THE SOCIOLOGICAL DISAGREEMENT. 133 



motion. Similarly among the units of a society, the funda 

 mental condition to equilibrium, is, that the restraining forces 

 which the units exercise on each other, shall be balanced. 

 If the spheres of action of some units are diminished by 

 extension of the spheres of action of others, there necessarily 

 results an unbalanced force which tends to produce political 

 change in the relations of individuals ; and the tendency 

 to change can cease, only when individuals cease to aggress 

 on each other s spheres of action only when there is 

 maintained that law of equal freedom, which it was the 

 purpose of Social Statics to enforce in all its consequences. 

 Besides this totally- unlike conception of what constitutes 

 Social Statics, the work to which I applied that title, is 

 fundamentally at variance with M. Comte s teachings in 

 almost everything. So far from alleging, as M. Comte docs, 

 that society is to be re-organized by philosophy ; it alleges 

 that society is to be re-organized only by the accumulated 

 effects of habit on character. Its aim is not the increase 

 of authoritative control over citizens, but the decrease of it. 

 A more pronounced individualism, instead of a more pro 

 nounced nationalism, is its ideal. So profoundly is my 

 political creed at variance with the creed of M. Comte, that, 

 unless I am misinformed, it has been instanced by a leading 

 English disciple of JVI. Comte, as the creed to which he has 

 the greatest aversion. One point of coincidence, however, 

 is recognizable. The analogy between an individual organism 

 and a social organism, which was held by Plato and by 

 Hobbes, is asserted in Social Statics, as it is in the Sociology 

 of M. Comte. Yery rightly, M. Comte has made this 

 analogy the cardinal idea of this division of his philosophy. 

 In Social Statics, the aim of which is essentially ethical, 

 this analogy is pointed out incidentally, to enforce certain 

 ethical considerations; and is there obviously suggested 

 partly by the definition of life which Coleridge derived from 

 Schclling, and partly by the generalizations of physiologists 

 there referred to (chap. xxx. . 12, 13, 16). Excepting 



