element without which the final achievement
would have been impossible. Without Comte there would have been no
Buckle, whose work furnishes another of these steps. Every page of the
'History of Civilization' exhibits the indebtedness of the English
Historian to the French Encyclopaedist of the Sciences; while the
'Intellectual Development of Europe' bears evidence of a 'Positivist'
inspiration to which Professor Draper might have more completely yielded
with decided benefit. For the lift which the author of the Positive
Philosophy and the founder of the Positive Religion has given the world,
let us be deeply grateful; although we must reject, as a finality, a
System of Science which cannot _Demonstrate_ the correctness of its
Principles and Phenomena, or a System of Religion which emasculates
mankind of its diviner and more spiritual aspirations, and dwarfs him to
the dimensions of a refined Materialism.

In classifying our existing Knowledge, then, on our present basis of
Scientific acquisition, we must draw a distinct line between
Mathematics, Astronomy, and Physics, on the one side, and all remaining
departments of Thought, on the other, and set these three Sciences apart
as the Exact or Infallible ones, occupying a rank superior to the
others, by virtue of the Certainty and Exactitude with which we are
able, through the operation of the true Deductive Method, to ascertain
their Principles and Phenomena. We shall then be enabled--by the aid of
Comte's principle that the domains of investigation take rank in
proportion to the complexity of their Phenomena--to ascertain, after a
very brief examination, the place which History holds in the Scale, and
how much claim it can lay to a Scientific character.

Comte closes the Hierarchy of the Positive Sciences by adding to the
three which we have denominated _Exact_ Sciences, Chemistry, Biology,
Sociology, and _La Morale_, in the order in which they are named, as
indicated by the nature of the Phenomena with which they are concerned.
If we adopt this arrangement, and annex to each of these _general_
Sciences, as they are called in the language of Positivism, its derived
or dependent branches, we shall have the following order: Chemistry;
Geology; Biology, including Botany, Human and Comparative Anatomy, and
Physiology; Zoology; Sociology; and _La Morale_. Although this enlarged
scale is defective, many important departments, such as Ethnology,
Philology, etc., being left out