28 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



nearest the subjective focus will exhibit in their transformations 

 a certain logic and regularity," ^ but there is the other focus in 

 social evolution, the objective. " Environments," Ross con- 

 tinues, " impose modes of existence extremely unlike, and 

 therefore in differently situated social groups those social phe- 

 nomena lying nearest the objective focus will undergo not 

 parallel but divergent evolution." The discovery and working 

 out of these problems was reserved for later sociologists under the 

 inspiration of Darwin's painstaking labors in biological evolution. 



Comte might have made more progress along these lines in his 

 later years, aided by advance not only in biological but in mental 

 and historical science had it not been that he was obsessed by the 

 logical fiction of his early treatise, was busied with the elabora- 

 tion of his positive poKty and moreover, was led astray by his 

 theory of " cerebral hygiene " which closed his mind to the 

 scientific truths discovered in the later years of his life. 



In spite, however, of these short-comings, so great has been his 

 contribution to social science and social philosophy that a modern 

 authority says: " The broad and general lines on which he 

 sketched the outlines of social science have formed the basis of all 

 attempts since. Much of his filhng in was crude, but some was of 

 permanent value. He indicated correctly the true nature and 

 scope of the science and the proper method of investigation to be 

 followed.'* 2 



Sociological organicists may well claim Comte as their master, 

 so too, the biological and the classifying schools. In basing social 

 evolution on the development of mind he is in line with genetic 

 psychologists. In suggesting the importance of material achieve- 

 ment as the basis of cultural, he was a forerunner of Ward, Carver 

 and others; in his emphasis on desires as the impelling forces to 

 progress his position was very much like that of Ratzenhofer 

 and Small; in his doctrine of social telesis and political opportun- 

 ism, he pointed the way to rational social control as generally 

 accepted today by social scientists. Comte's Positive Philos- 

 ophy may thus not inaptly be denominated a Prolegomenon 

 to Sociology. 



^ Foundations of Sociology, p. 62. ^ F. Spencer Baldwin, Class Lectures, 



