We have observed the importance attached by Comte to his new science of sociology. Fouillée endeavours to give to it a metaphysical significance with which Comte did not concern himself. He suggests in his volume on _La Science sociale contemporaine_ that as biology and sociology are closely related, the laws common to them may have a cosmic significance. Is the universe, he asks, anything more than a vast society in process of formation, a vast system of conscious, striving atoms? Social science which Fouillée looks upon, as did Comte, as constituting the crown of human knowledge, may offer us, he thinks, the secret of universal life, and show us the world as the great society in process of development, erring here and blundering there in an effort to rise above the sphere of physical determinism and materialism to a sphere where justice shall be supreme, and brotherhood take the place of antagonism, greed and war. The power at the heart of things, which is always ready to manifest itself in the human consciousness when it can, might be expressed, says Fouillée, in one word as “sociability.” Life in its social aspect displays a _conspiration_ to a common end. The life of a community resembles a highly evolved organism in many respects, as Fouillée shows; but although he thus partially adopts the biological and positivist view of the sociologists, Fouillée does not overlook the idealistic conceptions of Renouvier and his plea for social justice. He rather emphasises this plea, and takes the opportunity to point out that it represents the best political thought of his country, being founded on the doctrine of the _contrat social_ of Rousseau, of which social theory it is a clear and modern interpretation. We may take the opportunity afforded here by Fouillée’s mention of sociology, in which he was so keenly interested, to observe that the positivist tendency to emphasise an indefinite progress remained with most of the sociologists and some of the historians. It is seen in the two famous sociological works of Tarde and Durkheim respectively, _Les Lois de l’Imitation_ and _La Division du Travail social_. Two writers on history deserve mention as illustrating the same tendency: Lacombe, whose work _De l’Histoire considérée comme Science_ (1894) was very positivist in outlook, and Xénopol. This last writer, treating history in 1899 in his _Principes fondamentaux de l’Histoire_,[15] distinguished cause in history from causality in science, and showed that white the latter leads to the formation of general laws the former does not. History has no laws, for it is succession but never repetition. Much of his book, however, reflects the naturalism and positivism which is a feature of the sociological writers.[16] [15] This work, revised and considerably augmented, was re-issued in 1905 with the new title, _La Théorie de l’Histoire_.