COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD 



suggestions in his own way, which is not Comte's ; but 

 still he appeals to the analogy between society and an 

 organism ; and he calls the discussion sociology. But 

 when we turn to Mr. Leslie Stephen's Science of Ethics, 

 we meet with identically the same discussion. True, 

 Mr. Stephen prefers the expression "social tissue "to 

 the expression " social organism," but the difference is 

 essentially one of detail, and does not affect the question 

 before us. We are still working the biological analogy, 

 yet, if you please, this is ethics we are working at. The 

 brand, no doubt, is different ; the liquor is the same. 

 Spencer has elsewhere and in different form his dis- 

 cussion of ethics ; Stephen's ethics run parallel, not to 

 Spencer's ethics, but to Spencer's sociology. Again, 

 Professor Alexander's Moral Order and Progress is, as 

 the name implies, an ethical discussion, yet the author 

 finds it impossible to discuss the problems of personal 

 ethics apart from the relation of the individual to society, 

 and his book is penetrated throughout with biological 

 and evolutionary suggestions, most of all with the 

 Darwinian struggle for existence. But such suggestions 

 meet us at every hand in modern sociological discussions ; 

 nay more, such suggestions it was the professed business 

 of sociology to supplement and apply to human life. 

 It is plain, therefore, that sociology and ethics, as 

 sociologists generally conceive of sociology and of 

 ethics, cannot be separated from each other. Some 

 forms of ethical thought will wander far from the line 

 of treatment proper to us in this essay. But, wherever 

 you have these two things an interpretation of duty 

 as the debt which man, the individual, owes to society ; 

 and secondly the appeal to phenomenal fact as the only 

 safe or real authority there sociology and ethics must 

 necessarily approach, intertwine, or even coalesce. And 



