reached it in the "Politique Positive." Be it so. That, however, is a work which Mr. Harrison reproaches me with not having read.
But if I go on in this way, meeting one by one Mr. Harrison's allegations, I shall tire your readers before I reach the statement which I think will be held conclusive. My course must be to specify those idées-mères which I have indicated to Mr. Harrison, but which he refuses to look for, and then to show how from these the whole doctrine I have set forth gradually grew.
Omitting earlier stages, which I can trace back to 1850, I begin with the essay, "Progress: Its Law and Cause," which was published in 1857. On the second page of that essay I have named the generalization reached by Von Baer, that the changes undergone during the development of every living thing "constitute an advance from homogeneity of structure to heterogeneity of structure." On the next page I have enunciated the thesis of the essay; namely, that "this law of organic progress is the law of all progress"—not progress in a limited sense, but progress inorganic as well as organic, presented throughout the universe, from celestial bodies to such social products as science, art, and literature. How was the evidence supporting this thesis to be presented? By taking the various groups into which all kinds of phenomena are divisible, and showing that the law holds throughout each group, I have arranged them in the order astronomical, geological, biological, psychological, sociological. Why this order? The reasons are obvious. If the Cosmos has been evolved, then, in order of time, astronomical phenomena preceded geological, geological preceded biological, biological preceded psychological, psychological preceded sociological. Equally was the arrangement dictated by order of dependence. The existence of each of these groups of phenomena made possible the existence of the succeeding group. I could not have put the groups in any other order without manifest derangement. The second half of the article first asks the question—Why does this universal transformation go on? and the alleged cause is that "every active force produces more than one change" or effect; the implication being that there is a continuous multiplication of effects, of which increasing heterogeneity is a result. The rest of the article traces out everywhere this multiplication of effects; and in thus interpreting deductively the previous inductions I was, of course, forced to follow the same succession of groups of phenomena by the necessities of orderly exposition.
Is there anything here attributable to M. Comte? This order of exposition, which arose irrespective of any classification of the sciences, Comtean or other, and which governs the order in which the works constituting the Synthetic Philosophy have been written, is one which Mr. Harrison is courageous enough to say corresponds with Comte's scheme of the sciences. He does this in face of the fact that of Comte's six sciences three have no place in it! It contains no di-
