CHAPTER I
THE TRANSITION FROM ANIMALITY TO HUMANITY.
ART AND LANGUAGE
Of the philosophers who flourished before the rise of the positive doctrine, the greater number assumed as a postulate in the comparative study of man and animals, that there was between them a difference of nature, and not merely one of degree. Whatever fundamental difference be attributed to reason, language, moral sense, religion, etc., the “human kingdom” is conceived for the most part as superior to the animal kingdom and as clearly separated from it. Taking their stand upon an analysis of the present state of the human conscience, those philosophers recognise an order of “moral realities,” to which animals have no access. Thus they give to the science of Man a privileged object which separates it from the group of the natural sciences.
The positive method admits neither this postulate, nor the consequences which are drawn from it. In general this method is characterised by the substitution of the objective to the anthropocentric point of view, and also by the substitution of observation to imagination. It does not suddenly change its orientation when it comes to the study of man. The positive method is not therefore concerned with knowing what idea man forms of himself to-day and of his relations with other living beings. Into this idea enter elements of religious and metaphysical origin, whose presence is explained by historical reasons. The question is to observe the nature of man in his real relations with other beings. Man, so considered, at once takes his place again at the top of the zoological scale.
The problem will then be set in the following terms: Given that man is included in the animal series, of which he is the highest term, but still a term, to account for the differences which to-day place him so high above the term immediately below him. This is taking the very reverse attitude of nearly all the philosophers, whose main difficulty is to give an account of the likenesses which exist between man and animals. It is the position which Darwin will take in his Descent of Man.
Comte takes his stand upon two postulates. The first affirms the fundamental identity of the essential functions in man and animals. Since the whole of the moral and intellectual functions constitutes the necessary complement of animal life properly so-called, it would be difficult to conceive that all those functions which are fundamental should not, by this very fact be “common, at various degrees, to all the higher animals, and perhaps even to the entire group of the vertebrata.”204 The animal functions are as a blossoming out of organic life, destined in the first place to make this life more perfect and more complex: in the same way, the intellectual and moral functions are, originally, as it were, another blossoming out of animal life, and must consequently be found, at least as a possibility, wherever animal life has reached a certain degree of development.
This postulate, according to Comte, is sufficiently established by biology, by means of the comparative method. All the principal characteristics which pride and ignorance set up as absolute privileges of our species, also appear, more or less rudimentary, in the majority of the higher animals.205 The mistake was made because metaphysical ideology and psychology place intelligence foremost in the study of psychical functions. Intelligence indeed puts to-day an immense distance between man and animals. But a more accurate psychology recognises that the most energetic, the most “fundamental” of mental functions are the affective functions, since, in default of the impulse given by them, intelligence itself would not be developed. The analogy between man and the animals at once appears: for the affective functions are common to them both. It is the same with the intellectual functions, when allowance is made for the development they have assumed in man. In a word, if the dynamical superiority of the human species over the other species is strong, its statical superiority is weak. The problem consists in finding how, to such an apparently unimportant difference in the organs, such a considerable difference in the functions corresponds.206
Here comes in the second postulate: “The fundamental constitution of man is invariable.” Evolution but not transformation: this great principle, transmitted by biology to sociology, dominates the latter science entirely. In the course of the long history which leads humanity from savage animality to positive civilisation,207 nothing absolutely new appears. Everything which manifests itself little by little, pre-existed in the nature of man—in a potential state it is true; and this state would perhaps never have ceased if a number of favourable conditions had not occurred together.
The mental functions, which are indispensable to organic and to animal life properly so called, quickly attained the degree of development without which the species would have disappeared. On the contrary, the highest “fundamental dispositions” of our nature remained latent for a long time, and only manifested themselves by degrees. But if their development has been slow, it is, in return, continuous and indefinite. And these dispositions tend to preponderate, although the “inversion” of the primitive economy can never become complete. Humanity emerges progressively from animality. The highest civilization is then, at bottom, entirely in conformity with nature: for it is only the manifestation more and more marked of the most characteristic properties of our species. In this sense, our social solution must be understood “as the extreme term of a progression continued uninterruptedly throughout the whole living kingdom from the most simple forms of vegetable life, the predominance of the organic functions becoming less and less exclusive, in order in the first place to make room for the predominance of the animal functions properly so called, and finally for that of the intellectual and moral functions, whose development is the very definition of humanity.”208
Thus, the chain of being is uninterrupted. But Comte, as we know, did not accept Lamarck’s hypothesis. He believed in the fixity of species. Undoubtedly he admits in a measure which science will some day fix, acquisitions slowly incorporated into organisms by heredity. But he does not think that they will go so far as to transform species. The whole evolution of man must then be explained by its original constitution. Indeed, Comte here maintains, as everywhere in nature, the perfect correspondence between the statical and the dynamical point of view. The case of man cannot be an exception to this encyclopÆdic law, which is verified in all the orders of phenomena from the most simple to the most complex. As the whole line of the curve corresponds to the equation, so the whole development of humanity must correspond to the “fundamental nature” of man. On this condition alone is sociology possible as a science. Now positive sociology exists: therefore the postulate is justified.
II.
The theory of the relation between man and animals thus finds itself deduced from the general principles of positive philosophy. But it can also be verified a posteriori, through the criticism of the arguments of the adverse theory by means of observation and experience.
The first of these arguments and the one which in general makes the greatest impression, contrasts the instinct of animals with the intelligence of man. It represents instinct as blind and fatal, and intelligence as free and progressive. But this antithesis cannot withstand the examination of facts. Instinct is called too hastily a “fatal tendency of animals to the mechanical execution of actions which are uniformly determined by corresponding circumstances, and not requiring nor even admitting of any education properly so-called.” This fatal tendency does not exist. It is a gratuitous supposition, perhaps a remnant of the Cartesian theory concerning the automatism of animals. Georges Leroy, in his charming Lettres sur les animaux, has shown that in the mammals and in the birds of our districts, the fixity in the construction of habitations, in the habits of hunting, in the mode of migration, etc., only existed for naturalists who never left their study, or for inattentive observers.209
Undoubtedly, habits may become hereditary. But here we only have a phenomenon common to men and animals, and those habits are modified if the circumstances which have produced them come to change. It is in this sense alone that we can admit M. de Blainville’s formula: “L’instinct est la raison fixÉe, la raison est l’instinct mobile.” We must especially understand that instinct is not opposed to intelligence. What ought we really to indicate by instinct? A spontaneous impulse in a direction determined, independently of any foreign influence.” But in this sense, the word applies to the activity of any faculty whatever, to the intellectual faculties as well as to the others. There is no contrast between instinct and intelligence. We say of a child that he has the “instinct” of music, of drawing, of calculation, etc. In this sense man has certainly as many and more instincts than animals. If, on the other hand, we call intelligence the faculty of modifying our conduct according to the circumstances of each case, animals are, like man, more or less intelligent and reasonable. Otherwise they would be doomed to disappear very quickly.
But animals have no language! Another error in observation. The higher animals have a certain degree of language corresponding to the nature and to the extent of their relations. This language is no more fixed than the so-called instincts. The language of each social species is characterised by an arrest of development precisely like the society which this species tended to found. The limits of its progress, beyond which indeed it does not go, result from the whole of the obstacles which it encounters, in consequence of the competition with the other species, and particularly with the human species, without naming those limits which the imperfection of organs may create.210
Many animals are capable of experiencing needs without regard to a useful purpose. For instance, they like to exercise their animal functions for the pleasure of doing so, that is to say, to play. Some among them experience Æsthetic impressions. They are also, without the slightest doubt, capable of altruistic feelings. Sometimes these feelings show themselves in the shape of domestic affection, and tend to make a solitary life unbearable to the individual. Family life then becomes permanent. Sometimes an animal devotes itself to the service of a superior race. Do we know to what lengths the progress of altruism would go in certain animal species, if their intelligence could have been more developed, and if their surroundings had allowed of their more extensive social progress?211
Finally, animals even possess a rudiment of religion, if by this we understand an endeavour to interpret the phenomena which strike them. When sufficiently developed to manifest, where there is sufficient leisure, a certain speculative activity, they reach spontaneously, in the same way as we do ourselves, a kind of low fetichism, which consists in supposing that external bodies are animated by will and by passions.212 “A child, a savage, a dog, a monkey, seeing a watch for the first time, will see in it a kind of animal.” But Comte at once adds that the chief difference between man and animals lies in the impossibility for the latter to emerge from the lowest degree of fetichism, and to rise to a real religion. No animal society “combines sociability with intelligence sufficiently ever to constitute a religious association.”213 Comte would probably have approved of M. de. Quatrefages’ definition in which he calls man a religious animal. The decisive step was taken on the day when man’s intellect passed from fetichism to astrolatry.214 That “great creation of the gods” was the first trial in purely speculative activity made by his mind. The whole subsequent development of humanity arose from this.
Thus, the arguments which claim to establish an insuperable distance between man and animals, generally rest upon imperfectly observed facts. On the contrary, in animals, we find the more or less visible rudiments of everything which has evolved so magnificently in humanity. We cannot describe in detail how and why this species has become, so to speak, incomparable and incommensurable with the others. It must have got the upperhand, not in virtue of this and that particular advantage, (although an important one), such as the upright position or the possession of a hand, but on account of the co-operation of many favourable conditions, of which the totality allowed, so to speak, of an almost indefinite development. From a certain moment, there was a definite stoppage in the social evolution of the other species, and the progress of the human species was decisive. We cannot estimate the initial influence of the various conditions according to the present development of the several human faculties, for this development is especially due to the social life of which those conditions allowed. Each superiority of man may have been very little defined originally. Time, the action of the other higher functions, exercise, heredity have played their part here. The “human attributes” must then have grown constantly, ever consolidating the “ascendency” which they had determined. At the same time the corresponding attributes must have diminished in the rival species, as they were brought to a standstill in their development. Undoubtedly, by degrees, the interval has widened until it has become a gap so broad and so deep as to make it impossible to imagine how it could ever have been crossed. But biology and sociology help us to judge better. We must see this, in some detail, in connection with the important question of language.
III.
The theory of language, during the eighteenth century, had been one of the favourite subjects of philosophical speculation; in general, it had proceeded in this matter, by way of abstract and logical analysis. It chiefly saw in language a product of the intellectual faculties of man. But, already, from the second half of the century, this conception had been attacked in Germany by the school which began the reaction against the “philosophers,” and in which the most illustrious name is that of Herder. In France the traditionalist school felt that here one of the weak points of the philosophy of the eighteenth century was being touched. It insisted upon the characters of language which this philosophy did not explain. Comte knew the works of this school, and, in particular, those of M. de Bonald, whom he calls an “energetic thinker.”215 But his method differs from theirs, and he only agrees with them in the critical part of their doctrine.
If the theory of language, says Comte, is encumbered with insoluble questions, the fault lies in the method made use of by the metaphysicians. They have only considered man’s language, in its state of highest complication. They have attributed excessive importance to the signs of articulate human language, they have exaggerated the part played by reflection, and misunderstood that of spontaneity. Condillac especially and his school attributed far too much importance to the “disponibilitÉ” of signs.216 The scientific method will not isolate humanity from the other species which it dominates. It will connect the positive study of language with biology and with sociology: with biology more particularly for the question of origin; with sociology in so far as the development of language depends upon the reaction of social life upon domestic life.
The starting-point of the theory is a fact of experience. Every strong emotion is accompanied by the impulse to manifest it, and this expression reacts upon the emotion itself. Many species exhibit this.217 Singing and mimicking, or rather cries and gestures, are often used by them, as by man, not only to relieve the passions, but to excite them more. For instance, anger in carnivorous animals grows to exasperation, through the external signs which the animal gives of it. Comte is in accordance with the observations of Bell and of Gratiolet. The movements which co-operate in expression, he says, coincide in general with those which are made use of in action. Moreover, in the human species, for the most part, the individual expresses his affections in order to satisfy them better, by inducing his fellow-creatures to second him. It is an appeal to sympathy. If then the expression results from the feeling, it tends, conversely to develop and to consolidate it. The origin of language is thus affective, that is to say Æsthetic, since “we only express ourselves after having felt strongly.” Language therefore translates feelings before thoughts, and this is what the followers of the ideologist theory did not see. Even to-day, in our most developed language, we can still trace this origin. It reveals itself by the musical accent of the slightest speech. Expression is always inspired and maintained by some affection, even in cases where it is apparently limited to a simple scientific or technical exposition. The affective source of language, dissimulated as it is by the intellectual operations of which it is the instrument, reveals itself in the inflexions of the voice.
Language is made up of signs. According to what has just been said, natural signs are spontaneously produced by the play of the emotions. As a voluntary manifestation language is always artificial. The involuntary signs have been gradually divided into their component parts and simplified, while remaining intelligible. All artificial signs, says Comte, even in our species, spring from a voluntary “imitation” of the natural signs which are spontaneously produced. In this way both the formation and the interpretation of these signs are explained.218
Hobbes used to define a sign as a constant relation between two phenomena, seen by the subject. The two phenomena are here a state of consciousness and a motion. Sometimes the state of consciousness determines the motion, sometimes the motion causes the reappearance of the state of consciousness. The institution of a system of signs is a means of “connecting the within with the without.” Language is thus for man a means of making the series of his intellectual states participate in the regularity which characterises external order. The logical function of language therefore springs from its very essence in which the phenomena of the objective world and the phenomena which belong to the feeling and thinking subject are joined. It is equivalent to a system for rendering the mental life objective.219 Being thus made objective, these phenomena can henceforth be preserved and communicated, without man or the animals having had each an end in view, since the institution of the first signs is involuntary, and arises from “the combination between the muscular and nervous systems.” External order here acts as a regulator, even before thought has grasped it.
The signs which are spontaneously produced are not all transformed into voluntary signs. Those which appeal to sight or to hearing present special advantages for this use, and as a matter of fact, the two classes of signs are concurrently used by the higher animals. Gestures and cries are the origin of what later becomes the system of artificial signs. By degrees, the communication of emotions gives way to the expression of thoughts. Among very civilised populations it even came to be believed that song had come from speech. But, on the contrary, speech came from song. To be convinced of this a glance at the animal world is sufficient.
