This co-operation is called to-day “the division of labour.” Comte knew this expression: Adam Smith had already made it famous. If Comte did not make use of it, it is because economists had limited the idea and the term to “merely material usages.” He wishes, on the contrary, to consider co-operation in the whole of its rational extension. It then becomes an extremely general principle, dominating the whole of social statics, and finding its application in the greatest as in the most limited social groups. This principle leads us to regard not only individuals and classes, but also, in many respects the different peoples, “as participating together in a suitable way and a determined degree, in an immense common work whose development unites those actually co-operating with the series of their successors and their predecessors.” Thus we see the relation between the dynamical and the statical laws of social continuity which binds successive generations, with social solidarity which unites men living in the same period. This solidarity arises especially from the division of labour. The latter is the “primitive cause” of the extension and of the growing complexity of the social organism, which may be conceived as comprising the whole of our species. The founder of social statics, Aristotle, had formulated its most general principle: “separation of offices and combination of efforts.”[257] Without the “separation of offices” there would only be an agglomeration of families and not a society. But the indispensable counterpart of the separation of offices is the combination of efforts, that is to say a general thought which directs them, in a word, a government. Thus, the ideas of society and of government are implied in one another. Indeed, there is no society properly so-called without the division of social labour, a division immediately generating consequences which make government a necessity. Society in developing grows more and more complex. Instead of a small group of a few families, it ends by numbering hundreds, thousands, and even millions of them. At the same time the division of labour often gives rise to individual differences, at once intellectual and moral. Minds are developed, but each one according to its special line, at least according to that of his profession or of his class. The communion of feeling and of thought tends to become weaker. This last is not the least serious inconvenience. Smith had already pointed it out from the economical point of view, and the utopian reformers, Fourier especially, have shown strongly its extent and its dangers.