The third volume of the later work, the _Positive Polity_, treats of social dynamics, and takes us again over the ground of historic evolution. It abounds with remarks of extraordinary fertility and comprehensiveness; but it is often arbitrary; its views of the past are strained into coherence with the statical views of the preceding volume; and so far as concerns the period to which the present writer happens to have given special attention, it is usually slight and sometimes random. As it was composed in rather less than six months, and as the author honestly warns us that he has given all his attention to a more profound co-ordination, instead of working out the special explanations more fully, as he had promised, we need not be surprised if the result is disappointing to those who had mastered the corresponding portion of the _Positive Philosophy_. Comte explains the difference between his two works. In the first his 'chief object was to discover and demonstrate the laws of progress, and to exhibit in one unbroken sequence the collective destinies of mankind, till then invariably regarded as a series of events wholly beyond the reach of explanation, and almost depending on arbitrary will. The present work, on the contrary, is addressed to those who are already sufficiently convinced of the certain existence of social laws, and desire only to have them reduced to a true and conclusive system.' What that system is it would take far more space than we can afford to sketch even in outline. All we can do is to enumerate some of its main positions. They are to be drawn not only from the _Positive Polity_, but from two other works,--the _Positivist Catechism: a Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion, in Twelve Dialogues between a Woman and a Priest of Humanity_; and second, _The Subjective Synthesis_ (1856), which is the first and only volume of a work upon mathematics announced at the end of the _Positive Philosophy_. The system for which the _Positive Philosophy_ is alleged to have been the scientific preparation contains a Polity and a Religion; a complete arrangement of life in all its aspects, giving a wider sphere to Intellect, Energy, and Feeling than could be found in any of the previous organic types,--Greek, Roman, or Catholic-feudal. Comte's immense superiority over such præ-Revolutionary Utopians as the Abbé Saint Pierre, no less than over the group of post-revolutionary Utopians, is especially visible in his firm grasp of the cardinal truth that the improvement of the social organism can only be effected by a moral development, and never by any changes in mere political mechanism, or any violences in the way of an artificial redistribution of wealth. A moral transformation must precede any real advance. The aim, both in public and private life, is to secure to the utmost possible extent the victory of the social feeling over self-love, or Altruism over Egoism. This is the key to the