Montesquieu was in advance of his time, when, by the insight of his genius, he generalised the idea of natural law so as to bring under it the political, judicial, economical, and, generally speaking, all social phenomena. He really conceives the idea of social science. But the execution did not respond to the conception. How could Montesquieu have succeeded, since he was still without two indispensable elements: in the first place, the positive science of man from the biological point of view, and then the idea of progress, a vital necessity for every positive philosophy of history? Having failed to apprehend the fundamental laws of social dynamics, Montesquieu made too much use of the comparative method. Consequently, he took secondary laws for essential laws, such as the laws relating to the influence of climate. In the same way he has exaggerated the importance of various forms of political constitution.[230] Condorcet came after Montesquieu and Turgot, and had been formed in the school of d’Alembert. He came nearer than anyone to the social science which was to be founded. He understood admirably that the evolution of the human race, considered as a single being, is subject to laws. He brought the idea of progress into full daylight. But, nevertheless, positive sociology does not owe to him its origin. He shared the prejudice of his time on the subject of the indefinite perfectibility of man; this prejudice was only to disappear before the positive science of intellectual and moral man. Moreover, in the heat of the revolutionary conflict, he misunderstood the concrete reality of the progress, whose abstract necessity he had so well realised. By painting the centuries preceding the XVIII. century, in the darkest colours, he made the progressive evolution of humanity a kind of miracle, “doubly inadmissible in a doctrine which does not imply a Providence.”[231] But soon Cabanis and Gall bring forward the positive theory of the moral and intellectual faculties of man. The French revolution throws a vivid light upon the period which separates us from the Middle Ages. At last, the theorists of the counter-Revolution show that the philosophy of the XVIII. century, if it excelled in the power of demolishing, was incapable of reconstructing, and they also show that order must be inseparable from progress. Comte regards himself as a Condorcet who has profited by these lessons of experience. He has worked with Saint-Simon, he has read De Maistre. In short, he is possessed of all the necessary elements for the foundation of sociology.