uch questions. Our author,
for instance, after satisfying himself that marriage is a fundamental
law of society, is incapable of tolerating any infraction whatever of
this law in the shape of a divorce. He would give to it the rigidity of
a law of mechanics; he finds there should be cohesion here, and he will
not listen to a single case of separation: forgetful that a law of
society may even be the more stable for admitting exceptions which
secure for it the affection of those by whom it is to be reverenced and
obeyed.

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