Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/577

COMTE. 555 to breaks, a tendency toward the best, a vis jncdicatrix, etc. Here belong, also, the vegetative soul of Aristotle, the vital force and the plastic impulse of modern investigators. Finally the positive stage is reached, when all such abstrac- tions, which are even yet conceived as half personal and acting voluntarily, are abandoned, and the unalterable and universally valid laws of phenomena established by obser- vation and experiment alone. But to explain the laws of nature themselves transcends, according to Comte, the fixed limits of human knowledge. The beginning of the world lies outside the region of the knowable, atheism is no better grounded than the thcistic hypothesis, and if Comte asserts that a blindly acting mechanism is less probable than a world-plan, he is conscious that he is expressing a mere con- jecture which can never be raised to the rank of a scientific theory. The origin and the end of things are insoluble problems, in answering which no progress has yet been made in spite of man's long thought about them. Only that which lies intermediate between the two inscrutable ter- mini of the world is an object of knowledge. It is not only the human mind in general that exhibits this advance from the theological, through the metaphys- ical, to the positive mode of thought, but each separate science goes through the same three periods — only that the various disciplines have developed with unequal rapidity. While some have already culminated in the positive method of treatment, others yet remain caught in the theological period of beginnings, and others still are in the metaphys- ical transition stage. Up to the present all three phases of development existf side by side, and even among the objects of the most highly developed sciences there are some which we continue to regard theologically ; these are the ones which we do not yet understand how to calculate, as the changes of the weather or the spread of epidemics. Which science first attained the positive state, and in what order have the others followed ? With this criterion Comte constructs his classification of the sciences^ in which, how- ever, he takes account only of those sciences which he calls abstract, that is, those which treat of "events" in dis- tinction from " objects.' The abstract sciences (as biology)