lar institution, condemning
indefinitely all superiors to an arbitrary dependence on the
multitude of their inferiors, by a sort of transference to the
people of the much-reprobated right of kings."

[49] "There is," says M. Comte here in a note, which consists
of an extract from a previous work--"there is no liberty of
conscience in astronomy, in physics, in chemistry, even in
physiology; every one would think it absurd not to give credit
to the principles established in these sciences by competent
men. If it is otherwise in politics, it is because the ancient
principles having fallen; and new ones not being yet formed,
there are, properly speaking, in this interval no established
principles."

As our author had shown how the _theologic_ philosophy was inconsistent
often with itself, so, in criticising the _metaphysics_, he exposes here
also certain self-contradictions. He reproaches it with having, in its
contests with the old system, endeavoured, at each stage, to uphold and
adopt some of the elementary principles of that very system it was
engaged in destroying.

"Thus," he says, "there arose a Christianity more and more
simplified, and reduced at length to a vague and powerless
theism, which, by a strange medley of terms, the metaphysicians
distinguished by the title of _natural religion_, as if all
religion was not inevitably _supernatural_. In pretending to
direct the social reorganization after this vain conception,
the metaphysic school, notwithstanding its destination purely
revolutionary, has always implicitly adhered, and does so,
especially and distinctly, at the present day, to the most
fundamental principle of the ancient political doctrine--that
which represents the social order as necessarily reposing on a
theological basis. This is now the most evident, and the most
pernicious inconsistency of the metaphysic doctrine. Armed with
this concession, the school of Bossuet and De Maistre will
always maintain an incontestable logical superiority over the
irrational detractors of Catholicism, who, while they proclaim
the want of a religious organization, reject, nevertheless, the
elements indispensable to its realization. By such a concession
the revolutionary school concur in effect, at the present day,
with the retrograde, in preventing a right or