Beginning with Vico’s [1] _New Science_, there has been more than one attempt in modern Europe to inaugurate the Science of Society as a new departure. But the distinctive and modern spirit of what is known as Sociology, and under that {18} name has had a continuous growth of half a century at least, first found unmistakable expression in Auguste Comte. The conception which he impressed upon the science to which he first gave the name of sociology or social physics, was a characteristically modern conception. Its essence was the inclusion of human society among the objects of natural science; its watchwords were law and cause in the sense in which alone Positivism allowed causes to be thought of--and scientific prediction. [2] It is true that the large conception of unity which Comte embodied in his philosophy had very much in common with the principles insisted on by the Greek social philosophers. The close interdependence of all social phenomena among each other, the unity of man with nature, and the consequent correlation of moral and political theory with the organised hierarchy of mathematical and physical sciences, are ideas which Comte might have borrowed directly from Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless the modern starting-point is wholly different from that of antiquity. The modern enquirer--the sociologist as such--was to ask himself, according to Comte, in the language of physical science, what are the laws and causes operative among aggregations of human beings, and what are their predictable effects? The ancient philosopher--the ethical and metaphysical theorist--had before him primarily the problem, “what is the completest and most real life of the human soul?” The work of the latter has been revived by modern idealist philosophy dating from Rousseau and Hegel, and finding a second {19} home in Great Britain, as that of the former has developed itself within the peculiar limits and traditions of sociological research, flourishing more especially upon French and American soil. The continuance of these two streams of thought in independent courses, though not without signs of convergence, is a remarkable phenomenon of nineteenth century culture; and it will be one of the problems which the present chapter, and in a larger sense the whole of the present work, must deal with, to consider how far it is necessary or desirable that they should blend. [1] J. D. Rogers in Palgrave’s _Dict. of Pol. Econ._, art. “Social Science.” [2] See Gidding’s _Sociology_, p. 6.