As to our condition, it is improved according to the measure in which we can act upon natural phenomena, and this power in turn depends upon the knowledge we have acquired of the laws of phenomena. “Vision brings prevision and thus facilitates provision.” Progress is here manifested by the extension of our scientific knowledge and by the improvement of the arts founded upon this knowledge. If scientific knowledge, which is necessarily abstract, has to be separated from practice in order to seek for the general laws which regulate phenomena, science, once constituted, makes possible a system of reasoned applications which reaches immeasurably farther than empirical art. Like Descartes, Comte founds the most ambitious hopes upon the positive science of nature. Now, the most “modifiable” phenomena, those in which our intervention is most efficacious, are the human phenomena, be they individual or collective. On the other hand, our action upon the external world especially depends upon the dispositions of the agent. In every way then we must improve these dispositions. The most important improvement will be that of our internal nature. It will consist in bringing about the greater and greater prevalence of the attributes which distinguish man from the animals, that is to say, intelligence and sociability, correlated faculties, which are at once as a means and as an end to one another. We know, moreover, that there are limits to this progress. The perfect preponderance within ourselves of humanity over animality is a _limit_, nearer to which our efforts must ever bring us, without ever actually reaching it.[272] Whether it be a question of our condition or of our nature the improvement, in both cases, can only be very slow. It is never easy to substitute to natural order an artificial order resting upon the scientific knowledge of the former. Of those different forms of progress, the first, which Comte calls the material progress, because it is the easiest, is the most advanced. The great attraction which it has for the men of to-day is thus explained, but the importance given to it is quite exaggerated. If our nature could be brought to a higher degree of perfection it would assuredly be preferable. But it is perhaps necessary that our material conditions of existence should first have been ameliorated?