Respecting M. Comte’s application of the words _statics_ and _dynamics_ to social phenomena, now that I know what it is, I will only say that while I perfectly understand how, by a defensible extension of their mathematical meanings, the one may be used to indicate social _functions in balance_, and the other social _functions out of balance_, I am quite at a loss to understand how the phenomena of _structure_ can be included in the one any more than in the other. But the two things which here concern me, are, first, to point out that I had not “the slightest notion” of giving Social Statics the meaning which M. Comte gave it; and, second, to explain the meaning which I did give it. The units of any aggregate of matter, are in equilibrium when they severally act and re-act on one another on all sides with equal forces. A state of change among them implies that there are forces exercised by some that are not counterbalanced by like forces exercised by others; and a state of rest implies the absence of such uncounterbalanced {136} forces—implies, if the units are homogeneous, equal distances among them—implies a maintenance of their respective spheres of molecular motion. Similarly among the units of a society, the fundamental condition to equilibrium, is, that the restraining forces which the units exercise on each other, shall be balanced. If the spheres of action of some units are diminished by extension of the spheres of action of others, there necessarily results an unbalanced force which tends to produce political change in the relations of individuals; and the tendency to change can cease, only when individuals cease to aggress on each other’s spheres of action—only when there is maintained that law of equal freedom, which it was the purpose of _Social Statics_ to enforce in all its consequences. Besides this totally-unlike conception of what constitutes Social Statics, the work to which I applied that title, is fundamentally at variance with M. Comte’s teachings in almost everything. So far from alleging, as M. Comte does, that society is to be re-organized by philosophy; it alleges that society is to be re-organized only by the accumulated effects of habit on character. Its aim is not the increase of authoritative control over citizens, but the decrease of it. A more pronounced individualism, instead of a more pronounced nationalism, is its ideal. So profoundly is my political creed at variance with the creed of M. Comte, that, unless I am misinformed, it has been instanced by a leading English disciple of M. Comte as the creed to which he has the greatest aversion. One point of coincidence, however, is recognizable. The analogy between an individual organism and a social organism, which was held by Plato and by Hobbes, is asserted in _Social Statics,_ as it is in the _Sociology_ of M. Comte. Very rightly, M. Comte has made this analogy the cardinal idea of this division of his philosophy.