e, that the universe was created, and even that it is
continuously governed, by an Intelligence, provided we admit that the
intelligent Governor adheres to fixed laws, which are only modified or
counteracted by other laws of the same dispensation, and are never
either capriciously or providentially departed from. Whoever regards
all events as parts of a constant order, each one being the invariable
consequent of some antecedent condition, or combination of conditions,
accepts fully the Positive mode of thought: whether he acknowledges or
not an universal antecedent on which the whole system of nature was
originally consequent, and whether that universal antecedent is
conceived as an Intelligence or not.

There is a corresponding misconception to be corrected respecting the
Metaphysical mode of thought. In repudiating metaphysics, M. Comte did
not interdict himself from analysing or criticising any of the abstract
conceptions of the mind. He was not ignorant (though he sometimes seemed
to forget) that such analysis and criticism are a necessary part of the
scientific process, and accompany the scientific mind in all its
operations. What he condemned was the habit of conceiving these mental
abstractions as real entities, which could exert power, produce
phaenomena, and the enunciation of which could be regarded as a theory
or explanation of facts. Men of the present day with difficulty believe
that so absurd a notion was ever really entertained, so repugnant is it
to the mental habits formed by long and assiduous cultivation of the
positive sciences. But those sciences, however widely cultivated, have
never formed the basis of intellectual education in any society. It is
with philosophy as with religion: men marvel at the absurdity of other
people's tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities remain in their own,
and the same man is unaffectedly astonished that words can be mistaken
for things, who is treating other words as if they were things every
time he opens his mouth to discuss. No one, unless entirely ignorant of
the history of thought, will deny that the mistaking of abstractions for
realities pervaded speculation all through antiquity and the middle
ages. The mistake was generalized and systematized in the famous Ideas
of Plato. The Aristotelians carried it on. Essences, quiddities, virtues
residing in things, were accepted as a _bona fide_ explanation of
phaenomena. Not only abstract qualities, but the concrete n