Up to this point the theory of language has been biological, and the acquired facts can thus be summed up: 1, Man does not express his thought in order to communicate it, but he communicates because he expresses it. 2, What is first expressed is emotion, not thought. By degrees language becomes intellectualized, as the mental life itself. 3, Expression is spontaneous and primary. It arises from the relation between the nervous and muscular systems. In the progressive transformation where, from being involuntary, the signs gradually become voluntary, they are at once causes and effects.
The essential condition for this transformation to take place is social life. Undoubtedly, language appears very quickly, as soon as individuals of the same species find themselves in constant relations with one another. Each one learns to attribute the character of signs to the movements which accompany his emotions. Similar beings in whom the same phenomena take place, become equally capable of interpreting those signs. From this moment a language is born; and this is true for the animal species as for man. But human evolution follows an evolution which is peculiar to itself, and which determines that of language. Our language would not have far exceeded the period in which it especially expresses emotions, if human societies had remained purely domestic groupings, without any other organisation than that of the family. “The institution of human language,” says Comte, “appears, in sociology, as the chief continuous instrument of the necessary reaction of political upon domestic life.”220
Henceforth we can picture to ourselves, in its broad outlines, the prehistoric evolution of language. Originally it comprised gestures and cries. Gestures predominated in the first place as being more immediately expressive. By degrees they took a second place. As the natural signs became divided up so as to become artificial, the superiority of vocal signs appeared. Among other reasons it was due to the “spontaneous correspondence” between the voice and hearing which allows everyone to develop his own education. We hear young children practising for long hours, playing with the articulate sounds which they begin to emit. From this more or less organised singing, still a melody of vocal signs, poetry was born. Finally from poetry, much later, springs, what is commonly called prose, that is, the use of non-rhythmic phrases. Three great evolutions in the history of humanity: how many centuries have not been required for their accomplishment!
Writing is to drawing what speaking is to singing. Originally it was not an artifice invented to help vocal language. Here again the ideological theory aggravates the part played by reflection. Man was obeying an instinct when by drawing he reproduced the familiar objects which met his gaze, occupied his imagination, and caused his strongest and most frequent emotions. Gradually, these spontaneous endeavours at imitation assumed the character of signs, became divided up and simplified, and finally were co-ordinated with vocal sounds which themselves had gone through a separate evolution.
Thus language and art have a common origin, which is the Æsthetic, that is to say, the affective expression. Comte does not separate these two terms. He takes the word “Æsthetic” at once in its etymological and in its modern sense. Our movements, at first involuntary, then voluntary, translate our impressions and react upon them, because they spring from them; that is the humble source from which everything else is derived. With animals it only gives rise to inarticulate vocal sounds, and to a more or less expressive mimicry. In man, it is the principle of language and of art. The latter begins by being a simple imitation. Then the reproduction of objects is perfected. It becomes more faithful “by bringing out better the chief features which were at first obscured by an empirical mixture.” “Idealisation” consists in this. Finally “expression” properly so called is developed, and “style.”221
Thus, if we call language the whole of the means suitable for the transmission beyond ourselves of our various impressions, this whole forms a system in which the most customary and least expressive portion, language, was at first mingled with the portion which bears the name of art, taking art in its most primitive elements: song and drawing. These two parts became differentiated in evolution. Our social requirements have continually increased the use and extension of the vocal and visual signs which are made use of in active life and in speculative thought. These signs have become simpler and simpler and even abstract: to such an extent that their origin ended by being considered the result of a convention.222
The primitive parentage of language and of art accounts for many facts which current theories do not explain. For instance, language is not only created but preserved by the people. Grammarians, “even more absurd than logicians,”223 in general have understood nothing about it. Their claim to authority is amusing. But it is to popular spontaneity, at once conservative and progressive, that our languages owe their admirable rectitude. The basis of each language collects what is essential and universal in the Æsthetic evolution of humanity. Hence the magic charm of poetry, the most ancient of all the arts. Words possess a power of evoking images from which the artist draws inexhaustible effects. Often during the long childhood of human reason even the power of words must have seemed to be supernatural: Nomina Numina. By dint of considering language as ideologists and logicians, we have forgotten that its nature is emotional and Æsthetic. However, even to-day the mysterious power of words has not disappeared. How great is the action of forms of prayer on tender souls, even when faith has deserted them! Next to action itself, language is the most powerful of the exciting causes of feeling, and religions are well aware of this fact. They know how to make use of it to conquer or to retain souls.
IV.
The logical function of language is the only one which has been studied by philosophers; that is, by the “ontologists” and the “metaphysicians.” But even their study has remained incomplete. Condillac and his school have solely considered the language which lends itself to logical analysis. Consequently, they only saw a single kind of combination which may be called the logic of signs. But, in reality, the logic of signs rests upon the logic of images, and this one on the logic of feelings. The so-called logicians thus conceive a narrow and false idea of our intellectual mechanism, when they concentrate all their attention “upon the most voluntary, but the least powerful of the three essential modes of which the mental combination admits.”224
The logic of feelings is the art “of facilitating the combination of notions according to the connection between the corresponding emotions.” It is the most instinctive: it is the source of all the great inspirations of our intelligence. We can think nothing which contradicts it, or even which is not implied in it. But it has two grave defects. Its elements are not precise enough, and it is not at our disposal. It only operates under certain given conditions, and the appearance of these conditions does not rest with us. We see it at work, for instance, among animals, who occasionally provoke our admiration for the marvels suggested to them by this logic which is so closely bound up with the emotions. The logic of images, though less strong, is more free and precise than the logic of feelings. Nevertheless if we only had these two we should still be incapable of realising combinations conceived and prepared by us. This office belongs to the logic of signs. For to us almost entirely belongs the disposal of these signs, and it is this which has allowed of the development of abstract language and of the sciences.
But we must not separate this last logic from the two others. The laws of our nature always cause the logical use of feelings and images to prevail over that of signs. Undoubtedly, the union between signs and thoughts may become direct, and moreover in the case of abstract notions, it could not be otherwise. Thus our inner world is artificially united to the outer world. We have an abstract and symbolical representation of it, without going through the feelings, or even, strictly speaking, through the images. But this relation has far less consistency than the one which is established by the involuntary intervention of images and of feelings. As the abstract sign has its origin in the sign appreciated by the senses, which itself proceeds from the relation of the muscular system with the nervous system; so, the relations between signs have their origin in the relations between images, and these, in their turn, proceed from the relations between feelings.
The facility with which we manipulate signs hides this truth from us: it is none the less certain that these signs are united to our thoughts in a far less intimate and less spontaneous manner than the feelings and even the images.
The positive theory further allows us, not indeed to solve, but to adjourn the question of a universal language. Indeed are we concerned with a purely scientific language? Mathematical analysis in part fulfils this desideratum. It allows us to express the laws of the simplest phenomena by symbols which are at everyone’s disposal. But if it is a question of a complete language, destined to be in common use among all men, who does not see that this conception is incompatible with the present state of humanity? How could we establish a universal language, while allowing the prevalence of “divergent beliefs and of hostile customs.”225 The unification of tongues will arise from the unification of peoples. When the latter has been realised, under the action of positive philosophy, the other will follow as a necessary consequence.
Moreover, from the present time, a universal language exists! It is Art, “the only form of language which is universally understood at once in the whole of our species.”226 Truly this universal language has its dialects. Comte’s remark is none the less strikingly accurate. The masterpieces of Greek sculpture, Rembrandt’s paintings, Beethoven’s symphonies are accessible to millions of human beings who have never known a word of Greek, of Dutch, or of German. To teach all children music and drawing, as Comte requires in his positivist plan of education, is not to make them participate in the luxury of “accomplishments.” It is placing within their reach works which appeal to the whole of humanity; it is giving them a stronger sense of the solidarity which is the essential characteristic of human society; finally it is teaching them the universal language of which they possess the instinctive rudiments, and whence have sprung the very languages which to-day appear as frigid systems of symbols and graphic representations. Is it not fair to allow them the enjoyment of a patrimony as ancient perhaps as humanity herself? Somewhere, Comte compares language to property.227 Like it, language has facilitated acquisitions and preserved social wealth. But it has an advantage over property, that of admitting of equal possession by all at the same time. Art presents this advantage no less than language. Works of art are the common property of the whole of humanity and no one should be deprived of that inheritance.
CHAPTER II
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ON SOCIAL SCIENCE
Social science had at first been called social physics by Comte. Later on he invented the name of “sociology”228 for it. It stands at the summit of the encyclopÆdic ladder of the sciences. Accordingly, it offers certain characteristics which the other sciences do not present.
Undoubtedly, by the definition of its object and by its method, it is perfectly homogeneous with the rest of positive knowledge. Sociology studies the laws of social phenomena as mathematics inquires into the laws of geometrical phenomena. In this sense, between these extreme sciences there are no other differences than those which arise from the diversity of the phenomena which are studied. But mathematics, and the other fundamental sciences, excepting sociology, are distinctly preliminary. Sociology is final. Each of the preliminary sciences should be cultivated only in the measure necessary in order that the following one may in turn assume the positive form. Social science, which is not preparatory to any other, establishes the principles of morals and of politics. It is, as has been seen, the key-stone of positive philosophy. It is in it, and through it, that positive philosophy acquires the universality which hitherto it had lacked.
Finally, there is a last difference which Comte likes to think he is successfully removing; the other sciences are more or less formed; everything has to be done for social science. Not that many trials have not been attempted. Comte does not ignore them, and he prides himself upon doing justice to his precursors. He goes back to Aristotle, in whom he admires an incomparable scientific and philosophical genius. In him he sees the inventor of social statics. His Politics are still read with profit.229 But Aristotle could have no idea of a sociology, and in particular of positive social dynamics. For that he lacked (without speaking of the fundamental sciences which excepting mathematics were yet to be born), a sufficiently wide and varied knowledge of history and the idea of progress.
Montesquieu was in advance of his time, when, by the insight of his genius, he generalised the idea of natural law so as to bring under it the political, judicial, economical, and, generally speaking, all social phenomena. He really conceives the idea of social science. But the execution did not respond to the conception. How could Montesquieu have succeeded, since he was still without two indispensable elements: in the first place, the positive science of man from the biological point of view, and then the idea of progress, a vital necessity for every positive philosophy of history? Having failed to apprehend the fundamental laws of social dynamics, Montesquieu made too much use of the comparative method. Consequently, he took secondary laws for essential laws, such as the laws relating to the influence of climate. In the same way he has exaggerated the importance of various forms of political constitution.230
Condorcet came after Montesquieu and Turgot, and had been formed in the school of d’Alembert. He came nearer than anyone to the social science which was to be founded. He understood admirably that the evolution of the human race, considered as a single being, is subject to laws. He brought the idea of progress into full daylight. But, nevertheless, positive sociology does not owe to him its origin. He shared the prejudice of his time on the subject of the indefinite perfectibility of man; this prejudice was only to disappear before the positive science of intellectual and moral man. Moreover, in the heat of the revolutionary conflict, he misunderstood the concrete reality of the progress, whose abstract necessity he had so well realised. By painting the centuries preceding the XVIII. century, in the darkest colours, he made the progressive evolution of humanity a kind of miracle, “doubly inadmissible in a doctrine which does not imply a Providence.”231
But soon Cabanis and Gall bring forward the positive theory of the moral and intellectual faculties of man. The French revolution throws a vivid light upon the period which separates us from the Middle Ages. At last, the theorists of the counter-Revolution show that the philosophy of the XVIII. century, if it excelled in the power of demolishing, was incapable of reconstructing, and they also show that order must be inseparable from progress. Comte regards himself as a Condorcet who has profited by these lessons of experience. He has worked with Saint-Simon, he has read De Maistre. In short, he is possessed of all the necessary elements for the foundation of sociology.
At the moment when he undertakes it, theological and metaphysical philosophy is still dominant over the contemporary conception of social facts. In it imagination is not subordinated to observation. Men do not apply themselves to the analysis of facts in order to discover their relations and their laws; they prefer to construct philosophies of history, which appear as non-scientific hypotheses, that is to say, which are not verifiable. Absolute results are sought for, as if in this order of facts, as in all the others, the absolute was not inaccessible. From the practical point of view, nobody doubts that man can modify social facts as he pleases, and that his action can be exercised there without any definite limits being placed upon it. It is supposed, in a word, that political society has no laws which regulate its natural development.
The same prejudices and the same false ideas have already predominated in the past on the subject of the more simple phenomena, which afterwards became objects of positive science. Should not this analogy cause philosophers to conceive “the rational hope of also succeeding in the dissipation of those errors of conception and of method in the system of political ideas.”232 Nothing is more natural than that the science of the most complex phenomena should be the last to reach the positive stage. It would even have been impossible for it to have been otherwise. Finally, beyond the difficulties which belong to the complexity of its object, sociology had to overcome others, which arise from political passions. Problems of this kind are indifferent to no one. In them the interests of each one are involved, and they influence even without our knowledge, the direction taken by our thoughts. Political parties excel in framing plausible theories adapted to their requirements. Thus a constant effort at disinterestedness is necessary on the part of any one who purposes to take up the science of abstract politics.
At any rate, if these reasons make us understand that sociology should make its appearance last among the fundamental sciences, none of them imply that it would not have arisen in its turn. On the contrary, beside “vital physics” and “inorganic physics,” “social physics” was one day to take its place. From 1824, Comte had a very clear idea of this. We do not see, he says, why the phenomena which the development of a social species presents should not have laws like the others, why these laws should not be capable of being discovered by observation, like those of the other phenomena, with this reservation only that the nature of this section of philosophy makes its study more difficult. “I will make it felt by the very fact that there are laws as determined for the development of the human species as for the falling of a stone.”233 Comte later on attenuated the rigidity of these expressions. He recognised that the social phenomena were of all others the most “modifiable.” But he none the less maintained that they were ruled by laws.
II.
Sociology, an abstract and wholly theoretical science, only sets itself the task of discovering the laws of phenomena, without first taking into account any possible applications. I shall not have, says Comte, to concern myself directly with political anarchy.234 Here, more than anywhere else, science must be separated from the corresponding art. The same reasons which led to physiology being constituted apart from medicine, with which it had for so long been confused, also require that social science should be distinguished from politics, of which, up to the present time, it has only been a more or less empirical or arbitrary interpretation.
