founded, are in many points coincident, and contemplate the same facts and phenomena, though in a different relation. The idea of the unity of human society, of the exhibition of law in its movements as a whole and in the interaction of its parts, conceptions of its constitution, progress, and destiny, more or less true and of various degrees of definiteness, were thus arrived at. Much is also to be ascribed to the gradual advance of the general scientific spirit, which seeks to penetrate and bring under its sway every object of knowledge, every department of mental activity. It may be, too, that the development of Social Science has been owing hardly less to political forces, to the stimulus of practical needs and the problems these suggest, than to any purely speculative impulse. Reflections and inquiries prompted by an immediate regard to definite practical issues, or pursued in justification of measures already adopted on the ground of expediency or at the bidding of feeling and common sense, have led the way and prepared the material for more articulate and scientific treatment of the subject as a whole.
It is with Comte that the floating and incoherent thoughts previously evolved on the subject first take distinct and positive form as a science. It was he who apprehended the several departments as mutually connected, and who detached the idea of Sociology as a whole, constituting a province of its own, and who assigned its place and relation to the other divisions of knowledge. Even admitting, on the one hand, the anticipation of some of his most important doctrines by Aristotle, and, on the other, the influence exerted on him by modern German thought, widely removed as he is from its spirit, Comte may still be regarded as virtually the father of Social Science. If his doctrines were not wholly original, he has the credit of first recognising their importance and emphasising their enunciation, as well as indicating their scientific position and systematic development. The very designation of the science as Sociology is due to him; and he it was who introduced into it, as well as defined the significance of, the important distinction observed in other sciences of tatical and Dynamical laws, corresponding to the theory of possible social simultaneities-or the theory of Order, and the theory of possible social successions-or the theory of