next after chemistry, biology, the
empty mode of explanation by scholastic entities, such as a plastic
force, a vital principle, and the like, has been kept up even to the
present day. The German physiology of the school of Oken,
notwithstanding his acknowledged genius, is almost as metaphysical as
Hegel, and there is in France a quite recent revival of the Animism of
Stahl. These metaphysical explanations, besides their inanity, did
serious harm, by directing the course of positive scientific inquiry
into wrong channels. There was indeed nothing to prevent investigating
the mode of action of the supposed plastic or vital force by observation
and experiment; but the phrases gave currency and coherence to a false
abstraction and generalization, setting inquirers to look out for one
cause of complex phaenomena which undoubtedly depended on many.

According to M. Comte, chemistry entered into the positive stage with
Lavoisier, in the latter half of the last century (in a subsequent
treatise he places the date a generation earlier); and biology at the
beginning of the present, when Bichat drew the fundamental distinction
between nutritive or vegetative and properly animal life, and referred
the properties of organs to the general laws of the component tissues.
The most complex of all sciences, the Social, had not, he maintained,
become positive at all, but was the subject of an ever-renewed and
barren contest between the theological and the metaphysical modes of
thought. To make this highest of the sciences positive, and thereby
complete the positive character of all human speculations, was the
principal aim of his labours, and he believed himself to have
accomplished it in the last three volumes of his Treatise. But the term
Positive is not, any more than Metaphysical, always used by M. Comte in
the same meaning. There never can have been a period in any science when
it was not in some degree positive, since it always professed to draw
conclusions from experience and observation. M. Comte would have been
the last to deny that previous to his own speculations, the world
possessed a multitude of truths, of greater or less certainty, on social
subjects, the evidence of which was obtained by inductive or deductive
processes from observed sequences of phaenomena. Nor could it be denied
that the best writers on subjects upon which so many men of the highest
mental capacity had employed their powers, had accepted as thoroughly
th