Comte who took such pains to define the physical fact, the chemical fact, the biological fact, has not given a definition of the sociological fact. The reasons for this are not difficult to see. In the first place, this fact defines itself so to speak, by elimination. As there are no phenomena accessible to us more complicated than those of the social life, all the phenomena which are not studied by the preceding sciences are of course the subject of sociology. Moreover, there might be a reason to seek for a definition of the sociological fact, if we started from the consideration of the individual to rise to that of society. But Comte’s conception is radically different. For him it is the individual who is an abstraction; and society is the true reality. He must not explain humanity by man, but on the contrary, man by humanity. From this moment, all the human phenomena properly so-called are ipso facto sociological. It is an essential characteristic of Comte’s system that man, considered individually, is not an object of science. The science of man belongs for one part to biology, for the other to sociology. To define the sociological fact amounts then to establishing the relations between biology and sociology.
We have already seen that these relations are extremely close. On the one hand, sociology could not be constituted so long as higher biology had not reached a certain degree of development. History has furnished us with a proof of this: the state of infancy of biology contributed largely to the failure of Montesquieu’s and Condorcet’s sociological attempts. But, on the other hand, the study of the intellectual and moral functions, that is to say, the highest part of biology, can only be made from the sociological point of view. Here we have a kind of mixed domain, which properly belongs neither to the one nor to the other of the sciences.
Could we not then consider sociology as a simple extension of biology, an extension which would be far more important in the case of the human species than in any of the others? Do we not do this implicitly when we attribute the study of the intellectual and moral functions to biology, since everything which bears the name of “moral science,” history, law, political economy, etc., finally rests upon these functions? What is the use of a new fundamental science for the study of phenomena which at bottom reduce themselves to biological phenomena?
Comte protested against this interpretation of his doctrine.235 According to him, sociology is no less irreducible to biology, than the latter is to chemistry. The sociological phenomena, independently of the more general laws which are common to them with the subjacent orders, have laws of their own which regulate them. If animal societies only existed as we see them to-day, it would perhaps not be impossible to consider sociology as an appendix of biology. But human society excludes any attempt of this kind. For it is social life which has made the extraordinary development of the intellectual and moral functions possible in man, and this development is the very definition of humanity. Now, the first consequence of this development is that biology properly so-called, no longer suffices for studying it. We need a new method in it, the method of historical observation. Already, were it for this reason alone, there can be no question of reducing sociology to biology.
In the second place, when we pass from the individual to the collective organism, “the continued expansion and the almost indefinite perpetuity” of the latter makes it almost impossible not to separate it from the former in a scientific study.236 Comte is not deceived by the analogy between the two kinds of organism. To speak accurately, sociology with him, hardly ever considers anything except a single organism. Let us leave aside the little that it says of animal societies. It represents the human race as constituting, in time and in space, “an immense and eternal social unity, whose various organs, individuals and nations, united by universal solidarity, each, according to a determined manner and degree concur in the evolution of Humanity.”
One of the ideas which Comte most admires in Condorcet, and which he regards as indispensable to social science, is that which makes a single being in process of evolution of the totality of the human species.237 Henceforth, the parallelism between this immense “social unity,” and the organisms studied by biology could not be a strict one. “The complex nature of the former,” says Comte himself, “deeply differs from the indivisible constitution of living beings.” We must then know how to restrain comparison wisely, “in order that it should not give rise to faulty approximations, instead of precious indications.” Comte has sometimes failed in carrying out this prudent precept, for instance, when in the social organism he looks for what is analogous to tissues, organs, and systems studied by the anatomists. But he has, none the less, traced very firmly the limits beyond which the use of analogy here becomes an abuse.
These limits are determined by the specific character of the social reality, which escapes the grasp of the biological method. For the principal phenomenon in sociology, the one which establishes most evidently its scientific originality, is the gradual and continuous influence of human generations upon one another. Now our intelligence cannot “guess the principal decisive phases of such a complex evolution without an historical analysis properly so-called.”238 Here is the final word: no history, no sociology. Comte had already written in 1822: To reduce sociology to biology is to annul the direct observation of the social past. Undoubtedly the reason for man’s superiority over the other animals lies in the relative perfection of his organisation. In this sense, social physics, that is to say, the study of collective development of the human species, is really a branch of physiology. In this sense, the history of civilisation is but the sequel and the indispensable complement of the natural history of man. But, important as it is to form a proper conception, and never to lose sight of this relation, yet it would be a mistake to conclude from it that no clear division should be established between social physics and physiology properly so-called. For, in the case of the human race, there is history which cannot be reached by a process of deduction.239
III.
Already, in biology the nature of the object had compelled scientific men to start from the consideration of the whole to reach that of the parts, to proceed from the complex to the simple. With still greater reason, the same inversion of method imposes itself in sociology. For, although the individual elements of society appear to be more separable than those of the living being, the social consensus is still closer than the vital consensus.240
The spirit of the sociological method will then be always to consider simultaneously the various social aspects, whether in statics, or in dynamics. Undoubtedly each of them can be the object of a special study, by the way of “preliminary elaboration.” But, as soon as the science is sufficiently advanced, the correlation of phenomena will serve as a guide for their analysis. Political economy has proved by facts that the isolated study of a series of social phenomena is condemned to remain irrational and barren. Those then who, in the system of social studies, wish to imitate “the methodical parcelling out, which belongs to the inorganic sciences,” misunderstand what the essential conditions of their subject require. Here the most general laws must be known first. It is from them that science must then descend to the more particular laws.
The more complex the phenomena, the more numerous are the processes of method at our disposal for studying them. This law of compensation is verified again in the present case. Sociology, over and above the processes made use of by the preceding sciences possesses some which are peculiarly its own. To put it more plainly, in its capacity of final science, the whole positive method belongs to it. As method is only learnt by practice, the sociologist will therefore have to be formed by a complete scientific education from mathematics, which will give him the feeling of positivity, to biology which will teach him the comparative method. The Cours de philosophie positive precisely retraces this methodical ascent, which leads the human mind, by successive degrees, up to social science. And, since the intellectual evolution of the individual reproduces that of the species, the sociologist will cover the same ground to reach the same end.
At any rate, if a mathematical education is indispensable so as to accustom him to the positive mode of thought, he will, however, acknowledge that social phenomena do not allow of the use of numbers or of mathematical analysis, nor more especially of the calculation of probabilities. Comte treats Laplace’s attempt upon this point as absurd, an attempt which has been taken up again by other mathematicians. He likes to quote it as a proof of the lack of the philosophical spirit among geometers. Indeed, according to him, to apply the calculation of probabilities to historical events, implies a failure to understand that these phenomena are subject to invariable laws like all other phenomena.
In default of the powerful instrument furnished by mathematics, sociology makes use of the methods employed in the physical and natural sciences. Of these observation is the first. Social phenomena seem easy to observe, because they are very common, and the observer takes part in them more or less. But, on the contrary, these two circumstances render sociological observation very difficult. We only observe well on condition that we place ourselves outside what we observe.241 Sociological facts ought then to appear objective to us, detached from us, independent of the state of our individual consciousness. Nothing is more difficult to realise. In order to obtain, and more especially to maintain, “such an inversion of the spontaneous point of view,” the mind must already have partly constructed what it wishes to see. Were it not already provided with a preliminary theory, for the most part the observer would not know what he must look for in the fact which is taking place under his eyes. It is therefore by the preceding facts that we learn to see the following ones. There lies “the immense difficulty” of sociology, in which we are thus obliged, in a certain measure, to determine simultaneously the facts and the laws. If we are not already possessed of the necessary speculative indications to grasp them, the facts remain barren and even unseen, although we are, so to speak, immersed in them.
Consequently, a social fact can have no scientific significance if it is not brought into relation with another fact. In an isolated condition, it remains in the state of a simple anecdote, capable at most of satisfying “idle curiosity,” but unfit for any rational use. An infinite number of facts may be useful to sociology, apparently very insignificant customs, all kinds of monuments, the analysis and the comparison of languages; but the mind must be provided for their observation with general points of view. Only on this condition will a mind, well prepared by rational education, be able to transform the actions which take place beneath its eyes into sociological indications, “according to the more or less direct points of contact, which he will be able to discern in these actions with the highest notions of science, in virtue of the connexion of the various social aspects.”
There can be no question of experimenting in sociology.242 Not that we cannot act upon the social phenomena: they are, on the contrary, the most modifiable of all. But an experiment properly so-called consists in comparing two cases which differ from each other by a certain definite circumstance, and by that one alone. We have no means of determining two cases of this kind in sociology. It is true that in the absence of direct experiments nature presents indirect ones. They are the pathological cases, unfortunately too frequent in the life of societies, the more or less serious perturbations which they undergo through accidental or passing causes. Such are the revolutionary periods which correspond to diseases in living bodies. If we properly extend Broussais’ principle to sociology, that is to say, if we admit that morbid phenomena are produced by the effect of the same laws as normal phenomena, then social pathology will in some measure replace experiments. It will be said that this study has been fruitless up to the present time. But the reason of this is, according to Comte, that direct or indirect experimenting ought, like simple observation, to be subject to rational conceptions. Both are only productive in a sociology already possessed of its essential laws.
The comparative method, so useful to the biologist, is also precious for the sociologist. It draws together the various states of human society which coexist on the different parts of the earth’s surface, and among peoples independent of one another. Undoubtedly, if the total development only is considered, the evolution of Humanity is one. It nevertheless remains true that very considerable and very varied populations have as yet only reached the more or less inferior degrees of this evolution. We can thus observe them simultaneously and compare their successive phases. From the Fuegians to the most civilised nations in Europe, we can imagine no “social shade” which is not at present realised on some portion of the globe. Frequently, within the same nation, the social condition of the various classes represents states of civilisation which are very far removed from one another. Paris to-day contains more or less faithful “survivors” of nearly all the anterior degrees of social evolution, especially from the intellectual point of view.243 This comparative process holds good for social statics as for social dynamics. Even in statics a comparison can be established between animal societies and human society.
However, this type of method is not devoid of inconvenience in sociology. It does not consider the necessary succession of the various phases in the social evolution: it seems on the contrary to consider them all as simultaneous. Consequently, it prevents us from seeing the filiation of social forms. It also runs the risk of falsifying the analysis of the cases which are observed, and of causing simple secondary factors to be taken for main causes. This is what happened to Montesquieu who compared indifferently the cities of antiquity, the France of the Middle Ages, the England of the XVIII. century, the republic of Venice, the government of Byzantium, the Empire of the Sultan, and that of the Shah of Persia.
So the comparative method is only an auxiliary process in sociology. Like observation and experiment, it has to be made subordinate to a rational conception of the evolution of humanity. The latter in turn depends upon the use of an original method of observation, belonging to social phenomena, and free from the dangers presented by the preceding ones. This specific sociological method, this “transcendent” process, by which the positive method is completed, is, says Comte, the historical method.244
IV.
Sociology is an abstract science: history, which is its essential method, cannot therefore be history merely considered as a narrative. There are two ways of conceiving history, the one abstract and the other concrete. The latter dominates in the historical works written up to the present time. Their end is to relate and to array in chronological order a certain sequence of events. Undoubtedly in the XVIII. century efforts were made to co-ordinate political phenomena and to determine their filiation. But for all that this kind of work has not ceased to be descriptive and literary. The other form of history, which does not exist up to the present, has for its end the research of the laws which regulate the social development of the human species.245
Difference of object leads to difference of method. If an historian proposes to himself to compose exact “annals,” to relate things as they took place, he will begin by the special history of the various peoples, which, in its turn, is founded upon the chronicles of the provinces and the towns. It will be necessary for him to investigate documents in detail, and to neglect no source: the work of combination will only come subsequently. But if our end is the abstract science of history, that is to say the linking together of social phenomena, quite a different course will have to be followed. Indeed all the classes of these phenomena are simultaneously developed, and under the mutual influence of one another. We cannot explain the line of advance followed by anyone among them, without having first conceived in a general way “the progression of the whole.” Before all things then we must set ourselves to conceive the development of the human species in its widest generality, that is to say, to observe and to link together among themselves the most important steps towards progress which it has successively taken in the various fundamental directions. Then we shall subdivide the periods and the classes of the phenomena to be observed.246
These “various fundamental directions” correspond to what Comte called later the “social series.” By this he indicates the groups of social phenomena arranged for a scientific study. Once these groups are formed, then, according to the totality of historical facts, the sociologist seeks to determine the continuous growth of each, physical, moral, intellectual or political disposition or faculty, combined with the indefinite decrease of the opposite disposition or faculty: for instance, the tendency of human society to pass from the warlike form to the industrial form, from revealed religion to demonstrated religion, etc. From this will be drawn the scientific forecast of the triumph of the one and the fall of the other, provided that this conclusion is also in conformity with the general laws of the evolution of Humanity.
Such a forecast could never be founded upon the knowledge of the present alone. For the present exposes us to the danger of confusing the principal with the secondary facts, of “placing noisy passing demonstrations above deep-seated tendencies,” and of regarding institutions or doctrines as growing which are really on the decline. Our statesmen scarcely look back beyond the XVIII. century, our philosophers beyond the XVI. This is too little. It does not even suffice to make us understand the French revolution. The study of the “historical series” alone allows the understanding of the present and the prevision of the future. The sociologist will even exercise himself in predicting the past, that is to say, in acquiring a rational knowledge of it, and in deducing each historical situation from the whole of its antecedents. He will thus become familiar with the spirit of the historical method.
However, if this abstract historical method were used by the sociologist to the exclusion of every other, he would sometimes come to a wrong conclusion, and take the continuous decrease in a natural faculty for a tendency to total extinction. For instance, as civilisation becomes more refined, man eats less than formerly. Nobody concludes from this that he tends not to eat at all. But the absurdity which is palpable here, might, in other cases pass unperceived. That is why the historical method in sociology requires to be controlled by the positive theory of human nature. All the inductions which might contradict this theory are to be rejected. Indeed, the whole social evolution is at bottom but a simple development of humanity, without the creation of new faculties. The germ, at any rate, of all the dispositions or effective faculties which sociological observation, (and in particular, history), may make known, must then be found in the primordial type which biology has constructed beforehand for sociology. Accordance between the conclusions of historical analysis and the preliminary notions of the biological theory is the indispensable guarantee of sociological demonstrations.247
V.
