Law of the Three States 363

Classification of sciences 366

The double key of Positive Philosophy 368

Criticism on Comte's classification 369

Sociological conceptions 371

Method 371

Decisive importance of intellectual development 373

Historical elucidations 374

Their value and popularity 374

Social dynamics in the _Positive Polity_ 375

The Positivist system 376

The key to social regeneration 377

The Religion of Humanity 377

The Great Being 378

Remarks on the Religion 378

The worship and discipline 380

The priesthood 381

Women 382

Conclusion 383

AUGUSTE COMTE.[1]

Comte is now generally admitted to have been the most eminent and
important of that interesting group of thinkers whom the overthrow of
old institutions in France turned towards social speculation. Vastly
superior as he was to men like De Maistre on the one hand, and to men
like Saint Simon or Fourier on the other, as well in scientific
acquisitions as in mental capacity, still the aim and interest of all
his thinking was also theirs, namely, the renovation of the conditions
of the social union. If, however, we classify him, not thus according
to aim, but according to method, then he takes rank among men of a
very different type from these. What distinguishes him in method from
his contemporaries is his discernment that the social order cannot be
transformed until all the theoretic conceptions that belong to it have
been rehandled in a scientific spirit, and maturely gathered up into a
systematic whole along with the rest of our knowledge. This presiding
doctrine connects Comte with the social thinkers of the eighteenth
century,--in