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AUGUSTE COMTE. 2 tom. 8vo. Paris: 1830-5. THE HE competitors for the honours of science may be divided into several classes, actuated by very different motives, and pursuing very different objects;-those who investigate by observation and experiment the phenomena and the laws of nature; those who arrange the facts and expound the doctrines of science; those who record at different epochs the history of its progress; and those who attempt to explain the mental processes by which discoveries have been made, and prescribe for every branch of knowledge the most appropriate methods of research. Though the love of posthumous fame supplies these different classes with their earliest and their strongest impulse, yet this principle of action is often modified and replaced by less noble incitements, and those who have begun their career under its generous influence, have been seduced by advantages of more immediate adjudication and enjoyment. The first of these classes of the cultivators of science, comprehends all those to whom the name of philosopher is strictly applicable. But as no sound knowledge can exist, but that which either rests immediately on facts, or is deduced from them by mathematical reasoning, this class is necessarily subdivided into two-those who observe facts, and those who reason from them --those who make experiments, and those who deduce from VOL. LXVII. NO. CXXXVI. ន their results the laws of phenomena, and the more general principles to which these laws may be ultimately referred. The history of science furnishes us with many distinguished instances in which these two qualities of mind have been in a singular manner united; but the instances are doubtless more numerous where the observer and the experimentalist have confined themselves to their own sphere of labour, and where minds of a less practical and a more discursive capacity have found a more congenial exercise in the higher processes of combination and analysis. Although the last of these orders of enquirers have been generally supposed to belong to a higher rank of intelligence, yet this erroneous appreciation of mental value can be founded on no other principle than that the laws of phenomena are necessarily higher steps in the scale of knowledge than facts and observations. The two conditions of mind by which these two classes of philosophers are characterised, are in reality incommensurable. Facts may sometimes be discovered, and observations made which demand but little attention, and involve no extraordinary exertion of the mind; but the great facts and experimental results, which form the basis of modern science, have been generally obtained from processes of reasoning at once ingenious and profound, and have called forth the highest functions of our intellectual frame. Even when the fruits of experimental philosophy are merely simple facts, their value is inestimable, and no revolution in science will ever deprive their discoverer of the honours which belong to them. But when he who discovers new facts, detects also their relation to other phenomena, and when he is so fortunate as to determine the laws which they follow, and to predict from these laws phenomena or results previously unknown, he entitles himself to a high place among the aristocracy of knowledge. Such men are in truth the real functionaries of science. They are the hewers of its wood and the drawers of its water-the productive labourers who furnish to less industrious and more speculative minds, not only the raw material, but the embroidered fabric of intellectual luxury and splendour. Previous to the sixteenth century the active explorers of science were few in number, and even these few had scarcely thrown off the incubus of the scholastic philosophy. Speculation unrestrained and licentious threw its blighting sirocco over the green pastures of knowledge, and prejudice and mysticism involved them in their noxious exhalations. This condition of knowledge has been long ago subverted, and in the present day the ascendency of observation and experiment has been universally recognised. There is still, however, a body of men, insignificant in |