That which distinguishes M. Comte’s work from all other courses of philosophy, or treatises upon science, is the attempt to reduce to the scientific method of cogitation the affairs of human society—­morality, politics; in short, all those general topics which occupy our solitary and perplexed meditation, or sustain the incessant strife of controversy.  These are to constitute a new science, to be called Social Physics, or Sociology.  To apply the Baconian, or, as it is here called, the positive method, to man in all phases of his existence—­to introduce the same fixed, indissoluble, imperturbable order in our ideas of morals, politics, and history, that we attain to astronomy and mechanics, is the bold object of his labours.  He does not here set forth a model of human society based on scientific conclusions; something of this kind is promised us in a future work; in the present undertaking he is especially anxious to compel us to think on all such topics in the scientific method, and in no other.  For be it known, that science is not only weak in herself, and has been hitherto incompetent to the task of unravelling the complicate proceedings of humanity, but she has also a great rival in the form of theologic method, wherein the mind seeks a solution for its difficulties in a power above nature.  The human being has contracted an inveterate habit of viewing itself as standing in a peculiar relation to a supreme Architect and Governor of the world—­a habit which in many ways, direct and indirect, interferes, it seems, with the application of the positive method.  This habit is to be corrected; such supreme Architect and Governor is to be dismissed from the imagination of men; science is to supply the sole mode of thought, and humanity to be its only object.

We have called M. Comte’s an extraordinary book, and this is an epithet which our readers are already fully prepared to apply.  But the book, in our judgment, is extraordinary in more senses than one.  It is as remarkable for the great mental energy it displays, for its originality and occasional profundity of thought, as it is for the astounding conclusions to which it would conduct us, for its bold paradoxes, and for what we can designate no otherwise than its egregious errors.  As a discipline of the mind, so far as a full appreciation is concerned of the scientific method, it cannot be read without signal advantage.  The book is altogether an anomaly; exhibiting the strangest mixture that ever mortal work betrayed of manifold blunder and great intellectual power.  The man thinks at times with the strength of a giant.  Neither does he fail, as we have already gathered, in the rebellious and destructive propensities for which giants have been of old renowned.  Fable tells us how they could have no gods to reign over them, and how they threatened to drive Jupiter himself from the skies.  Our intellectual representative of the race nourishes designs of equal temerity.  Like his earth-born predecessors, his rage, we may be sure, will be equally vain.  No thunder will be heard, neither will the hills move to overwhelm him; but in due course of time he will lie down, and be covered up with his own earth, and the heavens will be as bright and stable as before, and still the abode of the same unassailable Power.