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this case is the frequently (though not always) verified hypothesis, supported by archaeological
excavations, that the stages of development at which many savages have become fixed are the stages
which have been traversed by advanced peoples. It is well known with what fury the hasty “pre”-
sociologists of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu in the lead, pounced on the anecdotes and even the
nonsense tales of travelers, but primarily as a change from the classical historians and to extend their
idea of humanity in space rather than to push human history back in time. It was left to our century to
attempt, with an unhoped-for success, this jump back in time.
II
As early as the beginning of the century, everyone felt that the time had come to condense into a living
synthesis the scattered fragments of social science grouped under the vague name of “moral and
political sciences,” which were alien to each other and even more alien to the harmonious group of
the natural sciences. It was necessary to end their double incoherence by coordinating them and
incorporating them into universal science. The attempts made in this direction were to remain sterile
until the appearance of a master idea which would bind the scattered straws into a single sheaf. Shall
we say that this idea came to light the day Auguste Comte formulated his famous law of the three
stages—theological, metaphysical, and positivist—which, from whatever point of view one chooses,
human development is compelled to traverse? A polemic on this subject arose between John Stuart
Mill and Littre. Mill denied that the great founder of positivism had brought sociology to the point at
which one can say that a science is truly constituted. For Littré, Comte’s constituting of sociology
resulted from the law in question. Who was right? I am afraid it was Mill. Can it be said that biology
existed from the time, certainly long ago, when it was discovered that all living beings are subject to
the “law of ages” and without exception pass through the successive stages of childhood, youth,
maturity, and old age, unless a violent death interrupts this course? And this law of ages is general
and profound in quite a different way from the law of the three stages.
On the other hand, insofar as it is valid, the law of the three stages was infinitely more difficult to
discover. If our life, compared to that of other animals, was so short that we could not see these
others one after another come to life, grow, age, and die, the sage who, from induction based on
observation and intelligent research, first discovered the frequency and universality of this succession
of stages in the animal world would be rightly admired as the author of a great and fruitful
generalization. Would not his law of ages be reputed one of the fundamentals of physiology? In
relation to human society, we individual humans are what in my hypothesis man is to the lives of
animals. Hence we would readily concede that Comte’s principle is one of the basic social laws if its
scope were as general and its truth as certain as its author believed. Unfortunately, its application is
limited to the intellectual development of societies. But even in this area it is not without exception
and extends, moreover, neither to their economic nor to their aesthetic development.
Nor are the transformations of languages explained, or those of religion, all of whose phases
remain in the first of the three stages. How then could Littré claim that by forming such a vague and
incomplete law Comte did for sociology what Bichat did for biology in discovering the elementary
properties of living tissue? As Mill pointed out, it is just these elementary properties of social tissue
that are missing from the work, otherwise so substantial, of the Master of the positivist school.
Was Mr. Spencer more successful when he picked up an ancient metaphor, developed and enlarged
it, pushed it to its extreme (until even he recognized its inadequacy) and in so doing classed social
bodies among living bodies? Would we say that this thesis concerning the social organism is one of
those good ideas which the new science could not do without and that, as a basis at least, it has had a