The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

of the work of Fabre d’Olivet?) and to fructify it by a synthesis with the thoroughly positive researches and methods of Frédéric Le Play. It is from this synthesis that a living and truly human sociology becomes possible, however little this study has succeeded in establishing itself in our Universities today (except perhaps among some Geographers!)—some Universities, I believe, eae ing ‘Sociology’ without studying Comte—or Geddes—while others retreat into ‘Social Science’ or ‘Social Studies’ is an attempt to conform more closely to the scientific prejudices of our day. Another remarkable sociological writer—apparently quite forgotten today—who arises directly out of Comte is Benjamin Kidd.

Particular appreciation of his work has been found farther field, in the young nations of Latin America, where his renovation of a Catholic conception of order has evidently met a need. I have myself met a Chief Justice of Brazil who is an enthusiastic Positivist; and indeed the national flag of his country carries a motto from Comte.

But one cannot avoid a sense of historic failure about both Comte’s thinking and his proposals, as he seems to have understood them himself and as they have been taken by others up to now, in comparison with his younger contemporary Marx, whose success has been a remarkable feature of the last hundred years. That is to say, Marxism has in the last half-century conquered empires, and Positivism has lost even its Chapel for the Religion of Humanity off Red Lion Square; but this turn of Fortune’s wheel of historic facts may be deceptive as an indication of ultimate human significance.

The work of Comte does indeed lend itself to criticism on several scores—but mainly as a result of not being taken as a whole. His famous Law of the Three Stages (already indicated in outline by Saint-Simon) has been well, and fairly, dealt with by Solovyov, and also by Caird. But first let us hear it in Comte’s own words (fom the ‘Fundamental Principles of the Positive Philosophy’, 1830, based on his original course of lectures):

‘In studying the total development of human intelligence in its different spheres of activity, from its first and simplest beginning up to our own time, I believe that I have discovered a great