Yet modern efforts had to seek quite different methods, and the energies which have been most effective for the ordering of knowledge in the last decades spring unquestionably from the system of Comte and his successors. He did not aim at a system of ramifications; his problem was to show how the fundamental sciences depend on each other. A series was to be constructed in which each member should presuppose the foregoing. The result was a simplicity which is certainly tempting, but this simplicity was reached only by an artificial emphasis which corresponded completely to the one-sidedness of naturalistic thought. It was a philosophy of positivism, the background for the gigantic work of natural science and technique in the last two thirds of the nineteenth century. Comte's fundamental thought is that the science of Morals, in which we study human nature for the government of human life, is dependent on sociology. Sociology, however, depends on biology; this on chemistry; this on physics; this on astronomy; and this finally on mathematics. In this way, all mental and moral sciences, history and philology, jurisprudence and theology, economics and politics, are considered as sociological phenomena, as dealing with functions of the human being. But as man is a living organism, and thus certainly falls under biology, all the branches of knowledge from history to ethics, from jurisprudence to æsthetics, can be nothing but subdivisions of biology. The living organism, on the other hand, is merely one type of the physical bodies on earth, and biology is thus itself merely a department of physics. But as the earthly bodies are merely a part of the cosmic totality, physics is thus a part of astronomy; and as the whole universe is controlled by mathematical laws, mathematics must be superordinated to all sciences.