ns of historical
analysis and the preparatory conceptions of biological theory. As Mill
puts it:--"If a sociological theory, collected from historical evidence,
contradicts the established general laws of human nature; if (to use M.
Comte's instances) it implies, in the mass of mankind, any very decided
natural bent, either in a good or in a bad direction; if it supposes
that the reason, in average human beings, predominates over the desires,
or the disinterested desires over the personal,--we may know that
history has been misinterpreted, and that the theory is false. On the
other hand, if laws of social phenomena, empirically generalized from
history, can, when once suggested, be affiliated to the known laws of
human nature; if the direction actually taken by the developments and
changes of human society, can be seen to be such as the properties of
man and of his dwelling-place made antecedently probable, the empirical
generalizations are raised into positive laws, and sociology becomes a
science." The result of this method, is an exhibition of the events of
human experience in co-ordinated series that manifest their own
graduated connexion.

Next, as all investigation proceeds from that which is known best to
that which is unknown or less well known, and as, in social states, it
is the collective phenomenon that is more easy of access to the observer
than its parts, therefore we must consider and pursue all the elements
of a given social state together and in common. The social organization
must be viewed and explored as a whole. There is a nexus between each
leading group of social phenomena and other leading groups; if there is
a change in one of them, that change is accompanied by a corresponding
modification of all the rest. "Not only must political institutions and
social manners, on the one hand, and manners and ideas, on the other, be
always mutually connected; but further, this consolidated whole must be
always connected by its nature with the corresponding state of the
integral development of humanity, considered in all its aspects of
intellectual, moral and physical activity."--_Comte._

Decisive Importance of Intellectual development.

Is there any one element which communicates the decisive impulse to all
the rest,--any predominating agency in the course of social evolution?
The answer is that all the other parts of social existence are
associated with, and drawn along by, the contemporary condition