nexorable sense of duty constrained to declare that the grand
discovery is after all merely that of a distinction without a
difference.

What Comte chiefly condemned in the metaphysical mode of thought, are
the conception of mental abstractions as real entities which exert power
and produce phenomena, and the enunciation of these entities as
explanations of the phenomena; and certainly 'it is,' as Mr. Mill says,
or rather was, previously to his own ingenious solution of it, 'one of
the puzzles of philosophy, how mankind, after inventing a set of mere
names to keep together certain combinations of ideas and images, could
have so far forgotten their own act as to invest these creations of
their will with objective reality, and mistake the name of a phenomenon
for its efficient cause.' Those natural laws, however, on which
Positivism relies--are not they as purely mental abstractions as the
essences, virtues, properties, forces, and what not, for which it is
proposed to substitute them? Yet since Positivism regards these laws as
'governing' phenomena, and having phenomena 'subject' to them, must it
not necessarily regard them likewise as realised abstractions, as real
entities? Plainly, if its language be taken literally, its professors
must acknowledge that it does, unless they prefer to stultify themselves
by propounding such unmitigated nonsense as that power may be exercised,
and phenomena produced, by _non_-entities. But if so, what else is
Positivism than another form of that very metaphysicism which it
condemns? and a form, too, peculiarly obnoxious to Mr. Mill's caustic
remark that 'as in religion, so in philosophy, 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.'

Possibly, however, it may be replied that 'government by natural laws'
is a phrase which Positivists never use except metaphorically, and by
which they never mean more than certain successions of events.[47] Very
well. Either, then, they acknowledge no real government of phenomena at
all, in which case to speak of phenomena as governed by law is, if not a
purely gratuitous mystification, as glaring an instance as can well be
conceived of a 'bare enunciation of facts, put forward as a theory or
explanation of them:' or, if they do