mon ideas is of peculiar importance. The supreme idea is the idea of humanity, to which all individual and social development should be subservient.—Comte challenges the distinction between private and public functions. This distinction belongs to modern thought; it was unknown to the Greeks and to the Middle Ages. It is the duty of positive philosophy to develop a sentiment by means of which all should be enabled to regard themselves as co-laborers of the one great body of humanity. It is especially important to incorporate the proletariat, which has arisen since the abolition of slavery, into the social system.
The law of the three stages, with which we are already acquainted, belongs to social dynamics. The various stages of intellectual development correspond to definite stages of social and political development. Militarism corresponds with the theological stage. This is the period of regulative authority. The control of the jurists ("legislators") corresponds with the metaphysical stage; their specific task consists in regulating the rights of the various classes, particularly the rights of the middle class, of the military and of the clergy. Industrialism corresponds with the positive stage; the distribution of power is now determined by productive capacity, and social problems take the place of the political problems.
e. In a later work (Politique positive, 1851-4) Comte undertook to lay the foundation of a new religion, the Religion of Humanity. (The complete title therefore reads as follows: Politique positive, ou traité de sociologie instituant la religion de l'humanité.) Whilst in his Cours he made the world or nature his starting-point and aimed to attain an understanding of man on the basis of the knowledge of nature, he would now replace this
