First American edition, the London edition appearing the same year; first published in French in 1900. An attempt to reinforce the idea of the absolute reality of ‘humanity’ in a system otherwise entirely relative, towards which doubts were obviously growing. Lévy-Bruhl ponders mathematics, science and psychology in relation to the broad ‘problem’ of Comte’s philosophy, which is its relativity, but this is a sympathetic account, with a foreword by the British positivist Harrison. Interestingly the translator, about whom nothing is apparently known, uses her note to defend Harriet Martineau’s translation – now fifty years old – of Comte’s Philosophie Positive, as ‘much more than a translation … a condensed exposition of Comte’s doctrines, done with such mastery that it obtained the emphatic approval of Comte himself who, in such matters, was not very easily satisfied’. Certain male positivists had tended to dismiss Martineau’s translation on precisely the same terms, as a ‘condensing’ of the great positivist masterpiece.