His hierarchy being erected, he next enters on a review of the several received sciences, marking throughout the successful, or erroneous, application of the positive method.  This occupies three volumes.  It is a portion of the work which we are restricted from entering on; nor shall we deviate from the line we have prescribed to ourselves.  But before opening the fourth volume, in which he treats of social physics, it will not be beside our object to take a glance at the method itself, as applied in the usual field of scientific investigation, to nature, as it is called—­to inorganic matter, to vegetable and animal life.

We are not here determining the merits of M. Comte in his exposition of the scientific method; we take it as we find it; and, in unsophisticated mood, we glance at the nature of this mental discipline—­to make room for which, it will be remembered, so wide a territory is to be laid waste.

Facts, or phenomena, classed according to their similitude or the law of their succession—­such is the material of science.  All enquiry into causes, into substance, into being, pronounced impertinent and nugatory; the very language in which such enquiries are couched not allowed, perhaps, to have a meaning—­such is the supreme dictate of the method, and all men yield to it at least a nominal submission.  Very different is the aspect which science presents to us in these severe generalities, than when she lectures fluently before gorgeous orreries; or is heard from behind a glittering apparatus, electrical or chemical; or is seen, gay and sportive as a child, at her endless game of unwearying experiment.  Here she is the harsh and strict disciplinarian.  The museful, meditative spirit passes from one object of its wonder to another, and finds, at every pause it makes, that science is as strenuous in forbidding as in satisfying enquiry.  The planet rolls through space—­ask not how!—­the mathematician will tell you at what rate it flies—­let his figures suffice.  A thousand subtle combinations are taking place around you, producing the most marvellous transformations—­the chemist has a table of substances, and a table of proportions—­names and figures both—­why these transmutations take place, is a question you should be ashamed to ask.  Plants spring up from the earth, and grow, and blossom at your feet, and you look on with delight, and an unsubduable wonder, and in a heedless moment you ask what is life? Science will generalize the fact to you—­give you its formula for the expression of growth, decomposition, and recomposition, under circumstances not as yet very accurately collected.  Still you stand gazing at the plant which a short while since stole through a crevice of the earth, and taking to itself, with such subtle power of choice, from the soil or the air, the matter that it needed, fashioned it to the green leaf and the hanging blossom.  In vain!  Your scientific monitor calls you from futile reveries,