Is the general method of positive philosophy objective, or subjective, or both at once? As we know, this question has raised passionate discussion among positivists.[96] Outside the school it has been solved by some historians as if Auguste Comte, at the end of his life, had gone back to a doctrine very different from the one set forth by him in the _Cours de philosophie positive_. It suffices, however, to distinguish, with him, two successive points of view, to see how the two methods, antagonistic in a certain sense, can, in another one, be very well reconciled. If we only consider the process followed by our mind in the explanation of natural phenomena, that is to say the object of positive philosophy taken in the strict sense of the word, it is true that two opposite methods are found face to face. The subjective method goes from the consideration of man to that of the world, the objective method goes from the knowledge of the world to that of man. The first gives rise to theological and metaphysical philosophy, the latter to positive philosophy. The incompatibility of the two philosophies proceeds from that of the methods, which is irreducible. It allows us to say: “This will kill that.”[97] In this sense, the final establishment of the objective method, which is completed by the foundation of sociology, implies the exclusion, also final, of the subjective method. But “having reached its full maturity, true philosophy should inevitably tend to reconcile these two antagonistic methods,” wrote Comte in 1838, in the third volume of the _Cours de philosophie positive_, that is to say, long before the time of what has been wrongly called his second philosophy.[98] This reconciliation will be accomplished by means of the distinction between the special point of view of the sciences, and the universal point of view of philosophy. The scientific investigation of the laws of natural phenomena can only be made by means of the objective method: Comte never varies in his thought on this point. But these sciences are but the parts in a greater whole, for which the subjective method alone is suitable. Two arguments especially prove this, one belonging to the logical, the other to the moral and the religious order.