Thus conceived the historical method rests upon the postulate given by Comte, as we have seen, as a basis to his sociology. This postulate is thus enunciated: The nature of man evolves without being transformed. The various physical, moral and intellectual faculties, must be found the same at all the degrees of historical evolution, and always similarly co-ordinated among themselves. The development which they receive in the social state can never change their nature, nor consequently destroy or create any one of them, nor even intervene in the order of their importance.
In a word, the chief regulator of sociology is the science of human nature. It can even be said, without forcing the meaning of Comte’s thought, that sociology is really a psychology:248 not indeed, it is true, a psychology founded upon the introspective analysis of the individual subject, but a psychology whose object is the analysis by history, of the universal subject, that is to say, of Humanity.
Comte endeavours to bring the complexity and the extreme variety of social phenomena into an intelligible unity. This complexity is such that we could not determine the laws by starting from the observation of the simplest phenomena to reach the more complex ones afterwards. Moreover, these facts only possess sociological significance if the observer is already provided with a general theory before he ascertains them. But, on the other hand, history cannot be deduced. Given an already positive knowledge of human nature and of the “milieu” in which it evolves, we could not say a priori how it will evolve. History must then teach us how, as a matter of fact, social life has developed Humanity. Nevertheless, once this concession has been made to observation the method becomes again deductive. Since sociology is a science it ought, like the other sciences, to be able to substitute rational prevision to the empirical establishment of facts.
To complete the characterising of this final science, it must be at once positive, like the subjacent fundamental sciences, and universal like philosophy, which alone up to the present time has looked at things from “the point of view of the whole.” Henceforth these two conditions are fulfilled. In the first place, the positivity of sociology cannot be doubted. In it social facts are conceived as subject to laws, and Comte abstains from any research as to their mode of production. Then, sociology, in spite of the extreme difficulties of its object, has assumed the deductive form, and has brought secondary laws under more general laws. Comte is even convinced that his sociology comes nearer to the perfect scientific form than physics or chemistry. By his discovery of the great dynamic law of the three states, has he not given it a unity which is to be found as complete nowhere else but in astronomy? But, at the same time, it is truly universal, since it is a philosophy of history, or, in other words, the science of humanity considered in its evolution. As this science presupposes biology, and as biology in turn presupposes the science of the “milieu” in which living beings are immersed, sociology becomes at once the summary and the crown of the sciences which precede it.
Thus in replacing man in Humanity, and Humanity in the system of its conditions of existence, Comte constructs a final science which is at the same time the supreme science, the only science, that is to say, philosophy. “If the laws of sociology could be sufficiently known to us, they alone would suffice to replace all the others, save the difficulties of deduction.”249 The science of Humanity is the centre around which the others range themselves in order.
Already with Descartes, the anthropological character of philosophy was strongly marked. After him, philosophical speculation took man for its centre more and more. This tendency also predominates in Comte’s doctrine. But in it it assumes a social character. Here the “universal subject” is no longer the intellectual consciousness of Kant, or the absolute “ego” of Fichte; it is Humanity evolving in time, whose unity is displayed through the succession of generations connected in strict solidarity with each other. Henceforth the philosophical problems, no longer present themselves from the point of view of man conceived in the abstract or in himself apart from time. The consideration of history necessarily intervenes. Problems are formulated in social terms. There lies the deep significance of the doctrine systematised by Comte.
CHAPTER III
SOCIAL STATICS
As biology distinguishes the anatomical point of view, “relating to the ideas of organisation,” and the physiological point of view, “relating to the ideas of life,” so sociology separates the study of the conditions of existence of a society (social statics), and that of the laws of its movements (social dynamics).
This distinction has the advantage of corresponding exactly to that of order and progress, from the practical point of view, while it is closely allied to the encyclopÆdic law called “the principle of the conditions of existence.”
Comte will not admit that he is making two distinct sciences of social statics and social dynamics. Sociology, according to him, is constituted by the constant drawing together of these two corresponding studies. However, they each have their own object, and Comte has treated them separately. Indeed, social statics and dynamics are far from having the same importance in his work.
The essential part, on his own showing, is dynamics.250 When he makes history the characteristic process of the Sociological method, when he shows that the tradition transmitted from every generation to the following one is pre-eminently the sociological phenomenon, when finally he considers the new science as having been founded from the day when the law of the three states was discovered, is he not placing himself at the dynamic point of view? After having demonstrated that dynamic laws of social phenomena exist, he concludes that these phenomena are also subject to static laws: there would be a contradiction in admitting the one set of laws without the other. In Comte’s mind then dynamics preceded statics. Even from an objective point of view, dynamics seem to be the most important. For, if we knew the dynamic laws it would not be impossible to deduce the static laws from them, while to do the reverse would be impracticable, at any rate for minds constituted like ours.
So, in the Cours de philosophie positive, social statics holds a very small place compared with that occupied by dynamics. It is true that it takes up the whole of the second volume of the Politique positive. But there Comte brings into it many considerations which arise more from ethics and religion than from sociology properly so called.
I.
The idea of the social consensus, more restricted than that of the vital consensus, dominates the whole of social statics. The science sets itself to study the continual actions and reactions which the various parts of the social system exercise upon one another. Each of the numerous elements of this system, instead of being observed by itself, must be conceived as in relation with all the others, with which it has constant solidarity. From whatever social element we start, it is always connected, in a more or less direct way, with the whole of the others, even with those which at first sight appear independent.251
What are the ultimate “social elements?” In biology, anatomical analysis was to stop at the tissue, or at least at the cell. In sociology, statical analysis will stop at the family. “Human society is made up of families and not of individuals: it is an elementary axiom in statical sociology.” In the eyes of social science, the individual is an abstraction. All social strength is the result of a “more or less extended co-operation,” that is to say of the combined action of a greater or smaller number of individuals. There is nothing purely individual except physical force. But what is the physical force of a man alone, without arms or tools? (for these already imply a co-operation of social activities). Intellectual power is of value only when others participate in it: so it is with moral power.
On the other hand, if all social force is the result of union, all social force is, nevertheless represented by an individual. The social organism is “collective in its nature, and individual in its functions.”252 In this way the part played by the individual again becomes a very considerable one. If the individual, in so far as he is a social force, always represents some group, he is none the less possessed of his own personality which may precisely have taken a great part in the formation of such or such a group. We know that the social organism must not on all points be compared with the living organism. If the family is the ultimate element for social statics, this element is however itself made up of persons who are naturally independent, and who cannot be compared to cells.
The positive theory of the family is founded upon the biological theory of the physical and moral nature of man. This nature is sociable. The human species belongs to the category of those in which individuals not only live in more or less permanent bands, but form definite and durable societies. This is a fact in our experience. The social state is, for men, the state of nature. The “contract” theory cannot then be maintained. Comte does not stop to criticise it. The theorists of the counter-Revolution have sufficiently refuted Rousseau. According to Comte, sociability is spontaneous in the human species, in virtue of the instinctive leaning towards common life, “independently of any personal calculation, and often against the most immediate interest of the individual. Society is not then founded upon utility, which could moreover only appear in a state of society already established.”253
Thus, the family is the ultimate social element. Being preoccupied by this idea, Comte, who had such a deep, clear-sighted feeling of the evolution of societies, does not ask himself whether the family has evolved from something which existed previously. For him it is something natural, that is to say something given, beyond which we should not go back, and of which only the biological conditions can be determined. It is from this point of view that Comte defines the relations of man and woman in the family. He bases himself upon biology (that is to say both upon physiology and psychology), to represent the female sex as living in “a kind of state of continuous childhood.” Whence he concludes to the natural subordination of woman. This inferiority does not moreover extend to the whole of her moral nature, for, “in general, women are as superior to men by the natural development of sympathy, and sociability, as they are inferior to them where intellect and reasoning powers are concerned.”254 On this last point, John Stuart Mill held the contrary opinion, and this disagreement contributed not a little to alienate him from positive philosophy. Later on, in his “second career,” Comte, who more and more came to subordinate the intellect to the heart, still more extolled the moral excellence of woman, and ended by considering her as “intermediary between humanity and man.” But even then, while proclaiming the sentimental, moral, and Æsthetic superiority of woman, he persisted in maintaining that, from the intellectual point of view, by reason of immutable biological conditions, she remains inferior to man.
From analogous motives, Comte regards marriage as a “universal natural disposition, the first necessary basis of all society.” Every thing which tends to weaken marriage tends to disorganise the family, and, consequently, to destroy society in its constitutive elements. Comte will thus condemn divorce, of which he himself had the best reasons for appreciating the advantages. Generally, Comte’s theory of the family is modelled upon the Christian family. According to his constant practice, he seeks to detach the institutions of Catholicism, which he admires, from its dogmas which he believes to be almost dead. These institutions, excellent in themselves only suffer from being bound up with beliefs which are disappearing. So long, he says, as the family continues to have no other intellectual basis than religious doctrines, it will necessarily participate in their growing discredit. Positive philosophy “can alone henceforth establish the spirit of the family upon an immoveable foundation, with the modifications suitable to the modern character of the social organism.”255 This new intellectual basis is established by positive psychology and social statics. The constitution of the family remains the same. But its foundation is henceforth positive dogma instead of religious dogma, demonstrated belief instead of revealed faith.
Perhaps we must recognise in the energetic defence made by Comte of the family and of marriage as he found them established by the side of Catholic influence, a desire not to be confused with the followers of Saint Simon, of Fourier, and the other reformers of his time. These did not hesitate to contradict current and traditional customs. In Comte’s view, this contradiction is a sign of error. Scientific truth is found in the prolongation of public reason and of common sense. Here Comte sees a new, and not one of the least, important arguments, in support of his own theory.
II.
A society is composed of families: it is not itself a greater family. Neither is it an assemblage of contiguous families living together. The family and society are distinguished from each other by very clear differential characteristics.
The family is a “union” of an essentially moral nature, and secondarily intellectual.256 The chief constituent of the family is found in the affective functions, (the mutual tenderness of husband and wife, of the parents for the children, etc.). Society is, on the contrary, not a union, but a co-operation” of an essentially intellectual nature, and secondarily moral. Undoubtedly, an association of men cannot be conceived as subsisting without their sympathetic feelings being interested in it. Nevertheless, when we pass from the consideration of the single family to the co-ordination of several families, the principle of co-operation necessarily ends by prevailing. So Rousseau’s theory is not false on all points. Metaphysical philosophy, especially in France, says Comte, has undoubtedly committed an error of capital importance by attributing the very creation of the social state to this principle, for it is evident that co-operation, far from having been able to produce society, presupposes it. But if we confine this assertion to society properly so-called (the family being set aside) it is not so startling. For, if co-operation could not “create” human societies, it alone at least, has been able to “communicate to these spontaneous associations a definite character and a lasting consistency.”
This co-operation is called to-day “the division of labour.” Comte knew this expression: Adam Smith had already made it famous. If Comte did not make use of it, it is because economists had limited the idea and the term to “merely material usages.” He wishes, on the contrary, to consider co-operation in the whole of its rational extension. It then becomes an extremely general principle, dominating the whole of social statics, and finding its application in the greatest as in the most limited social groups. This principle leads us to regard not only individuals and classes, but also, in many respects the different peoples, “as participating together in a suitable way and a determined degree, in an immense common work whose development unites those actually co-operating with the series of their successors and their predecessors.” Thus we see the relation between the dynamical and the statical laws of social continuity which binds successive generations, with social solidarity which unites men living in the same period. This solidarity arises especially from the division of labour. The latter is the “primitive cause” of the extension and of the growing complexity of the social organism, which may be conceived as comprising the whole of our species.
The founder of social statics, Aristotle, had formulated its most general principle: “separation of offices and combination of efforts.”257 Without the “separation of offices” there would only be an agglomeration of families and not a society. But the indispensable counterpart of the separation of offices is the combination of efforts, that is to say a general thought which directs them, in a word, a government.
Thus, the ideas of society and of government are implied in one another. Indeed, there is no society properly so-called without the division of social labour, a division immediately generating consequences which make government a necessity. Society in developing grows more and more complex. Instead of a small group of a few families, it ends by numbering hundreds, thousands, and even millions of them. At the same time the division of labour often gives rise to individual differences, at once intellectual and moral. Minds are developed, but each one according to its special line, at least according to that of his profession or of his class. The communion of feeling and of thought tends to become weaker. This last is not the least serious inconvenience. Smith had already pointed it out from the economical point of view, and the utopian reformers, Fourier especially, have shown strongly its extent and its dangers.
This is, according to Comte, what it is the mission of a government to remedy. Its social function consists in repressing and in opposing as far as possible the tendency to the scattering of ideas, of feelings, and of interests. This tendency is the result of the very development of society, and left to itself, it would end by stopping this development. Government may thus be defined in its abstract and elementary function as “the necessary reaction of the whole upon the parts.”258
Government, at first, appears “spontaneously.” As Hobbes clearly saw, it is then in the hands of those to whom force belongs. But it soon becomes regularised and organised into a definite social function. As, in the development of the sciences, the growing differentiation of their object rendered research more and more special, and at last caused the appearance of a particular class of learned men, (the philosophers), whose own function is to attempt the synthesis of human knowledge; so, in the division constantly more ramified of social functions, a new one had to be constituted, “capable of intervening in the accomplishment of all the others, unceasingly to recall in them the thought of the whole, and the feeling of common solidarity.”
We are then entirely mistaken, when we want to reduce the function of government to “vulgar attributions of material order.” Government is not a simple institution of police, a guarantee of public order, nor, as was said in the XVIII. century, a necessary evil which will reduce itself to a minimum with progress, or even will tend to disappear. On the contrary, the more a society is developed, the more indispensable the function of government becomes in it, the more importance it assumes. Progress in the future will make a more and more considerable place for it in social life. Although it does not itself realise any determined social progress, government necessarily contributes to whatever progress society can make.
