Were it needful we could fill a score pages with the incongruities of M. Comte's scheme. But the foregoing samples will suffice. So far is his law of evolution of the sciences from being tenable, that, by following his example, and arbitrarily ignoring one class of facts, it would be possible to present, with great plausibility, just the opposite generalization to that which he enunciates. While he asserts that the rational order of the sciences, like the order of their historic development, "is determined by the degree of simplicity, or, what comes to the same thing, of generality of their phenomena;" it might contrariwise be asserted, that, commencing with the complex and the special, mankind have progressed step by step to a knowledge of greater simplicity and wider generality. So much evidence is there of this as to have drawn from Whewell, in his _History of the Inductive Sciences_, the general remark that "the reader has already seen repeatedly in the course of this history, complex and derivative principles presenting themselves to men's minds before simple and elementary ones." Even from M. Comte's own work, numerous facts, admissions, and arguments, might be picked out, tending to show this. We have already quoted his words in proof that both abstract and concrete mathematics have progressed towards a higher degree of generality, and that he looks forward to a higher generality still. Just to strengthen this adverse hypothesis, let us take a further instance. From the _particular_ case of the scales, the law of equilibrium of which was familiar to the earliest nations known, Archimedes advanced to the more _general_ case of the unequal lever with unequal weights; the law of equilibrium of which _includes_ that of the scales. By the help of Galileo's discovery concerning the composition of forces, D'Alembert "established, for the first time, the equations of equilibrium of _any_ system of forces applied to the different points of a solid body"--equations which include all cases of levers and an infinity of cases besides. Clearly this is progress towards a higher generality--towards a knowledge more independent of special circumstances--towards a study of phenomena "the most disengaged from the incidents of particular cases;" which is M. Comte's definition of "the most simple phenomena." Does it not indeed follow from the familiarly admitted fact, that mental advance is from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular to the general, that the universal and therefore most simple truths are the last to be discovered? Is not the government of the solar system by a force varying inversely as the square of the distance, a simpler conception than any that preceded it? Should we ever succeed in reducing all orders of phenomena to some single law--say of atomic action, as M. Comte suggests--must not that law answer to his test of being _independent_ of all others, and therefore most simple? And would not such