The memory of Bacon does not prevent the preponderating influence in this conception of Comte from being that of Descartes. Comte is far from ignoring it. He calls himself the continuator and by a dreadful barbarism, the _completer_ of Descartes.[29] Undoubtedly Descartes had not like him conceived the series of the fundamental sciences. After having applied a positive method to the study of inorganic nature, and even of living nature, for the rest he had reverted to a metaphysical method. But this “cartesian compromise” could only be provisional. None the less to Descartes belongs the merit of having definitely acquired several orders of phenomena for the positive spirit, and of affirming the unity of science at the same time as the unity of method. He was unable himself to realise this twofold unity, for its time had not come, and the necessary conditions had not yet been brought together. Moreover in the cartesian idea of science metaphysical elements subsist, and Descartes wrongly believed that the universal method was to be obtained by a transformation of the mathematical method. Comte takes up the leading ideas of Descartes again, and, at the same time, he corrects them, according as the progress of the positive spirit during two centuries enabled him to do. The position of “leading science,” if this expression can be allowed, passes from mathematics to sociology. Moreover, the unity of science, as Comte conceives it, no longer prevents the fundamental sciences from being irreducible to one another. This unity is sufficiently secured by the homogeneity of the sciences, which form a continuous series, an “encyclopædic hierarchy,” and which are all subordinated to the final science. Lastly the unity of the positive methods does not imply its uniformity everywhere. Each fundamental science, as will be seen further on, has its methods which are special to itself.[30] The classification of the sciences thus shows how positive philosophy stretches back over the XVIII. cent., whence it springs, to link itself with Bacon and Descartes. Comte has retained Bacon’s view on this point, that all scientific knowledge rests upon facts which have been fully observed, and that a system of positive sciences constitutes the indispensable basis for the only philosophy which is within our reach. To Descartes he here owes the idea of the unity of method and of the unity of science. We might almost say that he has received from Bacon his idea of the contents of the sciences and from Descartes his idea of their form. By what means did he invest such matter with such a form? The answer to this question is found in the positive theory of science. FOOTNOTES: [23] Cours, I, 46-47. [24] Cours, I, 14-15. [25] Cours, I, 82, 12. [26] Herbert Spencer: The Classification of the Sciences. London, 1864, p. 42. [27] Discours sur l’esprit positif (1844) p. 24. [28] Cours, VI. 610.