Auguste Comte and Positivism Author:John Stuart Mill Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: even to great thinkers. Mr Spencer, in the very writings in which he criticises M. Comte, affords signal instances of them. de speculations. Or cet essor indu... more »ctif ne saurait fournir des princi suffisants qu'envers les plus simples etudes. Partout ailleurs, ils a peuveut etre etablis qu'en subordonnant chaque genre d'inductions scientifiques a 1'ensemble des deductions emanees des domaines moiris compliques, et des-lors moins dependants. Ainsi nos diverses theories reposent dogmatiquement les unes sur les autres, suivant un ordre invariable, qui doit regler historiquement leur aveuement decisif, les plus independantes ayant toujours du se developper plus tot." " Science," says Mr Spencer in his " Genesis," " while purely inductive is purely qualitative. . . . All quantitative prevision is reached deductively ; induction can achieve only qualitative prevision." Now, if we remember that the very first accurate quantitative law of physical phsenomena ever established, the law of the accelerating force of gravity, was discovered and proved by Galileo partly at least by experiment ; that the quantitative laws on which the whole theory of the celestial motions is grounded, were generalized by Kepler from direct comparison of observations ; that the quantitative law of the condensation of gases by pressure, the law of Boyle and Mariotte, was arrived at by lirect experiment; that the proportional quantities in which every known substance combines chemically with every other, were ascertained by innumerable experiments, from which the general law of chemical equivalents, now the ground of the most exact quantitative previsions, was an inductive generalization ; we must conclude that Mr Spencer has committed himself to a general proposition, which a very slight consideration of truths...« less