If the idea of the division of labour is not to be understood in a purely material and economical sense, the principle of social cohesion, which Comte calls government, cannot any more be founded upon a single conformity of interests. This would not suffice to maintain a human society. For such a society to subsist, there must be a certain “communion” of beliefs, and feelings of sympathy, which themselves depend in a certain measure upon these beliefs. Undoubtedly, society could not resist a deep and durable divergence of interests. But it would still less resist incompatibility of feelings, and especially of beliefs among its members. In a word, the basis of human society is intellectual before all things. And, as the first object of the mind of man is the interpretation of the world which surrounds him, the constitutive basis of human society is religion. The groups which are united in the same general conception of the universe are part of the same society. Hence, in the past, we see endless conflicts between the societies whose religions were different; hence, in the future, the unity of the human species will finally become entirely rallied around positive religion.
If this is the case, government, which is by definition the highest and most general social function which represents the “spirit of the whole,” cannot be confined to temporal action. Its object is not only to assure the security of property and of persons. It must at the same time strengthen and preserve that “communion” of beliefs which is the basis of human society. It must guarantee the union of intellects, by establishing and teaching universally accepted principles. It must, in a word, be a “spiritual power.” In this capacity, in positive society, it will exercise an action at least equal to that enjoyed by the catholic clergy in the Christendom of the Middle Ages, as long as the Popes preserved its supreme direction.
These consequences are legitimately drawn from Comte’s principles. His philosophy made social reorganisation dependent upon the reorganisation of morals, and the reorganisation of morals upon that of ideas. He was, therefore, in social statics, to seek for the foundation of society in the harmony of intellects and to define government by its spiritual as much as by its temporal function.
III.
Comte’s social statics are far from fulfilling the programme which he indicated in a word when he called it “social anatomy.” Undoubtedly he is right in not pushing the comparison between living beings and society to dangerous or childish attempts at precision. But, in sociology as in biology, he separates the study of the organs from that of the functions, and we must admit that he insisted very little upon the analysis of the social organs. From the statical point of view he only distinguishes the individual, the family, and society taken as a whole. Moreover the consideration of the individual is only preliminary, since the families represent the real social elements. He therefore sees, or at least he studies nothing intermediary between these elements and the totality of the social body, that is to say the human species. He limits himself to indicating the separation of offices which increases with the extension of the social body. But what is the structure of this body, what diversity of organs and apparatus does it contain? Social statics tells us nothing of this. The Politique positive scarcely gives us a few brief indications on this point. The collective organism would be composed first of families, which constitute its real element, then of the classes or castes which form its tissues, and finally of towns or villages which are its real organs.
This is very vague. Only in the dynamics shall we find views a little more precise on the appearance, the structure, and the functions of the different social forms. Even then Comte does not really take the physiological point of view, any more than in statics he takes the really anatomical point of view. Before all things, his sociology remains a philosophy of history. It analyses the past of humanity, that it may find in it the interpretation of its present and the rational prevision of its future.
This science differs profoundly then from the fundamental sciences which precede it, in that it studies a single being, of which it cannot analyse the phenomena or discover the laws except by considering it in the first place in its totality. Comte hardly ever in social statics (and far less in dynamics) says society, as in biology he said, animals and vegetables. He says the collective organism: a simple, immense organism, whose life indefinitely extends into the past and into the future, in a word, Humanity. This conception representing humanity as a single Being which is an hypothesis for science, becomes an ideal for ethics, and an object of love for religion. Insensibly Comte passes from one of these points of view to the other. At the same time the character of social statics changes. From being an abstract science in the Cours, in the Politique it is transformed into a picture of future Humanity.
CHAPTER IV
SOCIAL DYNAMICS
For Comte, social dynamics is the chief part of sociology. He tells us that it occupied his attention “in a preponderating and even almost exclusive manner.”259 This preference is easily explained. In the first place the idea which best distinguishes sociology from biology, the idea of the gradual development of humanity belongs to social dynamics. Then, the method which particularly belongs to sociology, the historical method, applies especially to dynamics. Finally, the very conception of a social science became fixed in Comte’s mind by the discovery of the law of the three states which is a dynamic law.
Social dynamics is defined as “the science of the necessary and continuous movement of humanity,”260 or, more briefly, the science of the laws of progress. Here, as in social statics, and even still more exclusively, a single case is studied, namely, the case of the human species, regarded as a single individual, and considered in the whole of its past and future development. Henceforth, without misunderstanding the distinction between biology and sociology, should we not in the first place seek some of the conditions of social progress in the physical and moral nature of the individual man? This question did not escape Comte, and he says that it would be right to begin a methodical treatise on social science with it. However, he did not expressly deal with the question. He contented himself with indicating “this fundamental instinct which is the complex result of the necessary co-operation between all our natural tendencies, which urges man ceaselessly to ameliorate his condition in all respects, and always to develop the whole of his moral, intellectual, and physical life in every way as much as the system of conditions in which he finds himself placed allows of it.”261 This indication is completed by the study of the conditions which determined the first efforts of man, when he had to overcome his natural laziness, at the dawn of civilisation. It suffices at least to show the close union which exists in Comte’s thought between social dynamics and psychology. It is true that the sociological laws cannot be deduced from the biological laws. Nothing can replace a direct observation of social phenomena. But the very fact of progress, which is the object of social dynamics, would not exist without the “individual impulses which are its own elements.”
I.
Under the name of progress Comte understands a “social advance towards a definite although never attained termination, by a series of necessarily determined stages.” This idea was never clearly defined in antiquity.262 The men of ancient times were more inclined to represent social movements as oscillatory or circular. Upon special points, for instance in morals, they had a foreshadowing of the idea of progress.263 They conceived an effort towards improvement. But the scientific idea of social progress in its entirety remained foreign to them. For this idea is only formed by observation and by the analysis of history. Their historical outlook was yet too narrow for such a suggestion.
The idea of progress appears with the philosophy of history taught by Christianity; for, this religion gives a rational explanation of universal history considered as a whole. It proclaims the superiority of the Christian world over the pagan world, and of the new law over the old.264 But, scarcely has the idea of progress thus come into existence when it becomes clouded over and tends to fade away. Catholicism clearly sees progress in the series of events which caused it to succeed a former state, but it denies the progress which continues from that moment. It considers itself as final. It “limits onward progress to the advent of Christianity.” It claims to fix an invariable dogma which contains immutable and absolute truth. This is the very negation of the positive idea of progress. In order to find this idea clearly conceived and scientifically formulated, we must come to Condorcet, and even to the XIX. century, that is to say, to the foundation of social science by Comte. He was especially led to it, he says, by the historical study of the development of the sciences. For, of all the social series, this is the one whose evolution is most advanced. No other suggests so clearly the idea of a “progression” whose terms succeed each other by virtue of a necessary filiation. Pascal already gave a very fine formula of it, in his PrÉface du TraitÉ du Vide. Is it not remarkable that, in his sketch of the positive idea of progress, he should have been led at once to the essential hypothesis of social dynamics, that is to say, to consider the whole succession of generations as a single man, always living, continually learning?265
Nevertheless, the idea of progress, so well applied to the evolution of the sciences in the XVII. century, could not then be extended to all social facts. It had met with an insurmountable obstacle in the Middle Ages. Men considered that period as one of retrogression and barbarism, although, as a matter of fact, it was “characterised by the universal perfecting of human sociability.” The idea of progress therefore remained a special one. Thus originated the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns266 whose importance has not been sufficiently understood. The “eminent” Fontenelle and the “judicious” Perrault have very clearly shown in respect to intellectual activity generally considered, what Pascal had already established for science properly so-called.267
The XVIII. century was full of the idea of progress. But, failing to follow a positive method, it gave a false direction to this idea. It believed in the indefinite perfectibility of man and of society. Now, this notion does not coincide with that of progress. It is even fundamentally opposed to it. Progress signifies “development subject to fixed conditions, and operating in virtue of necessary laws, which determine its advance and its limitations.” It is precisely the ignorance of these conditions and of these laws which gives rise to the idea of indefinite perfectibility. If Helvetius and Condorcet had had a positive knowledge of human nature, they would not have entertained so many illusions and unreasonable hopes. Biology, that is to say, scientific psychology, would have taught them that human nature is invariable in its basis, that the preponderance of the selfish over the altruistic instincts is essential to this nature, and that, if progress favours the development of the altruistic feelings, it cannot, however, overturn the natural equilibrium of our inclinations. In a word, indefinite perfectibility is a metaphysical idea. Imagination plays a greater part in it than observation. The philosophers who conceived it did not realise the relations which bind the intellectual and the moral life of man to the structure of his organism.
In order that the idea of progress should reach its final form it was necessary, in the first place, that positive psychology should have put an end to the dreams of indefinite perfectibility. It was also necessary that the French Revolution should come to render the course of the history of humanity intelligible. Indeed, according to Comte, a “progression” cannot be understood, so long as we do not know at least three of its terms. Two terms do not suffice to define it. Now, up to the time of the French Revolution, several “progressions” or social series undoubtedly offered the required number of terms to scientific reflection; for instance, the evolution of such and such a science or of such and such an art. But, in sociology, the knowledge of secondary laws is subordinated to that of primary laws, and the advance of such and such a social series can only be understood if the development of society in general is known in its fundamental law. To discover this law then, we must possess at least, three terms of the general “progression.” Now, before the French Revolution two terms only were given: the rÉgime of the societies of antiquity, and the Christian rÉgime (that is to say, the one which attained its highest degree of perfection in the Catholic organisation of the Middle Ages.) The French Revolution came to furnish the third term. It brought the idea of a new rÉgime. As Kant had said, in terms which were certainly unknown to Comte, it gave men the idea of a social organisation founded upon principles different from those of the existing societies. Henceforth the idea of progress could apply itself to the whole of the historical development of humanity. “It is to this salutary disturbance,” says Comte, “that we owe the strength and the audacity to conceive a notion upon which rests the whole of social science, and consequently the whole of positive philosophy, of which this final science alone could constitute the unity.”268
This social science remained to be constructed. It will be the special work of Auguste Comte. According to him, the French Revolution only brought an imperfect idea of social progress. It helped to bring about the conception of the idea of a different rÉgime, but without actually founding it. The functions of the new philosophy will be to realise the positive idea of social progress. In a word, the revolutionary impulse made this philosophy possible. It has not done away with its utility.269
II.
Sociology being an abstract and speculative science in the same way as the other fundamental sciences, progress in it is not understood in a utilitarian or moral sense. From 1826 Comte exerted himself to prevent any equivocation on this point. The insufficiency of language, he says, obliges him to make use of the words “improvement” and “development,” of which the former and even the latter, although clearer, recalls ideas of absolute good and of indefinite amelioration, which Comte has no intention of expressing. These words for him have the simple scientific object of indicating, in social physics, a certain succession of states of the human species, “being effected according to determined laws: a usage exactly analogous to the one which physiologists make of them in the study of the individual organism, to indicate a succession of transformations with which no idea of continuous amelioration or deterioration is connected.”270 It would be easy to treat of the whole of social physics without once using the word improvement, and always replacing it by the scientific term development. For the question is not to appreciate the respective value of successive states referred to an ideal state, but simply to establish the laws of their succession. “The present is full of the past and big with the future.” Liebnitz’s formula thus expresses the general idea of progress. Comte only makes it positive by discovering the general laws of this progress, and by showing that they are correlated to the laws of social statics.
As a matter of fact, does the development of humanity lead to improvement or progress, in the moral and practical sense of the word? Social science has not to answer this question. However, Comte thinks that this improvement takes place, and that progress, so understood, can be shown at once in our condition and in our nature.271 As proofs of this, in the first place, he gives the increase in the population, at least in that portion of humanity which he nearly always considers alone, the white race; then he mentions the law—according to which exercise perfects the organs. This progress is fixed by heredity. Comte thus admits this principle laid down by Lamarck, with this reservation, that evolution never transforms “natural dispositions.”
As to our condition, it is improved according to the measure in which we can act upon natural phenomena, and this power in turn depends upon the knowledge we have acquired of the laws of phenomena. “Vision brings prevision and thus facilitates provision.” Progress is here manifested by the extension of our scientific knowledge and by the improvement of the arts founded upon this knowledge. If scientific knowledge, which is necessarily abstract, has to be separated from practice in order to seek for the general laws which regulate phenomena, science, once constituted, makes possible a system of reasoned applications which reaches immeasurably farther than empirical art. Like Descartes, Comte founds the most ambitious hopes upon the positive science of nature.
Now, the most “modifiable” phenomena, those in which our intervention is most efficacious, are the human phenomena, be they individual or collective. On the other hand, our action upon the external world especially depends upon the dispositions of the agent. In every way then we must improve these dispositions. The most important improvement will be that of our internal nature. It will consist in bringing about the greater and greater prevalence of the attributes which distinguish man from the animals, that is to say, intelligence and sociability, correlated faculties, which are at once as a means and as an end to one another. We know, moreover, that there are limits to this progress. The perfect preponderance within ourselves of humanity over animality is a limit, nearer to which our efforts must ever bring us, without ever actually reaching it.272
Whether it be a question of our condition or of our nature the improvement, in both cases, can only be very slow. It is never easy to substitute to natural order an artificial order resting upon the scientific knowledge of the former. Of those different forms of progress, the first, which Comte calls the material progress, because it is the easiest, is the most advanced. The great attraction which it has for the men of to-day is thus explained, but the importance given to it is quite exaggerated. If our nature could be brought to a higher degree of perfection it would assuredly be preferable. But it is perhaps necessary that our material conditions of existence should first have been ameliorated?
The improvement in our nature may be physical, intellectual, or moral. The first would consist in an addition to the average duration of human life; it depends upon the progress of biology, and, consequently, of medicine and hygiene. Intellectual (scientific and Æsthetic) improvement, would be still more desirable. It “means a greater soaring upwards” than is represented by all physical improvements or a fortiori by any material improvements: for the intellect is a “universal tool” whose uses have a universal application. But human happiness depends far more upon moral progress “over which we have, also more command, although it is more difficult.” No intellectual improvement could be equal in value to an increase in goodness or in courage. If we were wise our whole endeavour therefore would be in this direction. At any rate we ought always to remember that other forms of progress are desirable simply as means, and moral progress alone as an end.273
III.
