/OO THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
But Comte is mistaken, or rather humanity would be mistaken in its evolution, when he expresses the view, which is in contra- diction with his own conception of the moral order, that
whoever will adopt the conception established in this volume concerning the structure and existence of the collective organism, will at once recognize that the modern anarchy constitutes but the last degree of an immense perturbation. Its real origin is, indeed, traced back to the first dissolution of the ancient theocracies, the only complete types that the social order then permitted. We see from that time always and everywhere arising the revolutionary principle of the election of superiors by the inferiors which developed gradually during thirty centuries and now menaces the overthrow of political society.
What would one say of a zoologist who, meeting in his observations an animal species, of an importance equal to that of human societies which occupy with their existence the thirty centuries of history of which Comte speaks, and who should reject this species as a perturbation of his organic classification, for the reason that it deranges his preconceived order ? It is not the thirty centuries that ought to be erased from history as purely censurable or negative, but it is sociology that ought to conform its conclusions to the historical evolution. This evolu- tion, so considerable in time and space, which Comte considers as abnormal and perturbative, is, on the contrary, an organic and normal development. What is true is that the progressive trans- formation of public authorities into public servants, and of the hier- archy into an equivalence which is the very law of political progress, is in manifest contradiction to the hierarchies and authoritative conception of Comte a conception not at all positive, but simply subjective, as he recognized it himself.
It is even not correct, as he thought, that "the modifying social factors become less and less intense;" except that the more the organization is developed, the less easy becomes any profound social rearrangements of the most anciently integrated. It is this that explains why regularity becomes greater and greater, notwithstanding the growing mass of new and accessory variations destined to be consolidated and to support the weight of future modifications. The thesis of Comte is in contradiction to his own observation that the most complex phenomena are the most modifiable of all. He implicitly avows the error of his
