AUGUSTE COMTE 27 
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 religion 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 
1 In the Polity evaluated above the intellect. 
2 Positive Philosophy, ii, pp. 75-85. 
> Cf. Ward, Pure Sociology, p. 381. 
