but after an unknown duration of hard thought and violent controversy.
The period of decomposition, which has lasted, on his own computation,
from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the present, is not yet
terminated: the shell of the old edifice will remain standing until
there is another ready to replace it; and the new synthesis is barely
begun, nor is even the preparatory analysis completely finished. On
other occasions M. Comte is very well aware that the Method of a science
is not the science itself, and that when the difficulty of discovering
the right processes has been overcome, there remains a still greater
difficulty, that of applying them. This, which is true of all sciences,
is truest of all in Sociology. The facts being more complicated, and
depending on a greater concurrence of forces, than in any other science,
the difficulty of treating them deductively is proportionally increased,
while the wide difference between any one case and every other in some
of the circumstances which affect the result, makes the pretence of
direct induction usually no better than empiricism. It is therefore, out
of all proportion, more uncertain than in any other science, whether two
inquirers equally competent and equally disinterested will take the same
view of the evidence, or arrive at the same conclusion. When to this
intrinsic difficulty is added the infinitely greater extent to which
personal or class interests and predilections interfere with impartial
judgment, the hope of such accordance of opinion among sociological
inquirers as would obtain, in mere deference to their authority, the
universal assent which M. Comte's scheme of society requires, must be
adjourned to an indefinite distance.

M. Comte's own theory is an apt illustration of these difficulties,
since, though prepared for these speculations as no one had ever been
prepared before, his views of social regeneration even in the
rudimentary form in which they appear above-ground in this treatise (not