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The positive philosophy of Auguste Comte (v. 2)
The positive philosophy of Auguste Comte - v. 2 Author:Auguste Comte 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: cannot imagine radically new organisms, we can, as I showed in my suggestion about the use of scientific fictions, conceive of organizations which should differ ... more »distinctly from any that are known to us, and which should be in- contestably superior to them in certain determinate respects. The philosophical principle of the conditions of existence is in fact simply the direct conception of the necessary harmony of the statical and the dynamical analyses of the subject proposed. This principle is eminently adapted to the science of biology, which is continually engaged in establishing a harmony between the means and the end ; and nowhere else, therefore, is seen in such perfection, that double analysis, statical and dynamical, which is found everywhere. These, then, are the philosophical properties of positive biology. To complete our review of the science as a whole, we have only to note briefly the division and rational coordination of its parts. , It does not fall within the scope of this o/the science wor to notice several branches of positive biological knowledge, which are of extreme importance in their own place, but secondary in regard to the principles of positive philosophy. We have no concern here with pathology, and the corresponding medical art; nor with natural history, and the corresponding art of the education of organisms. These are naturally, and not untruly, called biological studies: but we must here confine the term strictly to the speculative and abstract researches which are the foundation of the science. The interior distribution of the science, thus regarded, is this. The speculative and abstract study of the organism must be divided, first, into statics and dynamics ; according as we are seeking the laws of organization or those of life: and agai...« less