OF SOCIETY. 



489 



Christian ethics. But, as already remarked, 1 neither 

 psychology nor ethics forms an integral part, or receives 

 adequate recognition, in Comte's philosophy. As it was 

 only at the end of his philosophical development that he 

 came to assign to ethics an important position, so also it 

 was only after having completed the greater of his two 

 larger treatises that he liberated himself from the early 

 conception, inherited from Cabanis, that psychology is 

 merely a department or appendix of physiology. He 

 came to see that the individual man is not merely a 

 biological unit but is an object of special scientific study. 2 

 Still the subordination of man as an individual to his 

 existence as a social being remains ; and with it the 

 emphasis given to a truth which has played an increas- 

 ingly important part in recent psychology and sociology. 3 



1 See also supra, p. 487. 



2 This is well brought out by Mr 

 Whittaker in his Tract on ' Comte 

 and Mill ' (Constable's ' Philoso- 

 phies Ancient and Modern,' 1908), 

 especially chapter v. " By the 

 time he had completed the ' Cours 

 de Philosophic Positive,' Comte 

 perceived the necessity of a 

 revision, as he told Mill in their 

 correspondence. Hitherto the 

 individual had not been explicitly 

 considered at all except as a bio- 

 logical organism. . . . Individuality 

 had seemed at first to be a mere 

 biological notion, and then to be 

 effaced under the conception of a 

 social unity. From Comte's later 

 point of view . . . there is a true 

 science of man as individual ; but 

 it is posterior, not prior, to soci- 

 ology. To this science Comte 

 gave the name of Morality, mak- 

 ing it the seventh in his hierarchy. 

 . . . Theoretically, it must be 



noted that Comte's new science 

 is properly not ethics, but psy- 

 chology of the individual. . . . But 

 he failed ... to distinguish it 

 from moral philosophy. . . . Just 

 as he does not discuss philoso- 

 phically the criterion of scientific 

 knowledge, but takes it for granted, 

 so he does not discuss the criterion 

 of action, but supposes it to emerge 

 as a matter of course from his the- 

 oretical 'moral science'" (pp. 52 

 and 53). 



3 As psychology, theory of know- 

 ledge, ontology and ethics, are all 

 wanting in Comte's ' Positivism,' 

 some have refused to call the 

 latter a philosophy at all, regard- 

 ing positivism merely as a general 

 attitude of the philosophical mind, 

 requiring to be scientifically defined 

 but capable of very various inter- 

 pretations and containing a number 

 of aspects which have, since its 

 proclamation, more and more 



