Note 14 — THE COURS DE PHILOSOPHIE POSITIVE. (continued 2)

M. Littré, who, though a warm admirer, and accepting the position of a disciple of M. Comte, is singularly free from his errors, makes the equally ingenious and just remark, that Political Economy corresponds in social science to the theory of the nutritive functions in biology, which M. Comte, with all good physiologists, thinks it not only permissible but a great and fundamental improvement to treat, in the first place, separately, as the necessary basis of the higher branches of the science: although the nutritive functions can no more be withdrawn in fact from the influence of the animal and human attributes, than the economical phaenomena of society from that of the political and moral.