ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by examining with the most scrupulous attention the present situation of that science. Astronomy began as astrology; chemistry was originally merely alchemy. Psychology is beginning to be based on physiology and to rid itself of the religious prejudices on which it was founded. ‘Astronomy, being the science in which facts are viewed in their simplest and least numerous relations, had to be the first to assume a positive character. Chemistry inevitably followed after astronomy and before physiology because it considers the activity of matter in relations which are more complex than in astronomy but less detailed than in physiology. A conception of general science discovered in one period is always put into effect in the following period. It was the Egyptian priests who invented polytheism, but it was the Greeks who were polytheists, that is, who believed in the existence of several invisible causes and worshipped them.
