which exists between the profession of the apothecary and that of the
physician. The former must know the range of _Materia Medica_, and the
contents of the _Pharmacopæia_, so far as is necessary to arrange the
various medicines in order, and deliver them when called for. The latter
must hold the different remedies in his knowledge, not as classified
upon the pharmaceutist's shelves, but as related to the various forms of
constantly changing vital Phenomena, in the midst of which he is to
detect their applicability to different forms of disease. Still more
analogous is Comte to the student of Natural History, whose business it
is, preëminently, to distribute and classify the Animal Kingdom, in
accordance with Generalizations which relate mainly to the form or type
of organization; while Buckle resembles the student of a higher rank,
who endeavors, in the midst of the play of passion and the actual
exhibitions of life itself, to read the nature of the mental and moral
development which exists beneath them and controls their workings.

It is evident that, up to a period subsequent to the publication of his
first volume, the writer of the 'History of Civilization' entertained
the fullest confidence in the ability of the Inductive Method to cope
with the ultimate problems of the Universe, and had high expectations of
being able, through its instrumentality, to reduce the whole body of our
Knowledge to a systematic whole, and to establish a Science of Sciences
which should be a Criterion of Truth, and the crowning intellectual
achievement of the ages. Whether Mr. Buckle fully comprehended the real
nature of the Science toward which he was aiming; whether he entirely
appreciated the radical and important change which its discovery would
necessarily introduce into our Methods of Investigation;--whether he
saw that it would be the inauguration of a true Deductive Mode of
reasoning, which would enable us to advance with incredible rapidity and
certainty into the arcana of those departments which he was then obliged