This habit is to be corrected; such supreme Architect and Governor is to be dismissed from the imagination of men; science is to supply the sole mode of thought, and humanity to be its only object. We have called M. Comte's an extraordinary book, and this is an epithet which our readers are already fully prepared to apply. But the book, in our judgment, is extraordinary in more senses than one. It is as remarkable for the great mental energy it displays, for its originality and occasional profundity of thought, as it is for the astounding conclusions to which it would conduct us, for its bold paradoxes, and for what we can designate no otherwise than its egregious errors. As a discipline of the mind, so far as a full appreciation is concerned of the scientific method, it cannot be read without signal advantage. The book is altogether an anomaly; exhibiting the strangest mixture that ever mortal work betrayed of manifold blunder and great intellectual power. The man thinks at times with the strength of a giant. Neither does he fail, as we have already gathered, in the rebellious and destructive propensities for which giants have been of old renowned. Fable tells us how they could have no gods to reign over them, and how they threatened to drive Jupiter himself from the skies. Our intellectual representative of the race nourishes designs of equal temerity. Like his earth-born predecessors, his rage, we may be sure, will be equally vain. No thunder will be heard, neither will the hills move to overwhelm him; but in due course of time he will lie down, and be covered up with his own earth, and the heavens will be as bright and stable as before, and still the abode of the same unassailable Power. For the _style_ of M. Comte's work, it is not commendable. The philosophical writers of his country are in general so distinguished for excellence in this particular, their exposition of thought is so remarkably felicitous, that a failure in a Frenchman in the mere art of writing, appears almost as great an anomaly as any of the others which characterize this production. During the earlier volumes, which are occupied with a review of the recognized branches of science, the vices of style are kept within bounds, but after he has entered on what is the great subject of all his lucubrations, his social physics, they grow distressingly conspicuous. The work extends to six volumes, some of them of unusually large capacity; and by the time we arrive at the last and the most bulky, the style, for its languor, its repetitions, its prolixity, has become intolerable.