The state of sociological speculation being such as has been described--divided between a feudal and theological school, now effete, and a democratic and metaphysical one, of no value except for the destruction of the former; the problem, how to render the social science positive, must naturally have presented itself, more or less distinctly, to superior minds. M. Comte examines and criticises, for the most part justly, some of the principal efforts which have been made by individual thinkers for this purpose. But the weak side of his philosophy comes out prominently in his strictures on the only systematic attempt yet made by any body of thinkers, to constitute a science, not indeed of social phenomena generally, but of one great class or division of them. We mean, of course, political economy, which (with a reservation in favour of the speculations of Adam Smith as valuable preparatory studies for science) he deems unscientific, unpositive, and a mere branch of metaphysics, that comprehensive category of condemnation in which he places all attempts at positive science which are not in his opinion directed by a right scientific method. Any one acquainted with the writings of political economists need only read his few pages of animadversions on them (iv. 193 to 205), to learn how extremely superficial M. Comte can sometimes be. He affirms that they have added nothing really new to the original _apercus_ of Adam Smith; when every one who has read them knows that they have added so much as to have changed the whole aspect of the science, besides rectifying and clearing up in the most essential points the _apercus_ themselves. He lays an almost puerile stress, for the purpose of disparagement, on the discussions about the meaning of words which are found in the best books on political economy, as if such discussions were not an indispensable accompaniment of the progress of thought, and abundant in the history of every physical science. On the whole question he has but one remark of any value, and that he misapplies; namely, that the study of the conditions of national wealth as a detached subject is unphilosophical, because, all the different aspects of social phaenomena acting and reacting on one another, they cannot be rightly understood apart: which by no means proves that the material and industrial phaenomena of society are not, even by themselves, susceptible of useful generalizations, but only that these generalizations must necessarily be relative to a given form of civilization and a given stage of social advancement. This, we apprehend, is what no political economist would deny. None of them pretend that the laws of wages, profits, values, prices, and the like, set down in their treatises, would be strictly true, or many of them true at all, in the savage state (for example), or in a community composed of masters and slaves. But they do think, with good reason, that whoever understands the political economy of a country