Soil, and Modes of Life; Physical inquiries into the influence of Heat,
Electricity, etc., on individuals and nations; Chemical investigations
into the nature of different kinds of Food, and their relations to the
animal economy, and hence to the career of Peoples; Geological
researches to discover the origin of the human Race, and its position in
the Animal Kingdom; questions of Physiology, of Social Life, of
Ethnology, of Metaphysics, of Religion; every problem, in fine, which
the world has been called to consider, forms a part of the record of its
progress and comes within the scope of History. As the Descriptology, or
verbal daguerreotyping of the Continuity of Society, and hence of the
Dynamical aspect of Concrete Sociology, History stands, then, in a
sense, at the head of the scale, omitting Theology, the true apex of the
pyramid of Sciences, which pyramid Comte has decapitated of this very
apex.

The problems which History is called to solve are therefore exceedingly
intricate and perplexing. The Generalizations of Chemistry, conducted,
as they must be, on our present basis of Knowledge, by the Inductive
Method, are involved in a degree of uncertainty, not only on account of
the complexity of their Phenomena, but also by reason of the absence of
any method of ascertaining when all the elements of a right
Generalization are obtained. In Geology, including Mineralogy, the
complexity increases, and the possibility of precision and certainty
decreases in the same ratio. This augmentation of complexity in the
Phenomena and proportionate diminution of exactitude and certainty in
respect to the Generalizations derived from them, continues at every
successive degree of the scale; so that when we arrive at History, all
hope of even proximate precision, and all expectation of anything like
positive Knowledge, except in the broadest outline and generalization,
by any application of the Inductive Method, has completely vanished.