nment, not as a natural right, but as a means to important ends,
under the conditions and with the limitations which those ends impose.
The general result of M. Comte's criticism on the revolutionary
philosophy, is that he deems it not only incapable of aiding the
necessary reorganization of society, but a serious impediment thereto,
by setting up, on all the great interests of mankind, the mere negation
of authority, direction, or organization, as the most perfect state, and
the solution of all problems: the extreme point of this aberration being
reached by Rousseau and his followers, when they extolled the savage
state, as an ideal from which civilization was only a degeneracy, more
or less marked and complete.

The state of sociological speculation being such as has been
described--divided between a feudal and theological school, now effete,
and a democratic and metaphysical one, of no value except for the
destruction of the former; the problem, how to render the social science
positive, must naturally have presented itself, more or less distinctly,
to superior minds. M. Comte examines and criticises, for the most part
justly, some of the principal efforts which have been made by individual
thinkers for this purpose. But the weak side of his philosophy comes out
prominently in his strictures on the only systematic attempt yet made by
any body of thinkers, to constitute a science, not indeed of social
phenomena generally, but of one great class or division of them. We
mean, of course, political economy, which (with a reservation in favour
of the speculations of Adam Smith as valuable preparatory studies for
science) he deems unscientific, unpositive, and a mere branch of
metaphysics, that comprehensive category of condemnation in which he
places all attempts at positive science which are not in his opinion
directed by a right scientific method. Any one acquainted with the
writings of political economists need only read his few pages of
animadversions on them (iv. 193 to 205), to learn how extremely
superficial M. Comte can sometimes be. He affirms that they have added
nothing really new to the original _apercus_ of Adam Smith; when every
one who has read them knows that they have added so much as to have
changed the whole aspect of the science, besides rectifying and clearing
up in the most essential points the _apercus_ themselves. He lays an
almost puerile stress, for the purpose of disparagement, on the
discussions