The study of life-histories as natural histories is a very recent phenomenon. The social sciences have barely begun to exploit this approach. It is of very great significance that Comte, after spending a lifetime in the preparation of his great system, finally saw that the capstone was missing, and at the time of his death was frantically trying to improvise it. His projected treatise was to deal with personality development and differentiation (_La morale_). It was never finished. There is something symbolic of the history of the social sciences in this story of Comte’s long preoccupation with institutions, his belated recognition of the possibilities of personality study, his hurried effort to make good the omission, and the fragmentary nature of the results achieved. Social science is in the belated-hurried-fragmentary phase of growth.[4] Comte’s fragment was never expanded by French sociologists. The comparative morphology of culture became all-absorbing, and this was concerned with the pantomime of what men did, and sporadically with what men thought. Comte executed his earlier volumes only too well. When the mental processes of primitives came to be studied by Durkheim and the Durkheimians, these “primitive mentalities” were examined for the sake of revealing highly abstract “forms” of thought, and not to reveal the individual sequence of human experience under different social conditions. The efforts which have been made to fill the gap have rested upon no massing of empirical data and have been fortified by no critical reflection on the methodological problem of improving the reliability of the data. The most promising sign of the times in France is the synthetic approach to social psychology which is sponsored by Blondel at Strassbourg.