it is content to rest in experimental science.  On the contrary, it would transform this science into a homogeneous doctrine which is able to explain everything in the universe.  This is but a tour de force.  The promise is fulfilled through the denial of the reality of everything which science cannot explain.  Comte was never willing to face the fact that the very existence of knowledge has a noumenal as well as a phenomenal side.  The reasonableness of the universe is certainly a conception which we bring to the observation of nature.  If we did not thus bring it with us, no mere observation of nature would ever give it to us.  It is impossible for science to get rid of the conception of force, and ultimately of cause.  There can be no phenomenon which is not a manifestation of something.  The very nomenclature falls into hopeless confusion without these conceptions.  Yet the moment we touch them we transcend science and pass into the realm of philosophy.  It is mere juggling with words to say that our science has now become a philosophy.

The adjective ‘positive’ contains the same fallacy.  Apparently Comte meant by the choice of it to convey the sense that he would limit research to phenomena in their orders of resemblance, co-existence and succession.  But to call the inquiry into phenomena positive, in the sense that it alone deals with reality, to imply that the inquiry into causes deals with that which has no reality, is to beg the question.  This is not a premise with which he may set out in the evolution of his system.

Comte denied the accusation of materialism and atheism.  He did the first only by changing the meaning of the term materialism.  Materialism the world has supposed to be the view of man’s condition and destiny which makes these to begin and end in nature.  That certainly was Comte’s view.  The accusation of atheism also he avoids by a mere play on words.  He is not without a God.  Humanity is God.  Mankind is the positivist’s Supreme.  Altruism takes the place of devotion.  The devotion so long wasted upon a mere creature of the imagination, to whom it could do no good, he would now give to men who sorely need it and can obviously profit by it.  Surely the antithesis between nature and the supernatural, in the form in which Comte argues against it, is now abandoned by thoughtful people.  Equally the antithesis of altruism to the service of God is perverse.  It arouses one’s pity that Comte should not have seen how, in true religion these two things coalesce.

Moreover, this deification of mankind, in so far as it is not a sounding phrase, is an absurdity.  When Comte says, for example, that the authority of humanity must take the place of that of God, he has recognised that religion must have authority.  Indeed, the whole social order must have authority.  However, this is not for him, as we are accustomed to say, the authority of the truth and of the right.  There is no such abstraction as the truth, coming