[12] According to Sir William Hamilton, as many as six; but numerical
precision in such matters is out of the question, and it is probable
that different minds have the power in different degrees.
[13] Or, as afterwards corrected by him, the appetites and emotions, the
active capacities, and the intellectual faculties; "le coeur," "le
caractere," and "l'esprit."
[14] M. Littre, who, though a warm admirer, and accepting the position
of a disciple of M. Comte, is singularly free from his errors, makes the
equally ingenious and just remark, that Political Economy corresponds in
social science to the theory of the nutritive functions in biology,
which M. Comte, with all good physiologists, thinks it not only
permissible but a great and fundamental improvement to treat, in the
first place, separately, as the necessary basis of the higher branches
of the science: although the nutritive functions can no more be
withdrawn _in fact_ from the influence of the animal and human
attributes, than the economical phaenomena of society from that of the
political and moral.
[15] Indeed his claim to be the creator of Sociology does not extend to
this branch of the science; on the contrary, he, in a subsequent work,
expressly declares that the real founder of it was Aristotle, by whom
the theory of the conditions of social existence was carried as far
towards perfection as was possible in the absence of any theory of
Progress.
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