These extreme, but logically deduced consequences, are part of the whole of Comte’s religious conceptions, that is to say of a distant ideal. They must not blind us to the profundity of his philosophical considerations on astronomy. His reflections upon the relation between the ideas of the world and of the universe correspond, from the positive point of view, to the first antinomy of the transcendental Dialectics in the _Critique de la raison pure_. Can we ever be more fully conscious of the relativity of our knowledge, that when we see that what we know of celestial phenomena is admirably precise so long as the solar system is concerned, but is reduced to almost nothing if we look beyond it? Our world will perish, and its disappearance like its existence, will perhaps be an imperceptible incident. By the continued resistance of the general _milieu_, says Comte, in the end our world must be re-united to the solar mass from which it came, until, in the immensity of future ages, a fresh dilatation of this mass shall organise a new world in the same manner, destined to repeat more or less completely the former cycle. Moreover, all these immense alternatives of destruction and of renewal have to be accomplished without influencing in any way the more general phenomena due to solar interaction; so that the great revolutions in our world would only be secondary and, so to speak, local events, in relation to transformations of a really universal character.[132] This outlook into the “immensity” of space and of duration suffices to show that Comte was not a prisoner in the little solar fatherland in which he seems to seclude himself. It may be that for moral and religious reasons he will not allow himself to go beyond it. But, like Pascal, he well knows that he inhabits “a little out of the way district of nature.” CHAPTER III. THE SCIENCES OF THE INORGANIC WORLD If we do not separate chemistry from physics, their common object is the knowledge of the laws of the inorganic world. In this way they are clearly distinguished on one hand from astronomy which we may consider as an “emanation from mathematical science,” and on the other hand from biology. The distinction between physics and chemistry presents a greater difficulty. Nevertheless this distinction must be maintained, since the physical phenomena are more “general,” and the chemical phenomena more “special,” that is to say, the latter depend upon the former, without this dependence being for the most part reciprocal. Even if some day we succeeded in establishing that chemical phenomena are in reality physical, the distinction would none the less subsist, in this sense, that in a fact termed chemical, there is always something more than in a fact which is simply physical, namely, the characteristic alteration which the molecular composition of bodies undergoes, and which consequently affects the totality of their properties.[133]