6 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD CHAP. 



times as plum, sometimes, it may be, as guava, yet in 

 all you taste the monotonous flavour of apple, or of 

 burnt sugar. Not less alike to each other are evolu- 

 tionary ethics and evolutionary sociology. Thus 

 to anticipate for a moment sociology was originally 

 formulated by Comte as the true guide to conduct, 

 the new authority, destined to supersede both ethics 

 and religion. He modified this position in later days, 

 as we shall see, but only within limits, and at the out- 

 set it was announced as we have given it. Soci- 

 ology offered to guide man with the help of biology ; 

 society was an organism ; man was a member in the 

 organism ; a part, not the whole ; essentially depend- 

 ent on the whole, and bound to serve its interests. 

 This conception reappears in Mr. Spencer ; he works 

 out its suggestions in his own way, which is not 

 Comte's ; but still he appeals to the analogy between 

 society and an organism ; and he calls the discussion 

 sociology. But when we turn to Mr. Leslie Stephen's 

 Science of Ethics, we meet with identically the same 

 discussion. True, Mr. Stephen prefers the expression 

 "social tissue" to the expression " social organism," 

 but the difference is essentially one of detail, and 

 does not affect the question before us. We are still 

 working the biological analogy, yet, if you please, 

 this is ethics we are working at. The brand, no 

 doubt, is different ; the liquor is the same. Spencer 

 has elsewhere and in different form his discussion of 

 ethics ; Stephen's ethics run parallel, not to Spencer's 

 ethics, but to Spencer's sociology .> Again, Professor 

 Alexander's Moral Order and Progress is, as the 

 name implies, an ethical discussion, yet the author 

 finds it impossible to discuss the problems of per- 



