questions of climate, race, etc.'

And again he says, the inquiry is to be conducted 'stripped of all
circumstances of climate, locality, etc.'

It will be sufficiently evident from this brief statement, that _The
Philosophy of History_ (not _History_, as the letter says) which
constitutes the Dynamic Branch of Sociology in the Positive System is,
in Comte's own intention and showing, a series of bald abstractions from
which the _substantial_ or _concrete_ elements of individual and
national activity, the proximate causes of Human Progress, are dropped
out; and that _History_ in the ordinary sense of that term, or in the
broader sense in which it has been used in these papers, as referring to
a possible Science, finds no place in his Scientific Schedule.

The error into which our critic has fallen, in this case, undoubtedly
resulted in part from the unfortunate confounding of the words
_Philosophy_ and _Science_, which pervades the Positive System.
Philosophy and Science are not, in any proper use of the terms,
synonymes. They relate--as it is designed at some future time to
show--to equally true and important, though _opposite_ aspects of the
Universe, considered either as a whole or in relation to its parts.
Comte, as has been heretofore exhibited, degraded Science from its
_Exact_ and _Certain_ position, in order to include Domains of Inquiry
which did not have and to which he could not furnish a truly scientific
basis. In like manner, after discarding a false Philosophy, unable to
institute a true, or at least a sufficiently comprehensive one, on the
foundation which he had reared, he gave the name of _Positive
Philosophy_ to his incongruous coordination of Scientific and
Unscientific Departments of Thought. The terms _Science_ and
_Philosophy_, thus wrenched from their legitimate uses, are therefore
loosely understood and indiscriminately applied by the students of his
System and the followers of his social theories, in ways which are
productive of numerous misunderstandings, though not perhaps of
unprofitable criticisms.

In a subsequent letter, the same gentleman calls attention to another
supposed error--the omission of _La Morale_ from the Positive Hierarchy
of Sciences--and adds:

'Although this final Science was in a manner involved in Sociology
as treated in the _Philosophy_, its normal separation was yet a
step of Capital Importance; sufficiently so to make the enumeration
of Comt