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 polity 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 filling 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 kis 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. 
1 Foundations of Sociology, p. 62. 2 F. Spencer Baldwin, Class Lectures. 
