nature, the highest stage of nature's most mature
and complex form. Man as individual is nothing more. Physiology gives us
not merely his external constitution and one set of relations. It is the
whole science of man. There is no study of mind in which its actions and
states can be contemplated apart from the physical basis in conjunction
with which mind exists.

Thus far man has been treated only biologically, as individual. We must
advance to man in society. Almost one half of Comte's bulky work is
devoted to this side of the inquiry. Social phenomena are a class
complex beyond any which have yet been investigated. So much is this the
case and so difficult is the problem presented, that Comte felt
constrained in some degree to change his method. We proceed from
experience, from data in fact, as before. But the facts are not mere
illustrations of the so called laws of individual human nature. Social
facts are the results also of situations which represent the accumulated
influence of past generations. In this, as against Bentham, for example,
with his endless recurrence to human nature, as he called it, Comte was
right. Comte thus first gave the study of history its place in
sociology. In this study of history and sociology, the collective
phenomena are more accessible to us and better known by us, than are the
parts of which they are composed. We therefore proceed here from the
general to the particular, not from the particular to the general, as in
research of the kinds previously named. The state of every part of the
social organisation is ultimately connected with the contemporaneous
state of all the other parts. Philosophy, science, the fine arts,
commerce, navigation, government, are all in close mutual dependence.
When any considerable change takes place in one, we may know that a
parallel change has preceded or will follow in the others. The progress
of society is not the aggregate of partial changes, but the product of a
single impulse acting through all the partial agencies. It can therefore
be most easily traced by studying all together. These are the main
principles of sociological investigation as set forth by Comte, some of
them as they have been phrased by Mill.

The most sweeping exemplification of the axiom last alluded to, as to
parallel changes, is Comte's so-called law of the three states of
civilisation. Under this law, he asserts, the whole historical evolution
can be summed up. It is as certain