Comte's Law of the Three Stages has often been affirmed, often denied or contemptuously ignored. It has very seldom been critically examined. Yet it should repay examination. Those who would pass it by as an exploded hypothesis forget that the general notions on which it rests have passed into ordinary thought and common language. The theological stage of a conception, the metaphysical way of looking at things, the positive method of science and of practice are familiar expressions which mean

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... mething for us, and it is well that we should know what they mean with more exactitude. On the other hand it is hardly reasonable to suppose that a hypothesis advanced 80 years ago in the infancy of anthropology, and before all the modern development of science and philosophy, should stand to-day precisely where it stood then. Acceptance of such a miracle would in fact be more suited to the theological than to the positive stage. I propose here to treat the theory itself in the Positive spirit, examining its various parts so far as space allows in relation to the facts of anthropology and the actual development of thought. The outline of the theory is so well-known that a very brief recapitulation of Comte's original statement* will suffice here. Comte tells us at the outset of the Positive Philosophy that he believes himself to have discovered a great fundamental law to which the human intelligence is subjected by an invariable necessity. It may be established both by rational proofs furnished by the knowledge of our organisation, and by historical verifica-tionS. It is that each of our principal conceptions, each branch of our knowledge, passes successively through three different statesthe theological or that of fiction (fictif), the metaphysical or abstract, the scientific or positive. In the first stage the mind aims at the discovery of the intimate nature of beings, the primary and final causes of all the effects that strike it, and represents phenomena as produced by the direct and continuous action of supernatural agents greater or less in number, whose arbitraryî ntervention explains all apparent anomalies. In the metaphysical * I do not hen attampt to de»l eithar with the genesia of the theory (on whioh lee B«rth, Phil, der O«*chichte ftU Soeiologie, p. 30-07) nor with tnbwqnent •tatemenU by Cout« htfuelf.