Ob 1 SOCIETY. 471 



are now considered as the main characteristics of 

 Positivism. The first is that of the hierarchy of the 

 sciences, and subsequently also of Social Order upon 

 the foundation of the exact and the natural sciences. 

 The second is one of the first great comprehensive, and 

 to a large extent successful, attempts in the direction of 

 a history of human thought and human society, of a 

 philosophy of History. In working out this, as also by 

 conceiving of sociology as a separate and distinct science, 

 Comte has placed himself at the head of all those who 

 have, before and after him, dealt with the social problem 

 in its largest sense as the problem of Humanity. 



But before treating more in detail the main points of 

 Comte's teaching and the growth and diffusion of the 

 positive philosophy which indeed belonged to a much 

 later period it is well to note what was done in 

 Germany at the end of the eighteenth and during the 

 first third of the nineteenth century. There, as I stated 

 above, Eousseau's gospel of the return to nature, includ- 

 ing his natural religion as well as the proclamation of 

 the natural rights of man, had created a great im- 

 pression. But no sympathy was felt with the scientific 

 or naturalistic interpretation which was given to these 

 ideas in the school of the encyclopaedists and of many of 

 the French reformers during the Eevolution. The word 

 Nature was not narrowed down to mean merely the 

 physical side of things. The term Nature as applied 

 to human affairs was conceived in a much larger sense 

 as including the intellectual, the moral and the spiritual, 

 as well as the physical factors in the life of man 

 and mankind. Social problems, so far as they were 



