of
intellectual development. The Reason is the superior and preponderant
element which settles the direction in which all the other faculties
shall expand. "It is only through the more and more marked influence of
the reason over the general conduct of man and of society, that the
gradual march of our race has attained that regularity and persevering
continuity which distinguish it so radically from the desultory and
barren expansion of even the highest animal orders, which share, and
with enhanced strength, the appetites, the passions, and even the
primary sentiments of man." The history of intellectual development,
therefore, is the key to social evolution, and the key to the history of
intellectual development is the Law of the Three States.

Among other central thoughts in Comte's explanation of history are
these:--The displacement of theological by positive conceptions has been
accompanied by a gradual rise of an industrial regime out of the
military regime;--the great permanent contribution of Catholicism was
the separation which it set up between the temporal and the spiritual
powers;--the progress of the race consists in the increasing
preponderance of the distinctively human elements over the animal
elements;--the absolute tendency of ordinary social theories will be
replaced by an unfailing adherence to the relative point of view, and
from this it follows that the social state, regarded as a whole, has
been as perfect in each period as the co-existing condition of humanity
and its environment would allow.

The elaboration of these ideas in relation to the history of the
civilization of the most advanced portion of the human race occupies two
of the volumes of the _Positive Philosophy_, and has been accepted by
very different schools as a masterpiece of rich, luminous, and
far-reaching suggestion. Whatever additions it may receive, and whatever
corrections it may require, this analysis of social evolution will
continue to be regarded as one of the great achievements of human
intellect.

Social dynamics in the Positive Polity.

The third volume of the _Positive Polity_ treats of social dynamics, and
takes us again over the ground of historic evolution. It abounds with
remarks of extraordinary fertility and comprehensiveness; but it is
often arbitrary; and its views of the past are strained into coherence
with the statical views of the preceding volume. As it was composed in
rather less than six months,