The theory of progress is the “principle” of social dynamics, itself the essential part of sociology, while sociology lies at the heart of positive philosophy. It was therefore to be expected that the adversaries of this philosophy would especially seek to ruin the theory of progress, which supports everything else. Indeed the objections have been numerous and pressing. Of these objections Comte had foreseen the two most important, and he had endeavoured to answer them beforehand. According to him, the theory of progress implies neither fatalism nor optimism, nor the quietism which has been represented as a consequence of it.274
On the first point, Comte draws our attention to the fact that the necessary consequence of his principle of laws is not the absolute determinism of phenomena, whether it be a question of social or other phenomena. Positive philosophy admits nothing absolute. Determinism, like free-will, is a metaphysical thesis, Comte is not compelled to take sides either with one or the other: he leaves them to mutually refute each other. The positive conception of the moral and intellectual faculties of man, as Gall clearly established, does not imply that human actions might not be otherwise than they are. Similarly, if in general natural phenomena are subject to laws, this does not prevent us from conceiving these phenomena as modifiable by man’s intervention. Now, of all natural phenomena, social phenomena are precisely the most modifiable; so much so that for a long time it was possible to ignore that they were governed by laws.
There is then no contradiction in affirming the reality of these laws, and in considering at the same time the intervention of human activity in social phenomena as efficacious. As early as 1824 Comte wrote to his friend Valat: “It would be misunderstanding my thought to conclude from it that I forbid all improvement, since, on the contrary, I formally establish that every government must change in consequence of the progress of civilisation, and that it is in no way a matter of indifference that these changes should take place by the mere force of circumstances, or by calculated planes based upon observation. I do not deny the power of political measures, I limit it.”275
It belongs to social science to determine the limits of the useful action of man upon social phenomena. These limits are narrow enough. Man can only modify, from the static point of view, the intensity, and from the dynamic point of view, the speed of social phenomena. Indeed, here as elsewhere, modifications can only be produced in conformity with laws. To suppose the contrary would be to deny the very existence of these laws. Now, the fundamental law of statics is the intimate solidarity and the mutual dependence of all social elements, at all the moments of their common evolution. There is, therefore, no disturbing influence, whatever its origin may be, which can “cause unsympathetic opposing elements to coexist in a given society.”276 Rather would it destroy this society. All that is possible is to modify the respective tendencies which indeed coexist in this society, but without causing the appearance or disappearance of any of them. In the same way, from the dynamic point of view, the order of the successive phases of progress is determined by laws. No external influence (nor in particular that of man), could overturn or disturb this order, or “skip” one of the stages. The evolution could only be made more rapid, that is to say, easier. The statesman, infatuated with his power, will perhaps find this a very humble part to play. But, even within these limits, human intervention could still be of capital importance provided that it were directed by science.
History confirms these views. In it we never see social phenomena modified by man otherwise than in their intensity, or in their speed. Where we best know their evolution, that is to say, in the social series, which includes the history of the sciences, of the arts, of morals and institutions, the verification of this law is constant. For instance, among the scientific men at Alexandria astronomy stopped at a certain point, because the further development of this science was not compatible with the general conditions of society at that time. And if Montesquieu’s attempt to subject social facts to laws failed, it is because, before sociology, positive biology had first to be founded. Analogous examples abound, and a contrary case has never presented itself.
Three secondary factors, race, climate, and man’s political action especially modify progress, in the measure which has just been indicated. In the present state of science it is impossible to arrange them in the order of their importance. Montesquieu, made too much of climates: others have made too much of races.277 Those elements of social evolution have not yet been studied by the positive method. Until the foundation of social dynamics their part was, of necessity, wrongly conceived. It was not known that the essential law, the law of the three states, is independent of these secondary factors, whilst on the contrary the secondary factors can only act in conformity with this law, without ever suspending it. In order that the modifications which they produce should become intelligible, it was necessary that the normal type of evolution should first be known. To study the influence of climates and of races before first possessing the general laws of social dynamics, was, almost, to pretend to establish pathology without having first constituted physiology.
As to man’s political action, it too has been wrongly understood. In the absence of a positive conception of social phenomena, some denied the efficacy of this action, others exaggerated it. When it was used in the direction of progress, it almost necessarily appeared to be the principal cause of the results which social evolution would have brought about in any case. The illusion was all the more inevitable from the fact that social forces are always personified in individuals. On the other hand, how often have the most vigorous political efforts only been successful for a day, because the general evolution of society was proceeding in the contrary direction!
So long as the theological and metaphysical period lasts, man does not hesitate to ascribe to himself an almost boundless action upon natural phenomena. Having reached the positive period, he knows that phenomena are only, modifiable within certain limits, determined by their laws, and that he can only aspire to relative results. Once positive sociology is established it wholly transforms the familiar idea of political art. But because it entertains less great and less gratifying ambitions, this art will only be all the more effective. Compare what medicine and surgery are able to do to-day for the good of the sick with what they could do before chemistry and biology became positive sciences!
But, it is said, admitting that man can modify social phenomena, what reason has he to interfere with them, since progress takes place of itself? Why not allow the natural evolution which most certainly realises it to work itself out?
This objection confuses progress understood as a succession of states which unfold according to a law, with progress understood in the sense of indefinite improvement. On this point again the comparison of society with living organisms is instructive. Do not these develop in conformity with invariable laws? Yet, Comte regards them as extremely imperfect, and in what concerns the human body, the intervention of the doctor or the surgeon is often useful and even indispensable. When we reproach the sociological theory of progress with having optimism as its consequence, we take the scientific notion of spontaneous order for the systematic justification of any existing order.278 There is, however, a very long distance from one to the other. Spontaneous order may often be a very rough form of order.
Here, as everywhere else, positive philosophy substitutes the scientific principle of the conditions of existence to the metaphysical principle of final causes. It admits that spontaneously, according to natural laws, a certain necessary order is established; but it acknowledges that this order offers serious and numerous disadvantages, modifiable, in certain degrees, by man’s intervention. The more complex these phenomena, the more are the imperfections multiplied and intensified. The biological phenomena are “inferior” in this respect to those of inorganic nature. By reason of their complication, which is maxima, social phenomena must be the most “disorderly” of all. In a word if the idea of a natural law implies that of a certain order, the notion of this order must be completed by the “simultaneous consideration of its inevitable imperfection.”
The theory of progress is then incompatible neither with the ascertainment of social evil, nor with the effort to remedy it. The most complex of all organisms, the social organism, is also the one most subject to diseases and to crises. Thus, Comte foresees in a near future great internal struggles in our society, in consequence of our mental and moral anarchy.279 To-day, only that is systematised which is destined to disappear, and what is not yet systematised, that is to say all that lives, will not be organised without violent conflicts. It is enough here to think of the relations between masters and workmen.
Revolutions occur which nothing can prevent. It is an inevitable evil, and Comte gives a striking psychological reason for it. Our mind is too weak and our life too short for us ever to form a positive idea of a social system other than the one in which we were born and in which we live. It is from this one that, willingly or unwillingly, we draw the elements of our political and social ideas. Even men of a utopian turn of mind do not escape this necessity. Their dreams always reflect, at bottom, either the past, or a contemporary social state. In order that a new political system should appear, and especially for it to find access to men’s minds, the destruction of the preceeding system must be already very far advanced. Until then “even the most open minds could not perceive the characteristic nature of the new system hidden from all eyes by the spectacle of the old organisation.”280 Hence, the lengthy processes of decomposition of worn-out rÉgimes, the no less lengthy birth of new institutions, and the cruel periods of transition, full of troubles, of wars, and of revolutions.
With this same cause are connected what we may call the phenomena of survival. Institutions, powers, as also doctrines, have a tendency to subsist beyond the function which the general advance of the human mind had assigned to them.281 Conflicts then take place which it is beyond anybody’s power to prevent: happy is he who can make them shorter and less acute! The solution only comes with time when the vanquished ideas fall into “disuse.” The combat never ceases except from the lack of combatants.
All this in no way excludes the possibility for man to exercise a beneficent or a detrimental action. To understand is not always to justify. It is true that a comprehensive view of history disposes us to be indulgent, because it brings out the close solidarity of all the social elements of the same period. The responsibilities being shared, and so to speak diffused, appear to be less serious for each individual. Nevertheless this philosophy allows praise and blame for the past, and active intervention in social phenomena for the present.
But this intervention will only produce the desired results if it rests upon social science. The positive polity does not propose to direct the human race towards an arbitrarily selected end. It knows that humanity is moved by its own impulse, “according to a law no less necessary, although more modifiable than that of gravitation.”282 It is only a question for politics to facilitate this advance by throwing light upon it. It is a very difficult thing to undergo the action of a law without understanding it, or to submit to it with a full knowledge of the case. It remains in man’s power to soften and to shorten crises, as soon as he grasps their reasons and foresees the issue. He will not pretend to govern the phenomena, but only to modify their spontaneous development. “This demands that he should know their laws.”283
Let us also know how to own that in respect to many of these phenomena, and not the least important of them, we are absolutely powerless. Their conditions escape our grasp. For instance, the duration of human life is far from being as favourable to social evolution as might be conceived.284 On the contrary, after the extreme imperfection of our organism, the brevity of life is one of the causes of the slowness of social development. How many powerful minds have died before their full maturity had yielded all its fruit! What would not have been expected of their genius if they had been in full possession of their faculties during three or four centuries!
The positive theory of progress therefore entails neither optimism nor quietism. The intervention of man being excluded, the social state, which evolves, according to laws, at each period is just as good and as bad as it can be, “according to the whole of the situation.”285 More than one pessimist would be satisfied with this formula. It is legitimately drawn from the principle of the conditions of existence. But, truly, from the point of view of this principle, that is to say, from the point of view of positive and relative philosophy, there can be no question either of optimism or of pessimism. Metaphysics alone can offer an absolute judgment upon the whole of the social reality. The positive doctrine, here as elsewhere, only seeks the statical and dynamical laws of phenomena. It is true, that it finds that the social evolution is, as a matter of fact, accompanied by improvement. But this improvement is so slow, so laborious, interrupted by so many crises, disturbed by so many conflicts, that if humanity aspires to a better condition, it is mainly from her own efforts that she must expect a slightly more rapid progress.
CHAPTER V
THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
If social dynamics is a science, and if the law of the three states, discovered by Comte, is its fundamental law, this law (and those which proceed from it), must explain the successive phases of humanity, from the first dawn of civilisation, to the present condition of the most advanced nations. They must “introduce unity and continuity into this immense spectacle, where in general we see so much confusion and incoherence.”286 Thus the counterpart of social science is a philosophy of history. In it, social science finds its concrete expression and its verification. In the absence of the prevision of social facts for the future, a prevision which is rendered almost impossible by the extreme complication of these facts, social science at least allows of the “rational co-ordination” of the whole of the past.
In order to establish this philosophy of history, Comte gave himself two postulates. The first is common to him and to all those who endeavoured to set forth the evolution of humanity from its beginnings, especially before the recent progress made by anthropology. Comte “constructs” primitive man and the society in which he lived. The second postulate consists in considering, instead of the history of the whole of humanity, “the most complete and the most characteristic evolution,” that is to say, that of the white race; and in this race, only the populations of western Europe.287 Comte will almost confine himself to the periods dealt with by Bossuet in the Discours sur l’histoire universelle, which, moreover, he greatly esteems. His philosophy of history only embraces Egyptian civilisation, very little known in his time, then Greece and Rome, and finally after the fall of the Roman Empire, the development of some Latin and Germanic peoples in Europe.
We can understand that Bossuet should have so limited universal history as to include in it only a small portion of humanity gathered on the shores of the Mediterranean. He was obliged to do so by the leading idea in his work which makes the appearance of Christianity the culminating point in the human drama. All that precedes it must tend to bring it about, all that comes after it must arise from it. But is Auguste Comte, like Bossuet, justified in leaving out of universal history the great civilisations of the far east, almost the whole of Africa, and the whole of the new world? Since, according to him, there is no chosen people, nor “providential direction,” must he not consider the total evolution of humanity? He has no right to isolate a part of it in an arbitrary manner, and to neglect the rest. He has it all the less in that he considers the species in its entirety as an individual, and that this hypothesis of Condorcet has become a principle of social science with him.
But Comte believes his postulate to be as well justified by his definition of sociology, as Bossuet’s plan could have been by his theological doctrine. Resembling on this point the other positive sciences, sociology is made of laws not of facts. The pure and simple knowledge of facts is only an end from the point of view of scholarship. Science only seeks for this knowledge in the measure in which it is indispensable for the determination of laws. Consequently, if the evolution of human society proceeded simultaneously at different points on the globe, as, this evolution takes place, as we suppose, everywhere according to invariable laws, and as climate and race can only modify it within very narrow limits, the sociologist is not bound to study all the societies of the past and of the present. He will only do so in order to make use of the comparative method, in the measure which is judged useful and within the limitations permitted by this method. In the second place, among those historical evolutions, up to the present time independent of one another, to which will he give the preference to seek in it the verification of abstract social dynamics? Evidently to the most complete and the most characteristic: for there he will have least difficulty in disengaging the laws from the extraordinary complexity of facts. Have we not seen that the idea of progress, without which sociology cannot be constituted, has only been definitely formulated since the French Revolution? Comte then thought himself authorised to “limit his historical study to the sole examination of a homogeneous and continuous series, which was nevertheless justly qualified as universal.” At every moment in history, the people whose evolution is most advanced represent the whole of humanity since the rest of humanity is destined, sooner or later to pass through the same phase. Hence the idea, which is found equally in Hegel and in Renan, of a “mission” of races and of peoples. A temporary mission which, while it lasts, constitutes their might and their right, but which, too often, they have the misfortune to survive.
I.
The positive philosophy of history takes as its guiding principle the idea of unity. In virtue of a postulate which is an audacious anticipation concerning an uncertain future, the human species, in it, is regarded as an immense social unity. Similarly, in it, the evolution of humanity is regarded as ending in the moral and religious unity of all men. Humanity goes from spontaneous religion where it begins, to demonstrated religion where it becomes finally established. Between the two lies the domain of history. The successive states through which humanity passes in evolving are not homogeneous. The theological and the positive spirit are mingled in them at various degrees. They struggle one against the other. These states then contain within themselves the principle of their own destruction. Each one necessarily prepares the appearance of the following one, until the final state in which the positive spirit alone will predominate.
