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while the good they have proposed to substitute for the supposed evil has been what the spiritual life alone can produce. Should this attempt to present the reality, as the fountain of all human virtue and goodness, succeed in leading any who have been thus mistaken to a true judgment and proportionate regard for the one complement of their nature, the highest object of the writer will be accomplished.

The title has been taken as the only one which is strictly accurate. The entire argument is founded on and proved by facts which marshal themselves, and which therefore require far less theory to reduce them to scientific order than Comte claims for the framework of his philosophy.

And it has further been

chosen because the entire tendency of the book is to exhibit a positive primitive science, and thus to furnish an example of an order of things which the Comtean philosophy declares to be impossible: indeed, this argument entirely reverses Comte's order, and presents an important and broad side of human knowledge and experience as existing in a purely positive form, and preserved in unbroken continuity from the first man till now; and as developed in the line of degradation by 'metabhysical'

speculation, which has carried side by side with it, or drawn in its train, the fictitious,' all which developments have been spurned by the pure, primitive positivism of which this book

treats.

G. B.

BARNET, February 28, 1882.

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