The sciences are themselves relative and much attention is given by Comte to the proper classification of the sciences. He determines his hierarchy by arranging them in the order in which they have themselves completed the three stages and arrived at positivity. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology are his arrangement. This last named has not yet arrived at the final stage; it is but a science in the making. Comte, indeed, himself gives it its name and founds it as the science of society, science applied to politics, as was first indicated in his scheme of work and early ideas of reform. Comte strongly insists upon the social aspect of all knowledge and all action. He even goes to the extent of regarding the individual man as an abstraction; for him the real being is the social being, Humanity. The study of human society has a double aspect, which is also a feature of the other sciences. As in biology there is the study of anatomy on the one hand and of physiology on the other, so in sociology we must investigate both the laws which govern the existence of a society and those which control its movements. The distinction is, in short, that of the static and the dynamic, and it embraces in sociological study the important conceptions of order and of progress. Comte very rightly stressed the idea of progress as characteristic of modern times, but he lamented its being divorced from that of order. He blamed the conservative view of order as responsible for promoting among “progressives” the spirit of anarchy and revolution. A positive sociology would, Comte maintained, reconcile a true order, which does not exclude change, with real progress, a movement which is neither destructive nor capricious. Comte here owes a debt in part to Montesquieu and largely to Condorcet, whose _Esquisse d’un Tableau historique des Progrès de l’Esprit humain_ (1795) did much to promote serious reflection upon the question of progress. We have already noted Comte’s intense valuation of Humanity as a whole as a Supreme Being. In his later years, notably after 1845, when he met his “Beatrice” in the person of Clotilde de Vaux, he gave to his doctrines a sentimental expression of which the Religion of Humanity with its ritualism was the outcome. This positivist religion endeavoured to substitute for the traditional God the Supreme Being of Humanity—a Being capable, according to Comte, of sustaining our courage, becoming the end of our actions and the object of our love. To this he attached a morality calculated to combat the egoism which tends to dominate and to destroy mankind and intended to strengthen the altruistic motives in man and to raise them to the service of Humanity.