o speak, of his philosophy, and, unless it be true, he has
accomplished little; we cannot better employ part of our space than in
clearing it from misconception, and giving the explanations necessary to
remove the obstacles which prevent many competent persons from assenting
to it.

It is proper to begin by relieving the doctrine from a religious
prejudice. The doctrine condemns all theological explanations, and
replaces them, or thinks them destined to be replaced, by theories which
take no account of anything but an ascertained order of phaenomena. It
is inferred that if this change were completely accomplished, mankind
would cease to refer the constitution of Nature to an intelligent will
or to believe at all in a Creator and supreme Governor of the world.
This supposition is the more natural, as M. Comte was avowedly of that
opinion. He indeed disclaimed, with some acrimony, dogmatic atheism, and
even says (in a later work, but the earliest contains nothing at
variance with it) that the hypothesis of design has much greater
verisimilitude than that of a blind mechanism. But conjecture, founded
on analogy, did not seem to him a basis to rest a theory on, in a mature
state of human intelligence. He deemed all real knowledge of a
commencement inaccessible to us, and the inquiry into it an overpassing
of the essential limits of our mental faculties. To this point, however,
those who accept his theory of the progressive stages of opinion are not
obliged to follow him. The Positive mode of thought is not necessarily a
denial of the supernatural; it merely throws back that question to the
origin of all things. If the universe had a beginning, its beginning, by
the very conditions of the case, was supernatural; the laws of nature
cannot account for their own origin. The Positive philosopher is free to
form his opinion on the subject, according to the weight he attaches to
the analogies which are called marks of design, and to the general
traditions of the human race. The value of these evidences is indeed a
question for Positive philosophy, but it is not one upon which Positive
philosophers must necessarily be agreed. It is one of M. Comte's
mistakes that he never allows of open questions. Positive Philosophy
maintains that within the existing order of the universe, or rather of
the part of it known to us, the direct determining cause of every
phaenomenon is not supernatural but natural. It is compatible with this
to believ