But man at length awakens to the need of a more proximate explanation of phenomena, and, by such experiment as he is capable of, endeavours to ascertain, through their intrinsic properties or their outward manifestations, the cause or causes of their being. He leaves the skies and comes to earth, and seeks to read the secret of things by examining the things in themselves. This, Comte denominates the "metaphysical" stage, mainly, because the solutions given were bound up with abstractions of physical realities. Thus, if you asked Aristotle why a vegetable grew, he would reply that it had a "nutritive soul," or principle, which enabled it to assimilate food. If one asked why heavy bodies fall, or why flame and smoke ascend, the answer would be because everything tends to go to its _natural_ place, implying, thereby, that there was some occult power or tendency in bodies to behave in certain definite ways. Those were the days of the time-honoured legends about Nature "abhorring a vacuum," tolerating no "breaks," and the wonders of her "curative force". These phrases about abstractions were held to be adequate explanations of any of the facts about nature or man. At length, there came the period when men demanded a straightforward answer to plain questions, and refused to acquiesce in the reply that opium puts us to sleep because there is a _dormitive virtue_ resident in it. The powers of observation and experiment having increased, it became possible by scientific test and analysis to satisfy the desire for a more immediate knowledge, and thus to discover, for example, that water is water, not because it possesses the form of _aquosity_, as the Scholastics would have said, but because it is chemically composed of oxygen and hydrogen. This last stage Comte called the "positive," and hence we perceive what he means when he calls his entire system by that name. It marks his conviction that those methods which are so successful in the discovery of truth in scientific matters should be applied to the solution of the problems of sociology and religion. In other words, "positive" and scientific are practically synonymous terms, the system pledging its followers to hold nothing which is not its own evidence, to abandon all attempts to know anything which is not phenomenal, that is, an object of sense-experience, and consequently to disavow metaphysics as practically equivalent to the unreal. Thus, for Comte, sociology, of which he may truthfully be described as the founder, is as much a science as chemistry or astronomy. It deals with its subject-matter, man, in precisely the same way as the astronomer with the stars. And the same is also true of religion.