26 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART i 



image to the State or to civil society. The contrast 

 has been tellingly drawn between St. Paul's appeal as 

 to a well-known fact " Ye are members one of another" 

 and the Greek despair of being able to name any 

 authority strong enough to overrule personal selfishness. 

 When modern thinkers call society an organism, they 

 say in effect, not merely to fellow-Christians, but to 

 fellow -citizens or fellow- men, "We are members one of 

 another " ; they say it, counting on a response ; and 

 they obtain not a little response, thanks to the spread 

 of the Christian spirit and Christian ethic. Moreover, 

 science takes up the keynote in such a phrase as " the 

 physiological division of labour," a phrase which shows 

 us how the lower science is at times indebted for sugges- 

 tions to a higher in this instance, physiology, to the 

 economic branch of the science of society but which 

 also shows us the reality and the scientific serviceable- 

 ness of the analogy between the two fields of study. 



Apparently Comte himself was aware that biology 

 and sociology in some respects formed a class together, 

 contrasting with the lower sciences. In his little book 

 on Comte, Dr. Edward Caird twice over l tells us that 

 Comte recognised even in biology, much more in socio- 

 logy, the necessity of bringing to a focus that esprit 

 d' ensemble- for which he pleads, and for explaining tne 

 parts by their place and function in the whole, not the 

 whole by the co-operation of mutually independent 

 "Y parts. This spirit grew on Comte more and more. 

 " Humanity," he said at last, " is alone real ; the indi- 

 vidual is an abstraction." In so far as he appealed to 

 biology for encouragement in such teaching, Comte was 

 following biological clues in the new science of sociology. 



Now, if this be so, an adherent of the German 



1 2nd edition, pp. 61, 132. 



