result only from his knowledge of their natural
laws; and in the infancy of each science, they believed
themselves able to exert an unbounded influence over the
phenomena of that science.... Social phenomena are, of course,
from their extreme complexity, the last to be freed from this
pretension: but it is therefore only the more necessary to
remember that the pretension existed with regard to all the
rest, in their earliest stage, and to anticipate therefore that
social science will, in its turn, be emancipated from the
delusion.... It [the existing social science] represents the
social action of Man to be indefinite and arbitrary, as was
once thought in regard to biological, chemical, physical, and
even astronomical phenomena, in the earlier stages of their
respective sciences.... The human race finds itself delivered
over, without logical protection, to the ill-regulated
experimentation of the various political schools, each one of
which strives to set up, for all future time, its own immutable
type of government. We have seen what are the chaotic results
of such a strife; and we shall find that there is no chance of
order and agreement but in subjecting social phenomena, like
all others, to invariable natural laws, which shall, as a
whole, prescribe for each period, with entire certainty, the
limits and character of political action: in other words,
introducing into the study of social phenomena the same
positive spirit which has regenerated every other branch of
human speculation.[4]

In the present anarchy of political opinion and parties, changes in the
existing social order inevitably assume, he urged, the character, at the
best, of a mere groping empiricism; at the worst, of a social convulsion
like that of the French Revolution. Under the direction of a positive,
in place of a speculative or, as Comte would have said, metaphysical
science of society, progress must assume the character of an orderly
march.

It was to be expected, with the extension of exact methods of
investigation to other fields of knowledge, that the study of man and of
society would become, or seek to become, scientific in the sense in
which that word is used in the natural sciences. It is interesting, in
this connection, that Comte's first name for sociology was _social
physics_. It was not until he had reached th