With relation to the _past_, and in one point of view--namely, so far as regards the development of man in his speculative career--our Sociologist has endeavoured to supply a law which shall meet the peculiar exigencies of his case, and enable him to take a scientific survey of the history of a changeful and progressive being. At the threshold of his work we encounter the announcement of a _new law_, which has regulated the development of the human mind from its rudest state of intellectual existence. As this law lies at the basis of M. Comte's system--as it is perpetually referred to throughout his work--as it is by this law he proceeds to view history in a scientific manner--as, moreover, it is by aid of this law that he undertakes to explain the _provisional existence_ of all theology, explaining it in the past, and removing it from the future--it becomes necessary to enter into some examination of its claims, and we must request our readers' attention to the following statement of it:--
"In studying the entire development of the human intelligence in its different spheres of activity, from its first efforts the most simple up to our own days, I believe I have discovered a great fundamental law, to which it is subjected by an invariable necessity, and which seems to me capable of being firmly established, whether on those proofs which are furnished by a knowledge of our organization, or on those historical verifications which result from an attentive examination of the past. The law consists in this--that each of our principal conceptions, each branch of our knowledge, passes successively through three different states of theory: the _theologic_, or fictitious; the _metaphysic_, or abstract; the scientific, or _positive_. In other terms, the human mind, by its nature, employs successively, in each of its researches, three methods of philosophizing, the character of which is essentially different, and even radically opposed; at first the theologic method, then the metaphysical, and last the positive method. Hence three distinct philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, which mutually exclude each other; the first is the necessary starting-point of the human intelligence; the third is its fixed and definite state; the second is destined to serve the purpose only of transition.