The question was not to ruin but to transform the psychological, moral and social sciences. As we have seen, positive philosophy does not deny the possibility of a psychology. On the contrary, it establishes that psychical phenomena, like the others, are subject to laws, and that these laws must be looked for by the positive method. It only rejects the psychology of the ideologists as abstract, and that of Cousin as metaphysical. It claims that, in presence of the phenomena which he is studying, the psychologist should assume the same attitude as the biologist or the physicist, that any search after cause or essence should be carefully avoided, that any metaphysical or ethical after-thought should be set aside. Then a science of physical phenomena will be established; still it will only be able to study the highest mental functions in the “universal subject,” in humanity. If we wish to do so, we may continue to call it by its traditional name, although it is to the old psychology only what the chemistry of our day is to alchemy. A similar transformation gives rise to social science. Here again, the indispensable condition for the scientific knowledge of facts and of laws is a new attitude of mind in presence of these facts. We must set aside what interests us subjectively in them, and consider what is “specifically social” in them, just as the physiologist studies what is “specifically biological” in the phenomena of the organism. M. Durkheim, as a real heir of Auguste Comte, reasonably maintains that this is a condition _sine qua non_ of positive sociology. This only exists as a science if there are facts which are properly social, subject to special laws, besides the more general laws of nature which rule them also, and if these facts, by constant objective characteristics, are sufficiently distinct from the phenomena called psychological.