CHAP, ii COMTES LIFE AND TEACHING 11 



science of fifty or sixty years ago. The Positive Polity, 

 on the other hand, is sociology from beginning to end ; 

 looking back, as we shall see, to the survey of the 

 inferior sciences made in the Positive Philosophy, but 

 working out its own problems on the grand scale. 



In the earlier book we have the two main divisions 

 of sociology first, social statics, or the conditions of 

 social order ; these are treated briefly ; secondly, social 

 dynamics, or the historical laws of social progress in the 

 past. 



All three names are somewhat singular. The name 

 sociology Comte's own coinage is a hybrid term, 

 partly Latin and partly Greek. Social statics, again, is 

 used in a different sense from that of Mr. Herbert 

 Spencer's early treatise. With Spencer, social statics 

 refers to a future Utopian period, when egoism and 

 altruism are perfectly balanced ; a millennial age, when 

 "that great disturbance of human nature, which the 

 churches call sin," has been left behind. It therefore 

 corresponds to the " absolute ethics" or " ethics for the 

 straight man" of Mr. Spencer's later system a fresh 

 proof, if further proof were needed, that ethics and 

 sociology are only diverse names for the same product, 

 as production is carried on in the schools of empirical 

 sociology and evolutionary ethics. In the light of 

 science it would seem that Comte's use of the phrase is 

 much better justified than Spencer's. Mechanical statics 

 discuss the conditions of stability in actual life, not in 

 some ideal world, where the properties of things have 

 been modified out of all recognition. Lastly, the phrase 

 social dynamics ought in accuracy to be social kinetics. 

 By rights the name dynamics covers the whole field of 

 mechanics, studying the conditions both of stability and 

 of movement, and thus including as its two branches 



