pecial
circumstances have always attended on such union, increasing and
decreasing in proportion to its completeness; and will then verify these
facts as requisites by deducing them from general laws of human nature.
Thus, history indicates as such requisites and conditions of free
political union: 1. A system of educational discipline checking man's
tendency to anarchy; 2. Loyalty, i.e. a feeling of there being
something, whether persons, institutions, or individual freedom and
political and social equality, which is not to be, at least in practice,
called in question; 3. That which the Roman Empire, notwithstanding all
its tyranny, established, viz. a strong sense of common interest among
fellow-citizens (a very different feeling, by the bye, to mere
antipathy to foreigners).

Social Dynamics regards sequences. But the _consensus_ in social facts
prevents our tracing the leading facts in one generation to separate
causes in a prior one. Therefore, we must find the law of the
correspondence not only between the simultaneous states, but between the
simultaneous changes of the elements of society. To find this law,
which, when duly verified, will be the scientific derivative law of the
development of humanity, we must combine the statical view of the
phenomena with the dynamical. Fortunately, the state of mankind's
speculative faculties and beliefs, being the prime agent of the social
movement, furnishes a clue in the maze of social elements, since the
order of human progression in all respects will mainly depend on the
order of progression of this prime agent. That the other dispositions
which aid in social progress (e.g. the desire for increased material
comfort) owe their means of working to this (however relatively weak a
propensity it may be) is a conclusion from the laws of human nature; and
this conclusion is in accordance also with the course of history, in
which internal social changes have ever been preceded by proportionate
intellectual changes. To determine the law of the successive
transformations of opinions all past time must be searched, since such
changes appear definitely only at long intervals. M. Comte alone has
followed out this conception of the Historical Method; and his
generalisation, to the effect that speculation has, on all subjects,
three successive stages, has high scientific value.

The Historical Method will trace the derivative laws of social order
and progress. It will enable us both t