44 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries large 

 national developments, with this difference : that in 

 England, the national development brought with it pre- 

 eminently the industrial and economic problems, which 

 only come to the fore when a more or less settled state 

 of society has been reached ; whereas the national devel- 

 opment of France resulted in the great cataclysm of 

 the Eevolution, bringing with it the many doubts, 

 theories, and constructive attempts which surround the 

 question of the grovmdwork of state and society. Comte 

 was the first to proclaim Sociology as the science of the 

 nineteenth century — i.e., the problems connected with 

 the hfe of man, not as an individual but as a member 

 of a social organisation. 



This view appealed strongly to John Stuart Mill, in 

 whose mind the sociological problem, which in his fore- 

 runners had been limited more or less to industrial, 

 economic, and legal questions, began to acquire that 

 larger meaning and greater importance which it has 

 finally attained in the writings of Herbert Spencer. 

 36. No such inducement to attempt the solution of prac- 



Absence of 



the same in tical quBstious referring to State and Society existed in 

 Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. There 

 existed there no great industrial developments and no 

 great national expansion as in England, nor did the 

 Eevolution offer to German thinkers much more than 

 a subject for theoretical contemplation. But, as I have 

 had occasion to point out before, the dispersive nature 

 of Germany's political life and the absence of national 

 unity had resulted in a greater diffusion of culture and 

 in the development of the great educational systems, 



