subject, though for the purpose only of controversy, than they would be edified by a repetition of those reasonings which have long since brought conviction to their minds.  We will content ourselves, therefore, with this protest, and with adding—­as a fact of experience, which, in estimating a law of development, may with peculiar propriety be insisted on—­that hitherto no such incompatibility has made itself evident.  Hitherto science, or the method of thinking, which its cultivation requires and induces, has not shown itself hostile to the first great article of religion—­that on which revelation proceeds to erect all the remaining articles of our faith.  If it is a fact that, in rude times, men began their speculative career by assigning individual phenomena to the immediate causation of supernatural powers, it is equally a fact that they have hitherto, in the most enlightened times, terminated their inductive labours by assigning that unity and correlation which science points out in the universe of things to an ordaining intelligence.  We repeat, as a matter of experience, it is as rare in this age to find a reflective man who does not read thought in this unity and correlation of material phenomena, as it would have been, in some rube superstitious period, to discover an individual who refused to see, in any one of the specialities around him, the direct interference of a spirit or demon.  In our own country, men of science are rather to blame for a too detailed, a puerile and injudicious, manner of treating this great argument, than for any disposition to desert it.

Contenting ourselves with this protest, we proceed to the consideration of the new law.  That there is, in the statement here made of the course pursued in the development of speculative thought, a measure of truth; and that, in several subjects, the course here indicated may be traced, will probably, by every one who reads the foregoing extracts, be at once admitted.  But assuredly very few will read it without a feeling of surprise at finding what (under certain limitations) they would have welcomed in the form of a general observation, proclaimed to them as a law—­a scientific law—­which from its nature admits of no exception; at finding it stated that every branch of human knowledge must of necessity pass through these three theoretic stages.  In the case of some branches of knowledge, it is impossible to point out what can be understood as its several theologic and metaphysic stages; and even in cases where M. Comte has himself applied these terms, it is extremely difficult to assign to them a meaning in accordance with that which they bear in this statement of his law; as, for instance, in his application of them to his own science of social physics.  But we need not pause on this.  What a palpable fallacy it is to suppose, because M. Comte find the positive and theologic methods incompatible, that, historically speaking, and in the minds of men, which certainly admit of stranger commixtures than this, they should “mutually exclude each other”—­that, in short, men have not been all along, in various degrees and proportions, both theologic and positive.