There is nothing impracticable in this scheme. Comte has drawn out, in the positive Polity, a plan of education conceived on this principle. On this condition alone will philosophy, founded upon positive science, succeed in realising the harmony of minds, and in “reorganising the beliefs.” II. Auguste Comte often says that the positive spirit consists in keeping oneself equally distant from two dangers, mysticism and empiricism.[33] By mysticism he understands the recourse to non-verifiable explanations and to transcendent, hypotheses. Men’s imagination finds pleasure in these things, but we must be able to bring all “real” knowledge back to a general or particular fact. Positive science therefore abstains from searching after substances, ends, and even causes. It only bears upon phenomena and their relations. Empiricism, in its turn, is no less than mysticism contrary to the spirit of science, Empiricism signifies for Comte the knowledge which does not go beyond the pure and simple ascertainment of a fact. Now, an accumulation of even precisely noted facts has no theoretical interest. It may, at most, be erudition, but it is not science. To think that by thus gathering facts together one is labouring at the work of science, is “to take a quarry for an edifice.”[34] In a word, “science is made up of laws, and not of facts.”[35] Strictly speaking, no scientific observation is even possible without a previous theory, that is to say, without a presupposed law, whose verification is in question. Undoubtedly in science when it has become positive, the imagination no longer constructs “causes” or “essences.” It must submit to reason, that is to say, to the methodical investigation of phenomena. Nevertheless, this investigation cannot take place without guiding hypotheses, and thus the imagination plays a part in science, subordinate it is true, but indispensable. Comte here separates himself from Bacon. According to the English philosopher, in the knowledge of nature, the mind must make itself as receptive as possible. In introducing anything of itself it would falsify science, and its whole effort must be to hold itself up to phenomena as a perfectly plain and unspotted mirror, so as to reflect them as they are. Now this is precisely the idea of science which Comte rejects under the name of empiricism. Without the hypotheses or the theories suggested by the very activity of the mind science would never be constituted, according to him. There would never even be an apprehension of fact, at least an apprehension such that it could be of service to science. In a word “absolute empiricism is impossible.” In the simple observation of a phenomenon by the human mind, the entire mind is interested, and in it the subjective conditions of science are already virtually given.