AUGUSTE COMTE 17 
social physics or sociology, forms the climax of all the sciences 
which he arranges in a hierarchy based on filiation,! increasing 
complexity,? decreasing perfection in the sense of quantitative 
exactitude,’ and on the order of development of the sciences to 
that condition which might be termed positive. This classifica- 
tion, repudiated by Spencer, has been adopted with some modi- 
fications and explanations by Mill, Ward,‘ Giddings, De Greef and 
many others. 
This law of the three stages was incorporated into Mill’s 
logical doctrine as the ‘inverse deductive method.” It assumes 
that the general human mind has developed the same as the 
individual mind. Experience showed Comte that the child is 
imaginative with a personal-causal explanation of phenomena 
whereas the adult, at least the one schooled in the scientific 
method, interprets phenomena by reference to natural laws.® 
The period of youth had been with Comte a transition period, a 
period of storm and stress, of intellectual and moral anarchy and 
this he saw was characteristic of youth. Comte found stages of 
civilization that corresponded to these periods; primitive 
societies imaginative with a personal explanation of phenomena, 
the five nations of western Europe in the centuries just preceding 
his time corresponding to the anarchic stage of youth, and the era 
dawning with its emphasis on law like unto the mature mind of 
cultured man.’? He shows also that each science in its develop- 
ment has passed through these stages. 
One other item is worthy of consideration before passing to the 
discussion of his specific social doctrines, — his conception of law. 
In this he seems to have followed Hume. Not only does he repu- 
diate the effort to discover the final cause of change, but it would 
seem that he fails to recognize, also, efficient cause in the system 
itself. He seeks only laws of similitude and succession among 
phenomena. The former make possible his scheme of logical 
1 Positive Philosophy, i, p. 28; cf. Ward, Pure Sociology, ch. V. 
2 Positive Philosophy, i, ch. II. 4 Pure Sociology, pp. 65 f. 
3 Ibid., i, pp. 29, 223. 5 Whittaker, Comte and Mill, p. 23. 
8 Positive Philosophy, i, p. 3. 
7 [bid., ii, chs. VII-XI. Lévy-Briihl, of. cit., p. 364. 
8 Positive Philosophy, i, pp. 5, 12, 217, 221, 225 f., 515. 
