COMTE AND SPENCER ON SOCIOLOGY. 67 



stinct" in a sense which is not very clear and is throughout unscien- 

 tific ; for, according to modern researches,* we do " instinctively,'''' 

 i. e., unconsciously, that which previously we did knowingly, and thus 

 to account for an " instinct " as a primum movens sounds somewhat 

 like the " purgative force of the rhubarb " ; secondly, that the dis- 

 tinction he makes between egoistic and altruistic instincts is superfi- 

 cial. From the subjective point of view, it is obvious that whether 

 they act under the impulse of sexual attraction or under that of hun- 

 ger, individuals aim merely at the satisfaction of physiological (egois- 

 tic) want ; nor are their objective results so essentially different as 

 Comte pretends ; hunger as well as sexual attraction is able to lead 

 men and animals — in some cases to struggle, in others to co-operation. 

 And, if he did not exclude the social life of animals from the field of 

 his humanitarian sociology, he might easily perceive that associations 

 for food or for self-defense have generally a far more social character 

 than primitive conjugal alliances for progeny. 



Nevertheless, the greatest, perhaps the only valuable, service ren- 

 dered by Comte to social science lay in the very clear distinction he 

 made between the sociological and the biological domains, when he 

 referred to sociology only such aggregation of individuals as is based 

 on co-operation, conscious or unconscious, and abandoned groupings 

 based on struggle to biology. Thus, I may say, he opened the door 

 of true social science without himself entering its precincts, and, unfor- 

 tunately, I must add, misleading his followers with his erroneous state- 

 ments as to the unavoidable subjectivity of the methods of social knowl- 

 edge. I insist upon that high service ; that remarkable definition of 

 the boundaries and of the object of sociology appears, so to say, 

 drowned amid the numberless quaintnesses of his whole system, and 

 none of his admirers, orthodox or schismatic, have ever cared so far as 

 to disengage from his hardly readable volumes the few lines. 



Owing to his restricted acknowledgment of the principle of the 

 unity of Nature, Comte appears, at any rate, scarcely a precursor of 

 the modern scientific evolutionism. Looking for a more complete and 

 methodical compendium of that theory, we have to cross the Channel 

 and to approach Herbert Spencer's "First Principles," and his many 

 other valuable essays on ethical, political, and other sociological sub- 

 jects. No mind could perceive more perspicuously than Herbert Spen- 

 cer does the admirable unity of Nature, and no pen could describe it 

 with half so much clearness and attraction as his. "While the science 

 of Comte, always behind his age, appears like a mosaic of six stray 

 pieces — and the author takes painful heed to make us feel the gaps 

 which he supposes really to exist between them — the science of Spen- 

 cer on more than one point gets the start of the erudition of modern 

 specialists, and is throughout livingly and harmoniously one, accord- 

 ing to the unity of Nature. 



* Romanes, various writings ; also A. Herzen, " Studii fisiologici sopra la volonta." 



