But, admitting the same fact, M. Comte does not explain it in this way. This "theory;" these principles anterior to external observation, and which the mind absolutely requires in order to be able to observe, are, according to him, pure inventions of the human mind itself, temporary instruments which the mind creates and employs in its labors until it can obtain better. "Between," says he, "two difficulties, pressed on the one hand by the necessity of observing in order to form 'theories,' and on the other by the no less imperious necessity of creating 'theories' in order to be able to deliver itself up to a series of coherent observations, the human mind at its birth would find itself shut in by a vicious circle from which it would never have had any means of escaping, had it not succeeded in opening a natural issue by the spontaneous development of theological conceptions, which presented a point to which his efforts might be concentrated, and which might furnish aliment for his activity. {290} It is, in effect, very remarkable, that questions the most radically inaccessible to our capacities, the intimate nature of being, the origin and the end of all phenomena, should be precisely those which the intelligence propounds to itself, as of paramount importance in that primitive condition, all the other problems really admitting of solution being almost regarded as unworthy of serious meditation. The reason of this it is not difficult to discover, for experience alone could have given us the measure of our strength; and if man had not begun by entertaining an exaggerated opinion of that strength, it would never have been capable of acquiring all the development of which it is susceptible. So much does our organization exact." [Footnote 59] [Footnote 59: Cours de philosophie positive, par M. Auguste Comte, vol. i, pp. 9, 10.] {291} Strange error of a man, whose supreme pretension it is to found all human knowledge upon the observation of facts! At his very first step, at the first difficulty which he encounters, M. Comte observes inexactly and incompletely, does not see in the facts all that the facts contain, and only explains them by assigning to the human mind, in its primitive and spontaneous operations, a hypothesis, the hypothesis of "theological conceptions." God, and man's relations with God, is a human invention, destined to support man at the commencement of his career as an intelligent being, and to occupy provisionally the place of science! The source of this misapprehension, the capital error of Positivism in its metaphysical argument, is, that it ignores the nature and the limits of science.