Let us then be careful not to give here to the words “metaphysics” and “theology” their full meaning. For instance, to conclude from the law of the three States that the evolution of humanity ever carries it further from theology, to end in a final state wherein religion should have no place is singularly to misapprehend Comte’s doctrine. On the contrary the evolution of humanity is leading it to a state which will be pre-eminently religious. In it religion will regulate the whole life of man. Comte perhaps would not refuse to define man, as has often been done, as a religious animal. The history of humanity may be represented, in a sense, as an evolution which proceeds from primitive religion (fetichism) to final religion (positivism). But the object of the law of the three States is not to express the religious evolution of humanity. It is only concerned with the progress of the human intellect. It sets forth the successive philosophies which that intelligence has been obliged by turn to adopt in the interpretation of natural phenomena. It is, in a word, the general law of the evolution of _thought_. Those who made a mistake about it probably only considered this law in the first lesson of the _Cours_, where it is separately presented. But the error is no longer possible when one refers to the fourth volume of the _Cours_, where the law is put in its place, in social dynamics, especially in the fifty-eighth lesson, in the sixth volume. It is not, however, without reason that Comte set forth this law in the first pages of his _Cours de philosophie positive_. In sociology as he conceives it, the law of the intellectual evolution of humanity, that is to say the law of the three States is the essential law of dynamics, and therefore of the whole of social science. For, of all the social factors of which the concomitant and joint evolution constitutes the progress of humanity, the intellectual factor is the most important. It is the dominant one, in the sense that the others depend far more upon it than it does upon them. The history of art, of institutions, of morals, of law, of civilisation in general could not be understood without the history of intellectual evolution, that is to say of science and of philosophy, whereas this one, strictly speaking, would still be intelligible without the others. This evolution is therefore the principal axis around which the other series of social phenomena are arranged. Thus the law which expresses it is the most “fundamental,” the most “general,” in the precise sense in which Comte understands this word. In enunciating this law he declares legitimate by anticipation the existence of a social science. He proves _ipso facto_ not only that it is possible, but that it already exists. Hence the eminent position which he gives to the law of the three states. II.