All this “craves wary walking.”  It is a trying course, this method, for the uninitiated.  How it strains the mind by the very limitations it imposes on its outlook!  How mysterious is this very sharp, and well-defined separation from all mystery!  How giddy is this path that leads always so close over the unknowable!  Giddy as that bridge of steel, framed like a scimitar, and as fine, which the faithful Moslem, by the aid of his Prophet, will pass with triumph on his way to Paradise.  But of our bridge, it cannot be said that it has one foot on earth and one in heaven.  Apparently, it has no foundation whatever; it rises from cloud, it is lost in cloud, and it spans an inpenetrable abyss.  A mist, which no wind disperses, involves both extremities of our intellectual career, and we are seen to pass like shadows across the fantastic, inexplicable interval.

We now open the fourth volume, which is emblazoned with the title of Physique Social.  And here we will at once extract a passage, which, if our own remarks have been hitherto of an unattractive character, shall reward the reader for his patience.  It is taken from that portion of the work—­perhaps the most lucid and powerful of the whole—­where, in order to demonstrate the necessity of his new science of Sociology, M. Comte enters into a review of the two great political parties which, with more or less distinctness, divide every nation of Europe; his intention being to show that both of them are equally incompetent to the task of organizing society.  We shall render our quotation as brief as the purpose of exposition will allow:—­

“It is impossible to deny that the political world is intellectually in a deplorable condition.  All our ideas of order are hitherto solely borrowed from the ancient system of religious and military power, regarded especially in its constitution, catholic and feudal; a doctrine which, from the philosophic point of view of this treatise, represents incontestably the theologic state of the social science.  All our ideas of progress continue to be exclusively deduced from a philosophy purely negative, which, issuing from Protestantism, has taken in the last age its final form and complete development; the doctrines of which constitute, in reality, the metaphysic state of politics.  Different classes of society adopt the one or the other of these, just as they are disposed to feel chiefly the want of conservation or that of amelioration.  Rarely, it is true, do these antagonist doctrines present themselves in all their plenitude, and with their primitive homogeneity; they are found less and less in this form, except in minds purely speculative.  But the monstrous medley which men attempt in our days of their incompatible principles, cannot evidently be endowed with any virtue foreign to the elements which compose it, and tends only, in fact, to their mutual neutralization.

“However pernicious may be at