12 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PARTI 



exchange for Dumont's relation to Bentham. The 

 book was recently republished in English, when an 

 able reviewer 1 protested against the absurdity of 

 offering the reading public the science of fifty or 

 sixty years ago. The Positive Polity, on the other 

 hand, is sociology from beginning to end ; looking 

 back, as we shall see, to the survey of the inferior 

 sciences made in the Positive Philosophy, but work- 

 ing out its own problems on the grand scale. 

 ^ In the earlier book we have the two main divisions 

 of sociology first, social statics, or the conditions 

 of social order ; these are treated briefly ; secondly, 

 social dynamics, or the historical laws of social prog- 

 ress in the past. 



All three names are somewhat singular. The 

 name sociology Comte's own coinage is a hy- 

 brid term, partly Latin and partly Greek. Social 

 statics, again, is used in a different sense from that 

 of Mr. Herbert Spencer's early treatise. With Spen- 

 cer, social statics refers to a future Utopian period, 

 when egoism and altruism are perfectly balanced ; a 

 millennial age, when "that great disturbance of hu- 

 man nature, which the churches call sin," has been 

 left behind. It therefore corresponds to the " abso- 

 lute ethics" or "ethics for the straight man" of Mr. 

 Spencer's later system a fresh proof, if further 

 proof were needed, that ethics and sociology are 

 only diverse names for the same product, as produc- 

 tion is carried on in the schools of empirical sociol- 

 ogy and evolutionary ethics. In the light of science 

 it would seem that Comte's use of the phrase is much 

 better justified than Spencer's. Mechanical statics 



1 In the Manchester Guardian. 



