One of the outstanding features of the discussion upon ethics in our period is the fact that the social standpoint colours most of the discussion. This was largely due to the impulse given by Comte and continued by the sociologists. We have already remarked the importance which he attached to his new science of society or “sociology.” However much the development of this branch of study may have disappointed the hopes of Comte, it has laid a powerful and necessary emphasis upon the solidarity of the problems of society. As Comte claimed that psychology could not be profitably studied in the isolated individual alone, so he insisted that ethics could only be studied with profit from a social standpoint. This was not forgotten by subsequent thinkers, even by those who were not his followers, and the main development of the ethical problem in our period is marked by an increasing insistence upon sociability and solidarity. Comte was able to turn the thoughts of philosophers away from pre-occupation with the isolated individual, conceived as a cold and calculating intellectual machine, a “fiction” which had engrossed the minds of thinkers of the previous century. He was able also to indicate the enormous part played by instincts, particularly “herd-instincts,” by passion and feelings of social hatred and social sympathy. It was the extension of social sympathy upon which Comte insisted as the chief good. The great defect of Christianity from an ethical standpoint was, Comte pointed out, due to its individualistic ethic. To the doctrine of “saving one’s own soul” Comte opposed that of the salvation of humanity. The social unit is not the individual man or woman, it is the family. In that society which is not a mere association but a union, arising from common interests and sympathy, the individual realises himself as part of society. The highest ethical conception, however, arises when the individual, transcending himself and his family, feels and acts as a member of humanity itself, not only in his public, but also in his private life. In the idea of humanity Comte finds the concrete form of that universal which in the ethic of Kant was the symbol of duty itself. It was by this insistence on human social solidarity that Comte left his mark upon the ethical problem. Many of the details of social ethics given in the last three large volumes of his work are extremely thoughtful and interesting, in spite of their excessive optimism, but we can only here indicate what is sufficient for our purpose, his influence over subsequent thought. That is summed up in the words “solidarity” and “social standpoint.”