morphoses having the same essential traits.' I venture to think that Positivists would warmly join with Spencer in denying that Comte held any such view, that he countenanced any such conception about the Cosmos or the general sciences. To followers of Comte it would be a fatal blot on any system of philosophy to use any uniform set of laws as an adequate logic of all the sciences in turn assuming that any single set of principles sufficed to explain and co-ordinate the sciences within each, and co-ordinate one with another.
Comte, on the contrary, emphatically insists that the laws, the methods, and the principles of the different sciences are always different and distinct, practically incommensurable and not interchangeable. He holds that each general science has its own logic, its own generalization. Students of the Positive Philosophy do not need to be reminded that the Synthesis or co-ordination of the sciences, as proposed by Comte, consists, not in applying to them all alike one set of formulae, but in tracing their concatenation and mutual relations. To attempt a co-ordination of the sciences on one uniform theory—such theory primarily applied to the material world—inevitably forces the philosopher to reduce all social and moral problems to the terms of cosmical and physical problems, and ultimately to terms of molecular physics and mechanics. And this in Tact is exactly what has happened. The cardinal principles of the Synthetic Philosophy are all formulated in terms that apply to the whole Solar System, and indeed to the original molecular basis of the Universe. If the Universal laws of Evolution and Dissolution and their corollaries—segregation, integration and differentiation—govern and explain the phenomena of the Universe, then social and moral progress has to be explained
