Comte would therefore not have repudiated, for his classification of the sciences, the qualification of “anthropocentric” on condition that it were understood. It is no longer the spontaneous subjectivism from which the theological philosophy starts; it is the conscious subjectivism to which the positive philosophy attains. It has the merit of uniting in itself the two methods called objective and subjective. The former has been in the ascendant during the long evolution of the sciences, which were by degrees and successively reaching the positive state. The latter allows us to concentrate the aim of the distinct sciences thus constituted into a supreme science, which subordinates all the others to itself, without absorbing them. IV. The classification of the sciences is, at the same time, a plan for the setting forth of the positive philosophy, and a complement of the law of the three States. But, while this law expresses the _progress_ of the human intellect in the constitution of science and philosophy, the classification supposes that science and philosophy are already constituted. It expresses their _order_, and enunciates from the static point of view what the law formulates from the dynamic point of view. It shows the relations of the various elements of philosophy among themselves, and to the whole. So long as this idea of the whole was not defined, that is to say, so long as positive science remained special, these relations could not be rationally established. But, once sociology was created, and with it positive philosophy, it became possible to embrace the whole of the fundamental sciences in a single conception. For, from that time, they can be represented as being various aspects of the development of the human intellect. Truly, the object of science is single, and the divisions which are introduced into it for our convenience, without being arbitrary, are artificial. All the branches of our knowledge, that is to say all the fundamental sciences, must be considered as issuing from a single trunk. Not that these sciences can ever be reduced one to another. It suffices that they be homogeneous, and their homogeneity results from their subjection to the same method; further, from their tendency towards the same end, and finally, from their subordination to the same law of progress. In respect to the last and highest of these sciences, the others “must only be finally regarded as indispensable preliminaries in a progressive order.”[28] Thus the ladder of the fundamental sciences represents, in Comte’s mind, the methodical ascent of the positive spirit towards universality and unity. It is a hierarchy, a _scala intellectus_, according to Bacon’s expression. It includes the whole of the “philosophia prima” also foreshadowed by Bacon and vainly sought after by philosophers.