[8] We have already however
had occasion to notice M. Comte's propensity to use the term
metaphysical in cases containing nothing that truly answers to his
definition of the word. For instance, he considers chemistry as tainted
with the metaphysical mode of thought by the notion of chemical
affinity. He thinks that the chemists who said that bodies combine
because they have an affinity for each other, believed in a mysterious
entity residing in bodies and inducing them to combine. On any other
supposition, he thinks the statement could only mean that bodies combine
because they combine. But it really meant more. It was the abstract
expression of the doctrine, that bodies have an invariable tendency to
combine with one thing in preference to another: that the tendencies of
different substances to combine are fixed quantities, of which the
greater always prevails over the less, so that if A detaches B from C in
one case it will do so in every other; which was called having a greater
attraction, or, more technically, a greater affinity for it. This was
not a metaphysical theory, but a positive generalization, which
accounted for a great number of facts, and would have kept its place as
a law of nature, had it not been disproved by the discovery of cases in
which though A detached B from C in some circumstances, C detached it
from A in others, showing the law of elective chemical combination to be
a less simple one than had at first been supposed.
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