ts on the sun one might say, were
but the surface on which they appear altogether sunlike--and I leave
them without additional remark except that, although it may perhaps have
been hypercritical to point them out, still the language of a new
philosophy, claiming to supersede all old ones, ought to be proof even
against hypercriticism. I pass on to a generalisation, termed by Mr.
Mill 'the key to Comte's other generalisations: one on which all the
others are dependent, and which forms the back-bone, so to speak, of his
philosophy,' insomuch that 'unless it be true he has accomplished
little.' This is the so much vaunted discovery that all human thought
passes necessarily through three stages, beginning with the
theological, and proceeding through the metaphysical to the positive.
These three terms, however, in the novel sense in which they are used by
Comte, stand very urgently in need of definition. By the theological is
to be understood that stage of the mind in which the facts of the
universe are regarded as governed by single and direct volitions of a
being or beings possessed of life and intelligence. It is the stage in
which winds are supposed to blow, seas to rage, trees to grow, and
mountains to tower aloft, either because winds, seas, trees, and
mountains are themselves alive and so act of their own accord; or
because there is a spirit dwelling in each of them which desires that it
shall so act; or because each separate class of objects is superintended
by an out-dwelling divinity, which similarly desires; or, finally,
because one single divinity, supreme over all things, initiates and
maintains all the apparently spontaneous movements of inanimate bodies.
In the metaphysical stage, phenomena are ascribed not to volitions,
either sublunary or celestial, but to realised abstractions--to
properties, qualities, propensities, tendencies, forces, regarded as
real existences, inherent in but distinct from the concrete bodies in
which they reside; while the characteristic of the positive stage is the
universal recognition that all phenomena without exception are governed
by invariable laws, with which no volitions, natural or supernatural,
interfere. These being the three stages, the discovery of which as a
series necessarily passed through by human thought in its progress
towards maturity, constitutes one of Comte's chief glories, I almost
tremble at my own audacity, shrinking from the sound myself am making,
when by i