om the laws which regulate the succession between one state of society
and another, the fundamental problem of Social Science is to find these
latter laws. The form of this succession, by which (on account of the
exceptionally constant reaction, in social facts, of the effects, i.e.
human character, on their causes, i.e. human circumstances) one social
state is ever in process of changing into a different one, is now
allowed to be, not, as in the solar system, a cycle, but a _progress_
(by which is not here _necessarily_ meant _improvement_, whatever the
fact may be). In France it has been thought, that a law of progress, to
be found by an analysis of the course of history, would enable us to
predict the whole future. But such a law would be empirical, and not
true beyond its own facts; for the succession of mental and social
states cannot have an independent law. Empirical laws must indeed be
found; or a _general_ Science of Society would be impossible: for, the
character of any one generation is so much the result of the characters
of all prior ones, that _men_ could not compute so long a series from
the elementary laws producing it. But the empirical laws, when found (as
they can be, since the series of the effects as a whole is ever growing
in uniformity), must be shown by deductions to be, if not the only
possible, or even the most probable, at least possible, consequences of
the laws of human nature.

The empirical laws of society are uniformities, either of coexistence,
or of succession. The former are ascertained and verified by Social
Statics (which is the theory of the _consensus_, i.e. the mutual actions
and reactions, of contemporaneous social elements); the latter, by
Social Dynamics (the theory of Society considered as in a state of
progress). As to Social Statics--there is, M. Comte thinks, a perpetual
reciprocity of influence between all aspects of the same organism, and
to such an extent, that the condition of any one which we cannot
directly observe can be estimated by that of another which we can. There
is, he considers, such an interdependence, not only between the
different sciences and arts among themselves, but between the sciences
in general and the arts in general, even between the condition of
different nations of the same age, and between a form of government and
the civilisation of the period. Social Statics will ascertain for us the
requisites of stable political union: it will enquire what s