Editorial note — Translated from Le Correspondant POSITIVISM. A. COMTE, LITTRÉ, H. TAINE.

[Footnote 116: I transfer the word notion, although no notion is or can be general, because French writers frequently use it when they really mean not notion, but the object or thing noted. I do not approve of this use either in French or English. We may have notions of the general, but not general notions; a notion, if you will, as has been previously said, of the absolute (though absolute is itself a bad term for necessary, eternal, immutable, and infinite being), but not absolute notions. The notion is subjective, the noted is objective. To all legitimate induction there is necessary causality, the general—the universal, as say the schoolmen—and the particular, and unless the mind has à priori knowledge or intuition of them, no induction is possible. This is what the author evidently means, and it is undoubtedly true.—TRANSLATOR.]