“En troisieme lieu cette classification presente la propriete tres-remarquable de marquer exactement la perfection relative des differentes sciences, laquelle consiste essentiellement dans le degre de precision des connaissances et dans leur co-ordination plus ou moins intime."[26]

I am quite unable to understand the distinction which M. Comte endeavours to draw in this passage in spite of his amplifications further on.  Every science must consist of precise knowledge, and that knowledge must be co-ordinated into general proportions, or it is not science.  When M. Comte, in exemplification of the statement I have cited, says that “les phenomenes organiques ne comportent qu’une etude a la fois moins exacte et moins systematique que les phenomenes des corps bruts,” I am at a loss to comprehend what he means.  If I affirm that “when a motor nerve is irritated, the muscle connected with it becomes simultaneously shorter and thicker, without changing its volume,” it appears to me that the statement is as precise or exact (and not merely as true) as that of the physicist who should say, that “when a piece of iron is heated, it becomes simultaneously longer and thicker and increases in volume;” nor can I discover any difference, in point of precision, between the statement of the morphological law that “animals which suckle their young have two occipital condyles,” and the enunciation of the physical law that “water subjected to electrolysis is replaced by an equal weight of the gases, oxygen and hydrogen.”  As for anatomical or physiological investigation being less “systematic” than that of the physicist or chemist, the assertion is simply unaccountable.  The methods of physical science are everywhere the same in principle, and the physiological investigator who was not “systematic” would, on the whole, break down rather sooner than the inquirer into simpler subjects.

Thus M. Comte’s classification of the sciences, under all its aspects, appears to me to be a complete failure.  It is impossible, in an article which is already too long, to inquire how it may be replaced by a better; and it is the less necessary to do so, as a second edition of Mr. Spencer’s remarkable essay on this subject has just been published.  After wading through pages of the long-winded confusion and second-hand information of the “Philosophic Positive,” at the risk of a crise cerebrale—­it is as good as a shower-bath to turn to the “Classification of the Sciences,” and refresh oneself with Mr. Spencer’s profound thought, precise knowledge, and clear language.

II.  The second proposition to which I have committed myself, in the paper to which I have been obliged to refer so often, is, that the “Positive Philosophy” contains “a great deal which is as thoroughly antagonistic to the very essence of science as is anything in ultramontane Catholicism.”