I will not linger over the glaring inconsistency involved in the conclusion thus arrived at, of appealing, for the verification of empirical generalizations, to a species of deduction confessed to be impracticable for want of the requisite materials. I prefer to show that from Comte's own premises, as rendered by Mr. Mill, necessarily results a separate conclusion, absolutely fatal to his sociologically creative pretensions. According to him, as we have seen, the laws of elementary social facts, or of human actions and feelings, are the laws of universal human nature, which latter can, of course, be no other than whatever habits of invariably, in given circumstances, feeling and acting in given modes, may be common to all mankind. But it is admitted that the particular generation of human beings at any time existing must, by the accumulated influence of preceding generations, have been rendered very different from every preceding generation: and nothing is more certain than that two generations differing widely from each other in character, would, in many given circumstances, not only not feel and act in precisely the same, but would inevitably feel and act in widely different, manners. Nor is this all. The circumstances by which any generation is surrounded have been partly shaped for it by preceding generations, partly modified by itself--so that it is not possible for any two generations ever to find themselves in the same circumstances. Wherefore, as there never can be a repetition of either men or of circumstances precisely the same, it is manifestly impossible for any habits of feeling and thinking, in given modes in given circumstances, to be common to any two generations of men, still less to universal mankind. In other words, there cannot possibly be any laws of human nature: and if no laws of human nature, then no laws of elementary social facts; and if no laws of elementary social facts, then no laws of complex social facts; and if no laws of social facts, elementary or complex, then no single particle of material wherewith to build up the Science of Society or Sociology. [49] 'Auguste Comte and Positivism,' pp. 133-4. CHAPTER VI. _LIMITS OF DEMONSTRABLE THEISM._ Thought without Reverence is barren. The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship), were he president of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole _Mecanique Celeste_ and Hegel's _Philosophy_, and the epitome of all laboratories and observatories with their results, in his single head, is but a pair of spectacles, behind which there is no eye. Let those who have eyes look through him; then he may be useful.--_Sartor Resartus._