ABSTRACT
The laws of the evolution having been determined as regards individuals, it was attempted to apply them to human societies. Modern research has proved that societies also have passed through a series of inferior forms before reaching their present level. Of these researches is born sociology, an order of knowledge which will one day, perhaps, compose itself, but which hitherto has had to limit itself to recording phenomena without being able to predict them. Sociology must limit itself to recording phenomena. Whenever even its most illustrious professors have attempted, as did Auguste Comte, to enter into the region of previsions, they have lamentably erred. The notion of necessity which all the discoveries of modern science increasingly confirm is not a mere vain and useless theory. It teaches at least tolerance, and permits of entering upon the study of social phenomena with the coldness of a chemist who analyses a compound or determines the density of a gas.
