Note 20 — REASONS FOR DISSENTING FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. COMTE.

I believed at the time, and have never doubted until now, that the choice of this title was absolutely independent of its previous use by M. Comte. While writing these pages, I have found reason to think the contrary. On referring to Social Statics, to see what were my views of social evolution in 1850, when M. Comte was to me but a name, I met with the following sentence:—“Social philosophy may be aptly divided (as political economy has been) into statics and dynamics” (ch. xxx. § 1). This I remembered to be a reference to a division which I had seen in the Political Economy of Mr. Mill. But why had I not mentioned Mr. Mill’s name? On referring to the first edition of his work, I found, at the opening of Book iv., this sentence:—“The three preceding parts include as detailed a view as the limits of this treatise permit, of what, by a happy generalization of a mathematical phrase, has been called the Statics of the subject.” Here was the solution of the question. The division had not been made by Mr. Mill, but by some writer (on Political Economy I supposed) who was not named by him; and whom I did not know. It is now manifest, however, that while I supposed I was giving a more extended use to this division, I was but returning to the original use which Mr. Mill had limited to his special topic. Another thing is, I think, tolerably manifest. As I evidently wished to point out my obligation to some unknown political economist, whose division I thought I was extending, I should have named him had I known who he was. And in that case should not have put this extension of the division as though it were new.