It is proper to begin by relieving the doctrine from a religious
prejudice. The doctrine condemns all theological explanations, and
replaces them, or thinks them destined to be replaced, by theories which
take no account of anything but an ascertained order of phaenomena. It
is inferred that if this change were completely accomplished, mankind
would cease to refer the constitution of Nature to an intelligent will
or to believe at all in a Creator and supreme Governor of the world.
This supposition is the more natural, as M. Comte was avowedly of that
opinion. He indeed disclaimed, with some acrimony, dogmatic atheism, and
even says (in a later work, but the earliest contains nothing at
variance with it) that the hypothesis of design has much greater
verisimilitude than that of a blind mechanism. But conjecture, founded
on analogy, did not seem to him a basis to rest a theory on, in a mature
state of human intelligence. He deemed all real knowledge of a
commencement inaccessible to us, and the inquiry into it an overpassing
of the essential limits of our mental faculties. To this point, however,
those who accept his theory of the progressive stages of opinion are not
obliged to follow him.
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