ABSTRACT
1. Nothing could be more startling prima facie to the philosophical student than the proposition that the science of society is a creation of strictly modem thought; of thought that is, not merely recent in time, but determined by distinctively modem conditions and owning no continuity with the central tradition of European philosophy. Yet this was undoubtedly the view of Auguste Comte; it was implied by Mill in the sixth book of the Logic; and the same standpoint reveals itself in the independence and isolation which Sociology, or la Science Sociale, maintains to-day as against Plato and Aristotle on the one hand and their modem representatives—e.g. Spinoza and Hegel—on the other.
