Note 17 — REASONS FOR DISSENTING FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. COMTE.

In 1885, during a controversy with one of M. Comte’s English disciples, I was blamed for speaking “of Comte as making six sciences,” and was told that “in all Comte’s works, except the first, he makes seven sciences.” As I was dealing with The Positive Philosophy, I thought I could not do better than give the foregoing extract from the Cours de Philosophie Positive; and it did not occur to me that I was called upon to see whether, in any of his later voluminous works, M. Comte had made a different statement. My opponent, however, enlarged on this “blunder,” as he politely called it: apparently oblivious of the fact that if it was a blunder on my part to speak of Comte as recognizing six sciences when in his later days he recognized seven, it was a much more serious blunder on the part of Comte himself to have long overlooked the seventh.