Therein lies the novelty of Comte’s system. The question was, without leaving the scientific point of view, to discover a single universal conception of the whole of Reality as we find it in experience. The solution of this problem was found on the day when Comte created social science. For indeed, in the first place, sociology makes the positive method universal by extending it to the highest order of natural phenomena accessible to us. Moreover, once it is established as a special science, _ipso facto_ it assumes the character of a universal science, and consequently of a philosophy. Under a certain aspect, sociology is the sixth and last of the fundamental sciences. Under another aspect it is the only science, since the other sciences may be regarded as great sociological facts, and since the whole of what is given to us is subordinated to the supreme idea of humanity. Such is the way in which the transformation of science into philosophy takes place. If it dates from the foundation of sociology, it is because, once this last positive science has been created, nothing remains in nature of which we conceive the possibility of obtaining an absolute knowledge. “The relative character of scientific conception is necessarily inseparable from the true notion of natural laws, in the same way as the chimerical tendency to absolute knowledge spontaneously accompanies whatever use we make of the logical fictions or of metaphysical entities.”[370] Considered as a whole, the object of positive science, according to Comte, necessarily coincides with that of philosophy. For both of them it is the whole of the reality given to us. The human mind cannot exert itself in a vacuum. What it might draw from itself, without the help of experience, (if such a conception be not absurd), is purely fictitious, and has no objective value. If then the human mind remains attached to a metaphysical philosophy, this can only be in so far as the mind still conceives the whole or a part of reality from the absolute point of view, that is to say in so far as it still fails to understand that the laws of phenomena alone are within its reach, and persists in seeking the essence and the first or final cause for some among them. There was a time when the whole of reality was so understood. The conception of the world was then entirely metaphysical or partly theological. But the human mind has gradually constituted the positive science, first of the more simple and more general phenomena, and then of the more complicated ones. Finally the most complex of all, that is to say, the moral and social phenomena alone remained untouched by the scientific form. Let us suppose that this last order of facts is conquered by the positive method: the metaphysical mode of thought being no longer possessed of real objects, _ipso facto_ disappears. At the same time the positive mode of thought becomes universal, and positive philosophy is founded.