A complete and rational system of encyclopædic laws would realise the “philosophia prima” which Bacon dimly foresaw. In the actual condition of the sciences this would probably be a rash undertaking. Comte attempted it in the fourth volume of the _Politique positive_.[81] One can hardly say that the trial was a decisive one. It is true that at that moment Comte was already entirely taken up with religious preoccupations. However, the encyclopædic laws are destined to play a part in the positive philosophy of nature, which may be compared, in some respects, with that of the categories in Aristotle’s philosophy. They are the most general forms under which the phenomena given in experience become objects of scientific thought for us. As in each class of phenomena we determine laws, principles of order and of harmony, so the encyclopædic laws make the order and the harmony of the different classes among themselves. They are, so to speak, _the laws of laws_. Through them the human mind which has already reached unity of method, may some day reach a certain unity of knowledge. But this unity will always differ by two essential characteristics from that which metaphysicians have pursued up to the present time: it will respect the irreducibleness of the various fundamental sciences, and it will remain relative, both by the conditions of the object and by those of the subject, upon which it equally depends. Our conception of universal order “results from a necessary concurrence between that which is without us, and that which is within. The laws, that is to say the general facts, are never anything but hypotheses confirmed by observation. If harmony in no way existed outside us our mind would be entirely incapable of conceiving it, but in no case is it verified so much as we suppose it to be.”[82] We neither make order nor perceive it entirely. By long and arduous labour the human intellect gradually disengages the concept of order out of the facts that come crowding within its reach. It is an imperfect, contingent, perishable order, in a word, an order, relative like the mind itself. It is order nevertheless, and a necessary condition for ethics as well as for science. FOOTNOTES: [46] Cours, I. 4. [47] Discours sur l’Esprit positif, p. 23. [48] Cours, II. 505. [49] Cours, VI. 648. [50] Cours, VI, 659. [51] Cours, VI, 655. [52] Discours sur l’esprit positif, p. 17. [53] Lettre inedite a M. Papot, 8 mai 1851 (archives de la société positiviste). [54] Cours, VI, 662. [55] Cours, II, 36. [56] Cours, III, 362. [57] Cours, VI, 833. [58] Cours, III, 339, 365. [59] Cours, IV, 452. [60] Cours, IV, 470. [61] Pol. pos. i, 641. [62] Cours, III, 235. [63] Pol. pos. iv, Appendice p. 17. [64] Cours, ii, 26-27. [65] Cours, iii, 366. [66] Dialogues on natural religion, VIII. [67] Système de la nature, II. 187. [68] Cours, III. 363-4. [69] Pol. pos. II. 42. [70] Cours, IV. 274. [71] Pol. pos. Appendice, p. 25. [72] Cours, III. 325.