AUGUSTE COMTE 2/ 



ment both material and social. (4) In this evolutionary process 

 the intellect leads, furnishes the pattern and makes possible 

 material achievement and social telesis, and finally, (5) the heart, 

 including the desires and emotions, is the impelling force.^ The 

 first is essential to his ethics of altruism and his religion of 

 humanity for he had discarded all supernatural sanctions and 

 needed something to take their place. The second supplies the 

 key to his static sociology with its doctrine of consensus. The 

 third furnishes his theories of social continuity, social prophecy 

 and relativism. The fourth issues in his law of the three 

 periods as the interpreter of the historic process, in his teaching 

 concerning active material and social adaptation with the corol- 

 lary of political opportunism. The fifth supplies the dynamic of 

 social progress, of his altruistic ethics and of his positive polity 

 based on love and on his rehgion of humanity. 



This fiction of a general mind, however, not only does not corre- 

 spond to reality, but it partially closed the eyes of Comte to two 

 great realms of sociological investigation: first, to the actual 

 state of disorder and mal-adaptation, attention to which has led 

 to the modern studies in social pathology and social control, 

 and second, to the processes, forces and methods of social evolu- 

 tion which are now being studied inductively as well as those of 

 biological evolution. 



His assumption of an impulse to orderly development,^ 

 very like the preformation theory of early biologists, is highly 

 metaphysical and so unwarranted from his theory.^ There is no 

 such thing as a general human mind that has developed from 

 primitive to modern times. There is, to be sure, the phenomenon 

 of so-called social heredity or the transmission of acquired knowl- 

 edge and experience from generation to generation through 

 imitation, tradition, custom and education. There is, too, the 

 fact of similarity of individual mental processes in all ages, so far 

 as we know, and similarity in the laws of psychic interaction so 

 that, as Ross points out, " those social phenomena which lie 



^ In the Polity evaluated above the intellect. 

 * Positive Philosophy, ii, pp. 75-85. 

 ' Cf. Ward, Pure Sociology, p. 381. 



