Comte himself. Montesquieu; even
Macchiavelli; Adam Smith and the political economists universally, both
in France and in England; Bentham, and all thinkers initiated by
him,--had a full conviction that social phaenomena conform to invariable
laws, the discovery and illustration of which was their great object as
speculative thinkers. All that can be said is, that those philosophers
did not get so far as M. Comte in discovering the methods best adapted
to bring these laws to light. It was not, therefore, reserved for M.
Comte to make sociological inquiries positive. But what he really meant
by making a science positive, is what we will call, with M. Littre,
giving it its final scientific constitution; in other words, discovering
or proving, and pursuing to their consequences, those of its truths
which are fit to form the connecting links among the rest: truths which
are to it what the law of gravitation is to astronomy, what the
elementary properties of the tissues are to physiology, and we will add
(though M. Comte did not) what the laws of association are to
psychology. This is an operation which, when accomplished, puts an end
to the empirical period, and enables the science to be conceived as a
co-ordinated and coherent body of doctrine.
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