SOURCE: "Conclusion," in The Philosophy of August Comte, Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Lim., 1903, pp. 343-63.

In the following essay, Levy-Bruhl contrasts Comte's philosophy with the metaphysics that preceded it.

At the end of the Cours de philosophie positive Comte has himself summed up the results which he believed himself to have established. In the first place it is, from the intellectual point of view (which at first takes precedence of all others, although, in the positive state, the mind must be subject to the heart), a "perfect mental coherence which, as yet, has never been able to exist in a like degree," not even in the primitive period when man explained the phenomena of nature by the action of wills. For already, in this period, although imperceptibly, the positive spirit was making itself felt, while, in the positive period, nothing will subsist of the theological and metaphysical mode of...