ey describe the existing order of nature,
would disappear. In that case ideals would be defined in terms of
reality, and the tragic difference between what men want and what is
possible would be effaced. Comte's error was to mistake a theory of
progress for progress itself. It is certainly true that as men learn
what is, they will adjust their ideals to what is possible. But
knowledge grows slowly.

Man's knowledge of mankind has increased greatly since 1842. Sociology,
"the positive science of humanity," has moved steadily forward in the
direction that Comte's program indicated, but it has not yet replaced
history. Historians are still looking for methods of investigation which
will make history "scientific."

No one who has watched the course of history during the last
generation can have felt doubt of its tendency. Those of us who
read Buckle's first volume when it appeared in 1857, and almost
immediately afterwards, in 1859, read the _Origin of Species_
and felt the violent impulse which Darwin gave to the study of
natural laws, never doubted that historians would follow until
they had exhausted every possible hypothesis to create a
science of history. Year after year passed, and little progress
has been made. Perhaps the mass of students are more skeptical
now than they were thirty years ago of the possibility that
such a science can be created. Yet almost every successful
historian has been busy with it, adding here a new analysis, a
new generalization there; a clear and definite connection where
before the rupture of idea was absolute; and, above all,
extending the field of study until it shall include all races,
all countries, and all times. Like other branches of science,
history is now encumbered and hampered by its own mass, but its
tendency is always the same, and cannot be other than what it
is. That the effort to make history a science may fail is
possible, and perhaps probable; but that it should cease,
unless for reasons that would cause all science to cease, is
not within the range of experience. Historians will not, and
even if they would they can not, abandon the attempt. Science
itself would admit its own failure if it admitted that man, the
most important of all its subjects, could not be brought within
its range.[9]

Since Comte gave the new science of humanity a nam