In the course of the preceding extract, our author exposes the futility of that attempt which certain churchmen are making, as well on this side of the Channel as the other, to reason men back into a submission of their reason. Yet, if the science of Sociology should be above the apprehension of the vulgar, (as M. Comte seems occasionally to presume it would be,) he would impose on his intellectual priesthood a task of the very same kind, and even still more hopeless. A multitude once taught to argue and decide on politics, must be reasoned back into a submission of their reason to political teachers--teachers who have no sacred writings, and no traditions from which to argue a delegated authority, but whose authority must be founded on the very reasonableness of the entire system of their doctrine. But this is a difficulty we are certainly premature in discussing, as the true Catholic church in politics has still itself to be formed. We are afraid, notwithstanding all his protestations, M. Comte will be simply classed amongst the _Destructives_, so little applicable to the generality of minds is that mode of thought, to establish which (and it is for this we blame him) he calls, and so prematurely, for so great sacrifices. The fifth volume--the most remarkable, we think, of the whole--contains that historical survey which has been more than once alluded to in the foregoing extracts. This volume alone would make the fortune of any expert Parisian scribe who knew how to select from its rich store of original materials, who had skill to arrange and expound, and, above all, had the dexterity to adopt somewhat more ingeniously than M. Comte has done, his abstract statements to our reminiscences of historical facts. Full of his own generalities, he is apt to forget the concrete matter of the annalist. Indeed, it is a peculiarity running through the volume, that generalizations, in themselves of a valuable character, are shown to disadvantage by an unskilful alliance with history. We will make one quotation from this portion of the work, and then we must leave M. Comte. In reviewing the theological progress of mankind, he signalizes three epochs, that of Fetishism, of Polytheism, and of Monotheism. Our extract shall relate to the first of these, to that primitive state of religion, or idolatry, in which _things themselves_ were worshipped; the human being transferring to them immediately a life, or power, somewhat analogous to its own.