We have no faith in the _a priori_ methods of constructing the chart of human history, and tracing the necessary course of social progress, which have recently become so popular in Germany and France.

We cannot, with M.Comte, undertake to solve the problem,--Given three lobes of the brain, representing the propensities, affections, and intellectual powers, but differing from each other in size and situation, what will be the future history of the race,--religious, aesthetic, industrial, metaphysical, social?
We cannot, with M.Cousin, undertake to solve the problem,--Given three terms, the finite, the infinite, and the relation between the two, what will be the development of human thought, first, in the experience of individuals, and, secondly, in the history of society ?[72] All such problems are too high for us.

The history of the human race must be ascertained from the authentic records and extant monuments of the past, not constructed by theories, or divined by _a priori_ speculations.
But M.Comte does appeal, in the second instance, to history in confirmation of his views.

He is far from affirming, however, that the progress of the race, under the operation of his great law of development, has been either uniform or invariable; on the contrary, he admits, with regard to India, China, and other nations, comprising probably the majority of mankind, whose state, intellectually and socially, has been stationary for ages, that they afford little or no evidence in support of his theory; and for this, among other reasons, he confines himself to the history of what he calls the _elite_, or advanced guard of humanity, and in this way makes it a very "_abstract_" history indeed![73] Beginning with Greece, as the representative of ancient civilization, and surveying the history of the Roman empire, and of its successors in Western Europe, he endeavors to show that the actual progress of humanity has been, on the whole, in conformity with his general law.

He gives no historical evidence, however, of the prevalence of Fetishism in primitive times; _that_ is an inference merely, depending partly on his theory of cerebral organization, and partly on the assumption that in the savage state, which is gratuitously supposed to have been the primitive condition of man, there must have been a tendency to regard every object, natural or artificial, as endowed with life and intelligence.