Happy would be the prospects of mankind if
this were so. A time such as M. Comte reckoned upon may come; unless
something stops the progress of human improvement, it is sure to come:
but after an unknown duration of hard thought and violent controversy.
The period of decomposition, which has lasted, on his own computation,
from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the present, is not yet
terminated: the shell of the old edifice will remain standing until
there is another ready to replace it; and the new synthesis is barely
begun, nor is even the preparatory analysis completely finished. On
other occasions M. Comte is very well aware that the Method of a science
is not the science itself, and that when the difficulty of discovering
the right processes has been overcome, there remains a still greater
difficulty, that of applying them. This, which is true of all sciences,
is truest of all in Sociology. The facts being more complicated, and
depending on a greater concurrence of forces, than in any other science,
the difficulty of treating them deductively is proportionally increased,
while the wide difference between any one case and every other in some
of the circumstances which affect the result, makes the pretence of
direct induction usually no better than empiricism.
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