It must be owned that the temper of mind which now prevails would have been most unfavourable for the original elaboration of Positivism. That work, however, had already been accomplished under the Constitutional system; which, while not so restrictive as the preceding government, was yet sufficiently so to concentrate our intellectual powers, which of themselves would have been too feeble, upon the task. The original conception had indeed been formed during the preceding reign; but its development and diffusion took place under the parliamentary system. Positivism now offers itself for practical application to the question of social progress, which has become again the prominent question, and will ever remain so. Unfavourable as the present political temper would have been to the rise of Positivism, it is not at all so to its diffusion; always supposing its teachers to be men of sufficient dignity to avoid the snare of political ambition into which thinkers are now so apt to fall. By explaining, as it alone can explain, the futility and danger of the various Utopian schemes which are now competing with each other for the reorganization of society, Positivism will soon be able to divert public attention from these political chimeras, to the question of a total reformation of principles and of life. [Such a dictatorship would be a step towards the separation of spiritual and temporal power] Republicanism, then, will offer no obstacle to the diffusion of Positivist principles. Indeed, there is one point of view from which we may regard it as the commencement of the normal state. It will gradually lead to the recognition of the fundamental principle that spiritual power must be wholly independent of every kind of temporal power, whether central or local. It is not merely that statesmen will soon have to confess their inability to decide on the merits of a doctrine which supposes an amount of deep scientific knowledge from which they must necessarily be precluded. Besides this, the disturbance caused by the ambition of metaphysical schemers, who are incapable of understanding the times in which they live, will induce the public to withdraw their confidence from such men, and give it only to those who are content to abandon all political prospects, and to devote themselves to their proper function as philosophers. Thus Republicanism is, on the whole, favourable to this great principle of Positivism, the separation of temporal from spiritual power, notwithstanding the temptations offered to men who wish to carry their theories into immediate application. The principle seems, no doubt, in opposition to all our revolutionary prejudices. But the public, as well as the government, will be brought to it by experience. They will find it the only means of saving society from the consequences of metaphysical Utopias, by which Order and Progress are alike threatened. Thinkers too, those of them at least who are sincere, will cease to regard