stinguishes M. Comte's work from all other courses of
philosophy, or treatises upon science, is the attempt to reduce to
the _scientific method_ of cogitation the affairs of human
society--morality, politics; in short, all those general topics which
occupy our solitary and perplexed meditation, or sustain the incessant
strife of controversy. These are to constitute a new science, to be
called _Social Physics_, or _Sociology_. To apply the Baconian, or, as
it is here called, the positive method, to man in all phases of his
existence--to introduce the same fixed, indissoluble, imperturbable
order in our ideas of morals, politics, and history, that we attain to
astronomy and mechanics, is the bold object of his labours. He does not
here set forth a model of human society based on scientific conclusions;
something of this kind is promised us in a future work; in the present
undertaking he is especially anxious to compel us to think on all such
topics in the scientific method, _and in no other_. For be it known,
that science is not only weak in herself, and has been hitherto
incompetent to the task of unravelling the complicate proceedings of
humanity, but she has also a great rival in the form of theologic
method, wherein the mind seeks a solution for its difficulties in a
power above nature. The human being has contracted an inveterate habit
of viewing itself as standing in a peculiar relation to a supreme
Architect and Governor of the world--a habit which in many ways, direct
and indirect, interferes, it seems, with the application of the positive
method. This habit is to be corrected; such supreme Architect and
Governor is to be dismissed from the imagination of men; science is to
supply the sole mode of thought, and humanity to be its only object.

We have called M. Comte's an extraordinary book, and this is an epithet
which our readers are already fully prepared to apply. But the book, in
our judgment, is extraordinary in more senses than one. It is as
remarkable for the great mental energy it displays, for its originality
and occasional profundity of thought, as it is for the astounding
conclusions to which it would conduct us, for its bold paradoxes, and
for what we can designate no otherwise than its egregious errors. As a
discipline of the mind, so far as a full appreciation is concerned of
the scientific method, it cannot be read without signal advantage. The
book is altogether an anomaly; exhibiting the strangest