The spring of these concrete views of history is the logical need of unity. It is this which determined the initial movement. For the primitive religions, unity was never perfect. Even at the period when fetichism rules without question, some rudiments of the positive spirit exist. Human nature, being invariable, the germ of its final state was already contained in a primitive state. From that time it was certain that, if humanity emerged from its primitive state, it would evolve until it found unity in the final religion.
If this be so, how is it that Comte did not regard the succession of religious forms as the supreme dynamic law, as the principle of the philosophy of history? Why did he believe rather that he had found this principle in the law of the evolution of philosophies? It is because, according to him, the evolution of religious forms is a function of intellectual evolution. It is even subordinate to intellectual evolution, in this sense, that progress in the knowledge of the laws of nature sooner or later brings about a religious revolution. In the second place, if the philosophy of history had chosen the succession of religious forms as its chief axis, it would only have studied the process of decomposition of beliefs, which, up to the present time, has led them from the period when all thought is religious (fetichism), to that when no thought seems to be so any more (philosophical deism). It would not show at the same time the inverse and simultaneous process of the positive spirit, which not only determines this progressive decomposition, but also prepares the elements of a new faith. It would not show how by degrees, by means of science, this spirit establishes a conception of nature which by becoming social will become universal, and which will be the basis of the final religion. This is why Comte, while making religion the chief element in individual and social human life, was nevertheless to take the evolution of the intellect, that is to say, the sciences and the philosophies, as the “guiding thread” of his philosophy of history.
II.
It does not come within the purpose of this work to give even a summary outline of the philosophy of history developed by Comte first in the Cours de philosophie positive, and then in the third volume of the Politique positive. Neither shall we disengage the ingenious or profound views of detail with which it abounds. It will suffice for us to show how, according to Comte, the laws of social dynamics are always verified, and how apparent exceptions end by being interpreted in the direction of these laws.
Fetichism, properly so-called, was succeeded by astrology, then by polytheism, which was first conservative (the rÉgime of castes in Egypt), then intellectual (Greece), and social (the Roman empire). With the Christian religion monotheism comes to be substituted to polytheism. But does not the theory of progress soon meet with an insurmountable obstacle? How does it explain the Middle Ages, that long succession of centuries which Voltaire and the philosophers had described as full of darkness, of superstition, and of ignorance, as the disgrace of history? How to reconcile this lamentable “retrogression” with the “continuity” of progress affirmed by social dynamics?
Auguste Comte’s answer is presented in two forms.
In the first place the “retrogression” was never complete. At the time when the Middle Ages were at their darkest in Europe, Arab civilisation was going through its most brilliant period. In it many of the sciences were going beyond the extreme point reached by them in antiquity. The continuity of evolution was then not interrupted. It suffices to understand, in conformity with the postulate laid down by Comte at the beginning of social dynamics, that, at this period, the Arabs were the part of humanity whose intellectual evolution was most advanced, and who, consequently, represented the rest.
But, above all, the current opinion concerning the Middle Ages is erroneous. The philosophers of the XVIII. century did not know it. They only saw this period through their prejudices, or rather they did not deign to look at it. Nevertheless, the whole spiritual movement of modern centuries goes back to those “memorable times, unjustly qualified as dark by metaphysical criticism, of which Protestantism was the first organ.”288
In the first place—and this is a capital proposition in historical philosophy289—the feudal rÉgime as a temporal organisation, was the natural result of the situation of the Roman world. In any case it would have been formed, even if the invasions had not taken place. In virtue of the consensus which is the fundamental principle of social statics, the other series of phenomena which accompanied the establishment of the feudal rÉgime were then also produced as a “natural development,” and it is a misunderstanding to see in them an interruption of “progress.” The superiority of Antiquity over the Middle Ages, especially in the fine arts, will be raised as an objection. But Comte only recognises this superiority in the plastic arts, and especially in sculpture.290 According to him, it is explained by certain features in Greek customs which were sure to make the people of antiquity incomparable in the art of expressing the beauty of the human form. For the rest, the Æsthetic education of humanity “progressed during the Middle Ages. Architecture produced marvels of which antiquity had no idea. Dante is a unique poet. Modern music has its origin in the old Gregorian. Finally, the art of the Middle Ages presented two characteristics which the art of the aristocratic societies of antiquity did not possess, at least in the same degree. It was spontaneous, that is to say, in full natural harmony with the whole of the surrounding conditions. Consequently, it was popular, it expressed marvellously for the people, the very soul of the people.
If then it be true that “the mainspring of the fine arts is to be found under the sway of polytheism,” none the less has the development of our Æsthetic faculties been continuous: and the law of progress has not been reversed. It is true that since antiquity these faculties have not found a combination of such favourable circumstances, such a direct and energetic stimulus; but that proves nothing “against their intrinsic activity, nor against the real merit of their productions.” The Æsthetic spirit has become more widespread, more varied, and even more complete than it could ever have been in antiquity.291 Hence it is that the Renaissance did more harm than good to the fine arts. It inspired an exclusive and servile admiration for the masterpieces of antiquity, which are related to an absolute social system. “In this sense,” says Comte, “the appreciation of the present romantic school only sins in the direction of historical exaggeration; but its recriminations are far from being groundless.”292
Similarly, the intellectual activity of the Middle Ages has been very unjustly treated. Certainly, positive philosophy cannot be suspected of partiality in favour of theological dogmas and metaphysical subtleties. But, just as in physics we distinguish the material changes, which are within reach of our senses, and the molecular movements which escape them, so at certain periods the human intellect produces outside itself works which testify to its activity, and at other moments, without being less active its labour remains an internal one. There are periods of secret and silent preparation. Such, for instance, was the first portion of the Middle Ages. Far from the human mind remaining stationary and inactive at that time it did, on the contrary, a very considerable work: it was creating the modern languages, that is to say, the indispensable instrument for subsequent progress of thought.
We must also be fair to two immense series of labours, (alchemy and astrology), which have contributed so greatly and for so long to the development of human reason. In coming after the astrologers and the alchemists, modern scientific men not only found “science roughly outlined by the perseverance of these bold precursors,”293 they further received from them the indispensable principle of the invariability of natural laws. Astrology tended to suggest a high view of human wisdom. Alchemy restored the feeling of man’s power, which had been lowered by theological beliefs. In speaking of Roger Bacon, Comte goes so far as to say that the greater number of the scientific men of to-day who despise the Middle Ages so much, would be incapable not only of writing but even of reading “the great composition of this admirable monk,” on account of the immense variety of views on all orders of phenomena contained in it.294
Comte further enlarges with pleasure upon the mutual obligations of feudal tenure, “an admirable combination of the instinct of independence and of the feeling of devotion,” upon the appearance of chivalry, upon the raising of the condition of women, upon the enfranchisement of the commons upon the formation of the tiers État, etc.295 Like the romantic school, being preoccupied with the duty of fighting the systematic detractors of the Middle Ages, he goes to the opposite extreme. He no longer sees the famines, the the plagues, the stakes, the interminable wars. He is not content with showing that, in spite of all, the Middle Ages was a period of progress. He wants it to be a model period, in which we should find the indication, in all essential aspects, of the programme which we are to realise to-day.296
The secret of Comte’s partiality for the Middle Ages is not hard to discover. He never tires of praising the Catholic organisation of this period, the separation of the temporal from the spiritual power,297 last of all “the miracle of the papal hegemony.” Nothing of the kind was known in antiquity. That alone suffices to establish the superiority of the Middle Ages. Positive philosophy will restore this separation of the two powers to-day. It will complete the “admirable sketch” drawn of old by the Catholic Church.
Positivism, says Huxley, is “Catholicism minus Christianity.” Comte would not have protested very violently against this definition. Indeed, in the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, he distinguishes between the doctrine and the institutions. The doctrine is on the decline and will disappear. But the institutions were masterpieces of political wisdom, and they have only been ruined by having seemed to be inseparable from this doctrine. They ought to be re-established upon intellectual bases at once broader and more permanent.298 Positive philosophy furnishes these bases. It will know how to restore the “government of souls,” according to the model left by the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.
It has often been said that the social action of Catholicism was especially due to its moral teaching. Comte reverses this proposition. The moral efficacy of Catholicism principally depended upon the constitution of the Church, and only in an accessory way upon its doctrine.299 Without the constant action of an organised spiritual power, a religion, however pure it may be, cannot have much power over the conduct of men. Catholicism had understood this. It had founded a system of common education which was equally received by rich and poor. Morality thus acquired the “ascendency which belongs to it.” The feelings were subjected to an admirable discipline, which exerted itself to uproot even the smallest seeds of corruption.300
To conclude, “the eternal honour”301 of Catholicism is to have brought a decisive improvement into the theory of the social organism, by the separation of the two powers. Many causes have contributed to its being misunderstood; the excessive admiration of the modern historians for the city of classical times, the partiality of Protestants for the early Church, and finally the contempt of philosophers for the supposed darkness of the Middle Ages. We judge of it better to-day. Positive philosophy does not confine itself to rehabilitating the Catholic organisation: it takes it up again on its own account. “The more I investigate this immense subject,” writes Comte to John Stuart Mill, “the more confirmed I become in the view which I already held twenty years ago, at the time of my work upon the spiritual power, of regarding ourselves, we, systematic positivists, as the real successors of the great men of the Middle Ages, by taking up the social work again at the point to which Catholicism had carried it.”302 Undoubtedly the conditions are not the same to-day, and we must take the differences into account. But as to the extent and the intensity of action, we may say that for each of the social relations on which the Catholic clergy had to pronounce, an analogous attribution exists for the modern spiritual power.303 In a word, excepting for the dogma, Comte borrows from the Catholicism of the Middle Ages almost everything, its organisation, its rÉgime, its worship, and, if he could, its clergy and its cathedrals. His religion will be a Catholicism raised upon another basis.
III.
The separation between the temporal and spiritual power realised by Catholicism in the Middle Ages marks a decisive progress in the history of humanity. But it was not finally established. The rÉgime of which it formed a part was bound to disappear, because of the “mutual antipathy” between the elements included within it. The Catholic organisation of the thirteenth century was first shaken and then destroyed by the advancing ascendancy of the positive spirit, and the resistance of theological dogma. From this “organic” period European society has passed to a “critical” period which has filled centuries, and which positive philosophy alone is able to bring to a close. The whole of modern history, political, religious, scientific, Æsthetic, economic, etc., is, at bottom, merely the succession of the necessary stages in this double work; the decomposition of the rÉgime of the Middle Ages, and the preparation for the positive period. In a first phase, which occupies the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the movement remains a spontaneous one. It ignores the end to which it is tending. In the second, which extends to the end of the eighteenth century, the disorganisation becomes deeper under the influence of an entirely negative philosophy.304
The first signs of the decomposition which was beginning were of an economic order. The phenomena of this order are indeed a factor of the highest importance in the whole of social life. The economic evolution, according to Comte, necessarily precedes the Æsthetic and scientific evolution. It is the former, far more than the two latter, which characterises our civilisation in contrast with the societies of antiquity.305 Through it the organisation of modern societies was to begin. The freeing of the serfs, the foundation of independent urban communes, the transformation of industry which arose from this, are described by Comte almost in the same terms as those used by Augustin Thierry, (who like him had worked by the side of Saint-Simon). It is the ending of an economic organisation, and the heralding of a new rÉgime.
When this spontaneous decomposition had reached a certain point, the critical doctrines could appear and push it further. But, to see in these doctrines the original cause of this great movement, is to credit them with an exaggerated influence, and even, strictly speaking, an incomprehensible one. In order that doctrines may arise and prosper they must find favourable ground. The contrary opinion exaggerates “beyond all possibility” the political influence of the intellect, and creates a kind of vicious circle.306
The principle of “free examination” was at first, in the XVI century, only a natural result of the new social situation gradually brought about by the two preceding centuries. For this principle corresponds to a state of “non-government” of minds. And this state, in turn, comes from the progressive dissolution of mental discipline. It lasts so long as a spiritual power has not been reconstituted upon new foundations. In a society where spiritual power is normally exercised, that is to say, where it governs the universality of minds, united by a body of common beliefs, the need of intellectual liberty is not developed in individuals. At any rate it does not challenge unanimously accepted principles. But, when this power is weakened, the principles begin to be discussed. Each one soon claims to be a judge of their value. Everything then depends on the combination of social conditions. We can no more produce than we can stifle this disposition of minds, “outside the conditions which are favourable or unfavourable to it.” It is only developed during the periods which are not “organic.” “It is through having misunderstood this law of social statics that so many historical errors have been committed, in which the symptom is mistaken for the cause, and the result for the principle.”307
The first general form of the principle of freedom of examination expressed itself in Protestantism. In it this freedom at first remained confined within the more or less narrow limits of Christian theology. The spirit of criticism at first especially endeavoured, in the very name of Christianity, to ruin the admirable system of the Catholic hierarchy, which was its social realisation. This is the characteristic inconsequence of the metaphysical spirit, which always denies the logical deductions while claiming to maintain the principles, and which, in this particular case, aspired to reform Christianity at the same time that it destroyed the necessary conditions of its existence, that is to say, its organisation.
In the same way, as in the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, Comte chiefly admires “the masterpiece of political wisdom,” which knew how to separate the attributes of temporal power from those of spiritual power; so in Protestantism he especially sees the destructive principle of this masterpiece. He unceasingly reproaches it with having subordinated the spiritual to the temporal power in the whole of Europe. This “chief perturbation” was the origin of all the others. In accordance with the leaders of the traditionalist school, with de Maistre and de Bonald in France, with Haller in Germany, Comte insists upon the close relationship between the Protestant spirit and the revolutionary spirit. Once it has been demanded, the right of examination spreads by a necessity which is at once mental and social and cannot be overcome, to all individuals and all questions. The name of Protestantism should not be restricted to religious reform. It is no less suitable for the whole of the revolutionary philosophy. For this philosophy, from Lutheranism to the Deism of the XVIII. century, “without excluding Atheism which constitutes its extreme phase” is a protestation, at first against the principles of the old social order, and then against any organisation, whatever.308
The “absolute and indefinite” dogma of free examination sets up each individual judgment as an arbiter upon all social questions. From this dogma gradually emerge absolute liberty in speaking and writing, the political sovereignty of the masses at will creating or destroying institutions, the equality of all men, the isolation of nations: in a word, as Haller has said, “social and political atomism.” These consequences had become inevitable from the day when Protestantism gave the supreme decision in religious questions to every one, without taking into account conditions either of competence, or authority. This first step was a decisive one. If, supposing an impossibility, modern society were replaced in the state in which it was when Protestantism succeeded in becoming established, the same necessary succession of social and political consequences would again unfold themselves.
