Either way the position of M. Comte is untenable. If he intends that his two great modes of thought, the theologic and the positive, (between which the metaphysic performs the function of transition,) are _not_ equally spontaneous, but that the one must in the order of nature precede the other; then, besides that this is an unfounded supposition, it would follow--since the mind, or _organization_, of man remains from age to age the same in its fundamental powers--that, at this very time, no man could be inducted into the positive state of any branch of knowledge, without first going through its theologic and metaphysic. Truth must be expounded through a course of errors. Science must be eternally postponed, in every system of education, to theology, and a theology of the rudest description--a result certainly not contemplated by M. Comte. If, on the other hand, he intends that they _are_ equally spontaneous in their character, equally native to the mind, then, we repeat, what becomes of the elaborate and "indispensable" part ascribed to the _metaphysic_ of effectuating a transition between them? And how can we describe that as a scientific _law_ in which there is confessedly no immediate relation of cause and effect, or sequency, established? The statement, if true, manifestly requires to be resolved into the law, or laws, capable of explaining it. Perhaps our readers have all this while suspected that we are acting in a somewhat captious manner towards M. Comte; they have, perhaps, concluded that this author could not have here required their assent, strictly speaking, to a _law_, but that he used the term vaguely, as many writers have done--meaning nothing more by it than a course of events which has frequently been observed to take place; and under this impression they may be more disposed to receive the measure of truth contained in it than to cavil at the form of the statement. But indeed M. Comte uses the language of science in no such vague manner; he requires the same assent to this law that we give to any one of the recognized laws of science--to that of gravitation for instance, to which he himself likens it, pronouncing it, in a subsequent part of his work, to have been as incontrovertibly established. Upon this law, think what we may of it, M. Comte leans throughout all his progress; he could not possibly dispense with it; on its stability depends his whole social science; by it, as we have already intimated, he becomes master of the past and of the future; and an appreciation of its necessity to him, at once places us at that point of view from which M. Comte contemplates our mundane affairs.