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objection to such a view, so long as it maintains its self-sufficiency, keeps itself strictly
to itself, as its nobility obliges it to do,
makes no pretension of meddling with the world
of experience, and does not ask anybody to
assent to it.

Auguste Comte, at the other extreme, would
condemn every theory that were not
“verifiable.” Like the majority of Comte's
ideas, this is a bad interpretation of
a truth. An explanatory hypothesis, that
is to say, a conception which does
not limit its purpose to enabling the
mind to grasp into one a variety of facts,
but which seeks to connect those facts
with our general conceptions of the universe,