After that, it matters little that Protestantism should have fought against the revolutionary spirit, and that it should have disavowed “anarchical” philosophy. It matters little that it should have made repeated efforts to constitute a spiritual authority, and that it should have produced a multitude of sects “of which each pitied the preceding one and abhorred the one which followed it.”309 Whatever it may do, Protestantism remains purely critical, negative and disorganising. Consequently the part it plays can only be transitory. It contains no element which the positive organisation should preserve. It naturally ends in philosophical Deism.
This Deism appears as early as the XVII. century in England, and in Holland with Hobbes, Spinoza and Bayle. The right of examination is henceforth recognised as indefinite in principle, but in fact, it is thought possible to maintain the metaphysical discussion within the more general limits of monotheism.310 At bottom they continue “to destroy religion in the name of the religious principle.” A “rational theology” is constructed; and the natural religion, dear to the XVIII. century, is finally reached.
Now, in Comte’s eyes, rational theology is an “incoherent expression,”311 and natural religion “a monstrous drawing together of terms.” As if every religion (with the exception of the positive one), was not necessarily supernatural! The harmony between reason and belief, even when sought for with perfect sincerity, is deadly for faith. For the strength of theological conceptions lies in their spontaneity. Logical proof, even admitting that it be really demonstrative, never fortifies and can only weaken them. The innumerable proofs of the existence of God which have appeared since the XII. century, not only state the bold doubts of which this existence has been the object: it can also be asserted that they have largely contributed to the propagation of those doubts, “either through the contempt which the weakness of many of these arguments was bound to reflect upon ancient beliefs, or even by consideration of the strongest of these arguments.”312 Popular instinct was not mistaken in calling the metaphysicians who were working at these proofs atheists. Their work was essentially anti-theological. Our century sees it in another light. As the decay of theology still continues, that which formerly was judged by public opinion as impious, may to-day appear to be a pious occupation.
The criticism of religious beliefs has been developed and spread without giving too much offence to temporal power, thanks to the care taken by philosophers in general to reassure it upon the immediate consequences of their labours. Hobbes in the XVII. century, Voltaire in the XVIII. are as conservative from the political point of view as they are revolutionary from the religious point of view. The precaution was a very wise one on their part. But it did not arrest the consequences which arose from their principles. Critical philosophy, urging the dogma of the freedom of examination to the assault of all the principles of the established rÉgime, shook and ruined them one after the other, until the “final explosion” of the French Revolution. This was the conclusion in fact of the long work of decomposition which had been going on during five centuries. The old rÉgime was rotten; the Revolution overturned it, meaning to clear the ground.
But did it lay down the basis of the rÉgime which was to succeed this one? It did not, replies Comte with Saint-Simon and de Maistre. He admires the energy of the political gifts of the Convention. Nevertheless it was wrong in believing that “critical” principles could take the place and carry out the functions of “organic” principles. So long as the struggle lasted, the critical principles had been all the more effective in that they were credited with an absolute value. Thus the dogma of boundless liberty of conscience had served to destroy the spiritual power of the catholic clergy, the dogma of the sovereignty of the people to upset the temporal government, finally the dogma of natural equality to decompose the system of social classes. But, once the old rÉgime was abolished the error of taking these dogmas as the basis of “reorganisation” was committed.
It was not seen that they were incompatible not only with the rÉgime which they had just destroyed, but with any social system whatever. In this way it is moral and political disorder which was upheld as the end of social perfection. For, each of the dogmas of the critical doctrine, when it is taken in an organic sense, “comes exactly to lay down as a principle that in this particular respect society must not be organised.”313
What becomes of government, for instance in this system? “By a direct and total supervision of the most fundamental political notions,” government is represented, the necessary enemy of society.314 The latter must always hold it in a state of suspicion and of supervision, it must more and more restrict its modes of activity, and finally only leave it functions of general police, without its contributing in any way to the direction of the collective life and social development. In a word, with no action upon ideas, upon beliefs or feelings, the government would only have charge of the protection of interests. But is not this formally denying the very idea of government, which by definition, should on the contrary represent “the spirit of the whole,” and the “directing function” of society? Is it not giving up at the same time the great progress realised by the Middle Ages, that is to say a spiritual power independent of the temporal power? Even considering interests alone, this system only maintains order with great difficulty. It is obliged to have recourse to corruption, and it leads to continual increase in public expenditure.
The principles of critical philosophy cannot then be used as a foundation for a new social organisation. The attempt has been made and has been condemned by history. This failure could have been foretold. For, being essentially metaphysical, this philosophy implies a contradiction which necessarily renders it powerless. It tends to preserve the general bases of the old political system, whose chief conditions of existence it has however destroyed.315 There is a very close relationship between the natural religion of philosophers and the political conceptions of the revolutionists. The latter are still connected by their deepest roots with the old order of beliefs which they have fought against with all their strength. Liberty, equality, the sovereignty of the people, the whole of the “absolute” rights which constitute the basis of the revolutionary doctrine is shielded, in the last place, by a kind of “religious although vague consecration.” The French Revolution was the work of the Deists. Comte has set apart the thinkers of the XVIII century whom he considers as his precursors, that is to say, as the anticipatory representatives of the positive spirit: Fontenelle, Hume, Montesquieu, Diderot, and d’Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet and a few others. He judges the rest of the philosophy of the century more severely. He does not spare the EncyclopÉdie, and in the majority of the philosophical writings of this period he finds little but “a frivolous and feeble sophistic argumentation.” Circumstances almost alone have made its success. This philosophy is incomparably inferior to that which the counter-revolution opposed to it. In the logical respect which finally predominates, says Comte, the revolutionary criticism cannot to-day resist the system of the “retrograde school.” In a regular discussion, the latter would soon have compelled it to admit that it allows the essential principles of the old rÉgime while refusing to accept their most indispensable consequences.316
The inmost contradiction from which the revolutionary philosophy suffers will become more and more apparent. A not far distant moment will arrive when the effort to restore the past will include a large number of those who have contributed to its destruction. The partisans of natural religion, and even those of the most advanced Deism will rally to Catholicism as to the real foundation of the social organisation which they defend. The alternative will then be set up between the only two solutions which are logical and organic: either the old rÉgime, with the Catholic organisation, or the new, with the positive organisation. Between these two there is no room for the critical, liberal, metaphysical, revolutionary system, which, by whatever name it may be called, signifies “no organisation at all.”
IV.
The old rÉgime was bound to perish because in it, the social organisation was connected with a system of beliefs and of dogmas which could not withstand the spirit of investigation. In order that the new rÉgime may escape this cause of death, must it be able without suffering to bear the indefinite exercise of an absolute freedom of examination?——No, replies Comte, there is no system capable of enduring under these conditions. But it suffices that in constituting itself, the new faith, which is the basis of social order, should have undergone the test of free examination as we see it practised in the positive sciences. It suffices that, instead of a revealed faith, we should have a demonstrated faith which will then be immovable, and which will no more have to be called in question.
Comte then admits the preliminary test, but he is opposed to free examination indefinitely renewed. This distinction allows us to reconcile some of his declarations which otherwise would appear contradictory. His language differs according as he speaks of the positive dogma in the process of formation, or of that dogma once it has been formed. When it is in process of formation the dogma is subject to criticism, and if it is not victorious in resisting it it does not become an object of belief. No matter how much we may deplore the ever-dissolving energy of the spirit of analysis and of examination, it remains beneficial none the less, by compelling, for the intellectual and moral reorganisation, the production of a philosophy capable of sustaining the decisive test of a deep discussion, “freely prolonged until the entire conviction of public reason” has taken place. This is a condition from which nothing henceforth can exempt us.317 The spiritual reorganisation, says Comte, will be the result of purely intellectual action. It supposes a voluntary and unanimous assent at the end of complete discussion without the intervention of the spiritual powers to hasten the conclusion.
But does it follow that freedom of examination should remain indefinitely without limits? Undoubtedly it has been a good thing that men should see in this liberty an indefeasible right which they were all to enjoy. The dissolution of old beliefs in this way was easier and more rapid. The better this “singular phase” in our social development is analysed, the more will the conviction gain ground that without the conquest and use of this unlimited freedom social reorganisation could not have been prepared. But this singular phase was a transitory one. When it has been gone through, when common principles have again become universally accepted, “after sufficient verification,” the right of examination will again return within its normal and permanent limits, which consist in discussing the connection of consequences with fundamental and uniformly respected rules, but without again questioning these rules themselves.318
The question then reduces itself to knowing when the test may be legitimately considered as at an end. Will the individual approbation of all the members of society be required, and a kind of consecration by universal suffrage? As a matter of fact, such unanimity will perhaps never be realised. In justice it is not necessary. When we demand it we forget that Politic science is a positive science, the highest and most complicated of all. No one possesses any authority in the sciences if he is not competent. The people has no thought of making its opinion prevail in them; and, in matters of science, all who are not in a condition to understand demonstrations are the people. The convergence of intellects presupposes the voluntary and intentional renunciation on the part of the greater number of their “sovereign right of examination.”319
In this way the right is taken from no one. The use of it is simply intrusted by those who are incompetent to the competent ones. This intrusting, freely accepted by all, lasts as long as the conditions which made it necessary. No moral order could be compatible with the “wandering liberty of minds at the present time,” if it were to persist indefinitely. It is not possible that any man, whether he be competent or not, should every day call into discussion the very bases of society. “Systematic tolerance cannot exist, and has never really existed, except on the subject of opinions which are regarded as indifferent or as doubtful.”320
Such is the meaning of the celebrated passages on liberty of conscience with which Comte has so often been reproached. He had written it in 1822, and quoted it himself in the fourth volume of the Cours de philosophie positive,321 never suspecting that anything could be said against it. “There is no liberty of conscience in astronomy, in physics, in chemistry, in physiology, in the sense that everyone would deem it absurd not to take on trust the principles established in these sciences by competent men. If it is otherwise in politics, it is because the old principles have fallen, and, as the new ones are not yet formed, there are, properly speaking, in this interval no established principles.” It is then in no way a question of imposing beliefs upon men of which they are not to judge, by a kind of spiritual despotism. Comte merely wishes to extend to politics, considered as a positive science, what is admitted in the other sciences by common consent.
V.
Without much trouble, it is easy to see whence originate the essential features of this philosophy of history. In so far as it represents the development of humanity as subject to a law of evolution, which causes it to go through a succession of phases whose order is rationally determined, in a word as progress, the leading-idea is due to Comte’s “spiritual father,” to Condorcet.
For the interpretation of more recent events, and for the judgment passed upon the Middle Ages, Comte draws his inspiration from Joseph de Maistre, from the traditionalist school, and from Saint-Simon. To the latter, among other ideas, Comte owes the distinction between the critical and the organic periods. But, on Comte’s own confession, Joseph de Maistre’s influence over his mind was especially decisive. Like de Maistre, he thinks that the entirely negative philosophy of the XVIII. century knew very well how to destroy, but showed itself powerless to construct. Like de Maistre again, he is persuaded of the fact that social order requires a spiritual power beside the temporal power, and that the rÉgime of the Middle Ages was a “masterpiece of political wisdom” precisely because at that period the Catholic Church had brought about the independence of the spiritual power. Finally, like de Maistre, he makes the salvation of humanity in the future depend upon their return to a unity of beliefs.
Comte then equally proceeds from the learned ideologist with whom the philosophical effort of the XVIII. century ends, and from the ardent traditionalist for whom this very century is the abhorred period of error and of moral perversion. He undertakes, not indeed to reconcile them (who can reconcile things which exclude each other?), but to found a more comprehensive doctrine in which he will combine what he has received from the one and the other. As such his own task appears to him, and he does not believe it to be above his power; he feels himself in a position to avoid the mistakes which his predecessors were bound to make. Condorcet had a clear idea of social science; but that did not prevent him from misunderstanding the real onward movement of the human mind, and only to estimate his own century justly at the expense of preceding periods. De Maistre in his turn, no less prejudiced, though in another way, does not understand history any better. To restore society, to re-establish it in the state in which it was in the XIII. century, he goes to absurd lengths. He claims to take no notice of the advance of civilisation, and of the development of the sciences. Condorcet, who brought to light the idea of progress, understood nothing in the Middle Ages. De Maistre, who so clearly saw the excellence of the Middle Ages, denies the glaring fact of progress.
Both are excusable, because they were still too close to the French Revolution to grasp its full meaning. In the heart of the fray they were still partially blinded. Comte, who sees things from a greater distance, also sees them from a higher standpoint. He especially has at his disposal an instrument which neither Condorcet nor de Maistre possessed: he has completed the positive method, and he applies it to the science of historical phenomena. In a word, he has founded Sociology.
If he did not push social science as far forward as he believed, at any rate he was right in thinking that his originality lay in this attempt. The problem was clearly set: to blend into a new and positive science the social ideas proceeding from the speculation of the XVIII. century with the historical truths brought to light by the adversaries of this philosophy. The solution given by Comte is the very soul of his system. By a twofold and vigorous effort, he created “social physics.” On the one hand, he carries to the past the idea of progress which Condorcet could only apply to the future, and this allowed him to institute a positive philosophy of history. At the same time, he projects into the future that spiritual order which de Maistre had only seen in the past, and this furnishes him with the frame for his “social reorganisation”.
This philosophy of history, which no longer contains anything metaphysical, is social dynamics; this “reorganisation” of society, by means of a spiritual power, will be the positive polity.
