Perhaps our readers have all this while suspected that we are acting in a somewhat captious manner towards M. Comte; they have, perhaps, concluded that this author could not have here required their assent, strictly speaking, to a law, but that he used the term vaguely, as many writers have done—­meaning nothing more by it than a course of events which has frequently been observed to take place; and under this impression they may be more disposed to receive the measure of truth contained in it than to cavil at the form of the statement.  But indeed M. Comte uses the language of science in no such vague manner; he requires the same assent to this law that we give to any one of the recognized laws of science—­to that of gravitation for instance, to which he himself likens it, pronouncing it, in a subsequent part of his work, to have been as incontrovertibly established.  Upon this law, think what we may of it, M. Comte leans throughout all his progress; he could not possibly dispense with it; on its stability depends his whole social science; by it, as we have already intimated, he becomes master of the past and of the future; and an appreciation of its necessity to him, at once places us at that point of view from which M. Comte contemplates our mundane affairs.

It is his object to put the scientific method in complete possession of the whole range of human thought, especially of the department, hitherto unreduced to subjection, of social phenomena.  Now there is a great rival in the field—­theology—­which, besides imparting its own supernatural tenets, influences our modes of thinking on almost all social questions.  Theology cannot itself be converted into a branch of science; all those tenets by which it sways the hopes and fears of men are confessedly above the sphere of science:  if science, therefore, is to rule absolutely, it must remove theology.  But it can only remove by explaining; by showing how it came there, and how, in good time, it is destined to depart.  If the scientific method is entirely to predominate, it must explain religion, as it must explain every thing that exists, or has existed; and it must also reveal the law of its departure—­otherwise it cannot remain sole mistress of the speculative mind.  Such is the office which the law of development we have just considered is intended to fulfil; how far it is capable of accomplishing its purpose we must now leave our readers to decide.

Having thus, as he presumes, cleared the ground for the absolute and exclusive dominion of the positive method, M. Comte proceeds to erect the hierarchy, as he very descriptively calls it, of the several sciences.  His classification of these is based on the simplest and most intelligible principle.  We think that we rather add to, than diminish from, the merits of this classification, when we say, that it is such as seems spontaneously to arise to any reflective mind engaged in a review of human knowledge.  Commencing with the most simple, general, and independent laws, it proceeds to those which are more complicated, which presume the existence of other laws; in such manner that at every stage of our scientific progress we are supporting ourselves on the knowledge acquired in the one preceding.