ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGY IN RELATION TO THE THEORY OF PROGRESS.

As the modern world gradually lost touch with the organized Christianity which had been the governing spirit of European civilization in the past, it began to find a new inspiration for itself in the ideal of progress. From the second quarter of the eighteenth century onwards through the nineteenth, faith in human progress became more and more the effective working religion of the civilization. It is true that, alongside of this religious current and inter- mingling confusedly with it, there has been a genuine attempt to study the laws of social change, and the positive development of civilizations, but this scientific theory of progress has naturally been slower in developing and less fertile in results than its more emotional companion. The latter, which one may call the Gospel of Progress to distinguish it from the scientific theory of social development, had the advantage of finding for its apostles a series of great men of letters. The dominant characteristic of the culture of the eighteenth century, and one that it had received as a direct heritage from the earlier Renaissance, was a conception of civilization as something absolute and unique.