This objection confuses progress understood as a succession of states which unfold according to a law, with progress understood in the sense of indefinite improvement. On this point again the comparison of society with living organisms is instructive. Do not these develop in conformity with invariable laws? Yet, Comte regards them as extremely imperfect, and in what concerns the human body, the intervention of the doctor or the surgeon is often useful and even indispensable. When we reproach the sociological theory of progress with having optimism as its consequence, we take _the scientific notion of spontaneous order for the systematic justification of any existing order_.[278] There is, however, a very long distance from one to the other. Spontaneous order may often be a very rough form of order. Here, as everywhere else, positive philosophy substitutes the scientific principle of the conditions of existence to the metaphysical principle of final causes. It admits that spontaneously, according to natural laws, a certain necessary order is established; but it acknowledges that this order offers serious and numerous disadvantages, modifiable, in certain degrees, by man’s intervention. The more complex these phenomena, the more are the imperfections multiplied and intensified. The biological phenomena are “inferior” in this respect to those of inorganic nature. By reason of their complication, which is _maxima_, social phenomena must be the most “disorderly” of all. In a word if the idea of a natural law implies that of a certain order, the notion of this order must be completed by the “simultaneous consideration of its inevitable imperfection.” The theory of progress is then incompatible neither with the ascertainment of social evil, nor with the effort to remedy it. The most complex of all organisms, the social organism, is also the one most subject to diseases and to crises. Thus, Comte foresees in a near future great internal struggles in our society, in consequence of our mental and moral anarchy.[279] To-day, only that is systematised which is destined to disappear, and what is not yet systematised, that is to say all that lives, will not be organised without violent conflicts. It is enough here to think of the relations between masters and workmen.