The essential part, on his own showing, is dynamics.[250] When he makes history the characteristic process of the Sociological method, when he shows that the tradition transmitted from every generation to the following one is pre-eminently the sociological phenomenon, when finally he considers the new science as having been founded from the day when the law of the three states was discovered, is he not placing himself at the dynamic point of view? After having demonstrated that dynamic laws of social phenomena exist, he concludes that these phenomena are also subject to static laws: there would be a contradiction in admitting the one set of laws without the other. In Comte’s mind then dynamics preceded statics. Even from an objective point of view, dynamics seem to be the most important. For, if we knew the dynamic laws it would not be impossible to deduce the static laws from them, while to do the reverse would be impracticable, at any rate for minds constituted like ours. So, in the _Cours de philosophie positive_, social statics holds a very small place compared with that occupied by dynamics. It is true that it takes up the whole of the second volume of the _Politique positive_. But there Comte brings into it many considerations which arise more from ethics and religion than from sociology properly so called. I. The idea of the social _consensus_, more restricted than that of the vital _consensus_, dominates the whole of social statics. The science sets itself to study the continual actions and reactions which the various parts of the social system exercise upon one another. Each of the numerous elements of this system, instead of being observed by itself, must be conceived as in relation with all the others, with which it has constant solidarity. From whatever social element we start, it is always connected, in a more or less direct way, with the whole of the others, even with those which at first sight appear independent.[251] What are the ultimate “social elements?” In biology, anatomical analysis was to stop at the tissue, or at least at the cell. In sociology, statical analysis will stop at the family. “Human society is made up of families and not of individuals: it is an elementary axiom in statical sociology.” In the eyes of social science, the individual is an abstraction. All social strength is the result of a “more or less extended co-operation,” that is to say of the combined action of a greater or smaller number of individuals. There is nothing purely individual except physical force. But what is the physical force of a man alone, without arms or tools? (for these already imply a co-operation of social activities). Intellectual power is of value only when others participate in it: so it is with moral power.