702 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
social relations, as well as the increasing influence over the pres ent by the past, which continually incorporates everything that is really assimilable and valuable. No, the dead do not govern the living, but the living succeed the dead. It is living human- ity that governs itself, equipped with the heritage of the past, but which heritage is accepted under obligations which do not exceed the bequest. The heritage is especially modifiable in its highest acquisitions, and is the more modifiable as it is the more complex. Thus life always triumphs over death in the eternal course toward progress, and tradition itself exerts its influence only through the instrumentality of its living depositories, and though the modifications which the depositories make it submit to. Life is a continued adaptation. The final and absolute sys- tematization of life would be death.
The statics of Comte, as also his dynamics, are more than premature syntheses. They still belong to the kind of philosophy of history in full efflorescence in the nineteenth century, but which, however, constituted the bond of union between the old Scholas- tics and the real positive social science, whose object today is, above everything else, to perfect the methods. Though not con- cealing my own theoretical conceptions, which I have thus far reached, but not perfected, I present them only as attempts and researches in a path the access to which, I realize, would have been impossible without the labors of the immortal thinkers
whom I have criticised.
G. DEGREEF. BRUSSELS, BELGIUM.
\To be continued.]
