Comte not only fully recognized,
but attached great importance to systematizing.[4]
But though detached truths relating to the more complex order of
phaenomena may be empirically observed, and a few of them even
scientifically established, contemporaneously with an early stage of
some of the sciences anterior in the scale, such detached truths, as M.
Littre justly remarks, do not constitute a science. What is known of a
subject, only becomes a science when it is made a connected body of
truth; in which the relation between the general principles and the
details is definitely made out, and each particular truth can be
recognized as a case of the operation of wider laws. This point of
progress, at which the study passes from the preliminary state of mere
preparation, into a science, cannot be reached by the more complex
studies until it has been attained by the simpler ones. A certain
regularity of recurrence in the celestial appearances was ascertained
empirically before much progress had been made in geometry; but
astronomy could no more be a science until geometry was a highly
advanced one, than the rule of three could have been practised before
addition and subtraction.
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