The moral instincts, and the naturally lofty mind of M. Comte revolted at this consequence, although it flowed imperiously from his system. The respect which he felt for the method of observation, and for the facts which it attains to, did not permit him absolutely to ignore or expressly to deny the psychological fact of man's liberty. Sometimes he attempts to find it a place in that sum of external facts and fixed laws which is, in his opinion, the sole field for man's activity and for man's science. {299} But such is the want of coherence of idea, that M. Comte is visibly embarrassed; consequently, in his works--more especially in his "Cours de philosophie positive,"--the most solid and consistent of all his writings in its fundamental principles--he sets almost completely aside the essential fact of human liberty, and of free will in the individual man; and in those books in which he treats of social organization, when he finds himself face to face with the wants and the rights of political liberty, that natural consequence of individual free will and of the responsibility attaching to it, he struggles to elude questions of this kind, feeling the impossibility of reconciling the principle of moral order with the despotism and the fatalism of the material world; and when he explains his views as to the government of human societies, it is easy to see that, although writing "I am, head and heart Republican," [Footnote 60] he is, in his dreams, rather substituting a scientific domination for a theocratic domination than instituting any liberal _régime_. [Footnote 60: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré, p. 251.] {300} After metaphysics comes history. M. Comte appeals to the annals of all nations and all ages in confirmation of his system of the world and of humanity. This history is to be divided, according to him, into three successive states, the theological state, the metaphysical state, and the scientific state. In the theological state and epoch, the human mind and social institutions are under the empire of pretended supernatural powers, of several such or of only one such, invented by man for the solution of the natural problems which lay siege to man, and for the determination of the laws, with which the social order cannot dispense. In the metaphysical epoch and state, vain abstractions essay to replace the supernatural powers of the theological state, and only end in an anarchy, both of opinions and society. The third epoch is destined to be the reign of positive science, founded solely upon observation and respect for the facts, the forces, and the laws of that external world which is the theater of man's existence. The first two states are, according to him, essentially irrational and transitory. They are the first steps of that which M. Comte styles the grand evolution of humanity, of which the _régime_ of science is the end and the summit. {301}