the history of
every physical science. On the whole question he has but one remark of
any value, and that he misapplies; namely, that the study of the
conditions of national wealth as a detached subject is unphilosophical,
because, all the different aspects of social phaenomena acting and
reacting on one another, they cannot be rightly understood apart: which
by no means proves that the material and industrial phaenomena of
society are not, even by themselves, susceptible of useful
generalizations, but only that these generalizations must necessarily be
relative to a given form of civilization and a given stage of social
advancement. This, we apprehend, is what no political economist would
deny. None of them pretend that the laws of wages, profits, values,
prices, and the like, set down in their treatises, would be strictly
true, or many of them true at all, in the savage state (for example), or
in a community composed of masters and slaves. But they do think, with
good reason, that whoever understands the political economy of a country
with the complicated and manifold civilization of the nations of Europe,
can deduce without difficulty the political economy of any other state