  BY MR. FREDERIC HARRISON The publication in 1900 of Professor LÉvy-Bruhl’s volume The Philosophy of Auguste Comte was an event in the history of the Positive movement. The eminent position in the University of Paris and in recent philosophical history that is held by Prof. LÉvy-Bruhl gave great interest and importance to a systematic judgment from his pen such as the present work. The commemorative festival of Comte held this year, when the statue in the Place de la Sorbonne was unveiled by the Minister of War, in presence of an international gathering of delegates from the civilised world, has called fresh attention to the lifework of the philosopher who died 45 years ago. Accordingly, a translation of Professor LÉvy-Bruhl’s book was urgently demanded. When I was invited to add to this translation, which I can confidently recommend to students of philosophy, a slight introductory essay, I proposed to use a piece which I wrote on the publication of the French work. It appeared in “The Speaker,” (14 April, 1900;) and, as I see no reason to modify my opinion of this masterly book, I leave it Professor LÉvy-Bruhl followed up his History of Modern Philosophy in France by a substantial work on the philosophy of Auguste Comte. It forms a volume of the BibliothÈque de Philosophie Contemporaine, which has already devoted four other works to the Positive Philosophy. It is as well to premise that this treatise dealt solely with the philosophy, not with the polity, or any part of the religious scheme of Comte. Professor LÉvy-Bruhl writes as a student, but not as an adherent of Auguste Comte. His entire work is rather an exposition, not a refutation, or a criticism, or an advocacy of Comte’s philosophical system. But it may be said at once that no one abroad or at home, certainly neither Mill, nor Lewes, nor Spencer, nor Caird, has so truly grasped and assimilated Comte’s ideas as M. LÉvy-Bruhl has done. In his Introduction M. LÉvy-Bruhl very clearly states the scope of his work, and his own general attitude. He traces the origin of Comte’s philosophy in the mental effervescence of the first generation of the present century towards a reorganisation of society, M. LÉvy-Bruhl effectively disposes of the objection of LittrÉ, to which Mill gave countenance, that the Polity, with the whole of Comte’s second or social system, was in contradiction with his first and philosophic system as propounded in the Philosophy. As M. LÉvy-Bruhl proves, the six Opuscules dating from 1819 to 1826, some years before the Cours, which only began in 1830 and occupied twelve years, contain in germ the scheme ultimately elaborated in the Politique, from 1851 to 1854. Besides this, the
M. LÉvy-Bruhl then explains that, whilst recognising the entire coherence of Comte’s collective labours, he proposes to confine his present study to the earlier and principal work, the Philosophy, which in M. LÉvy-Bruhl’s opinion is the dominant and more fruitful composition. This he regards as the representative work of the nineteenth century, as shown by the intellectual history of the period. He points to its influence on thought in England, in Europe, and in America. It will surprise many persons to learn that in M. LÉvy-Bruhl’s opinion two eminent French writers, who assuredly neither were, nor were supposed to be, Positivists, “have done more for the diffusion of the ideas and method of Comte than LittrÉ and all the other Positivists together.” These two are Taine and Renan, much as they differed from Comte’s actual scheme and doctrines. Renan indeed spoke of Comte as destined
It is clear that, if M. LÉvy-Bruhl is in no sense an adherent of Comte, he is a most sympathetic and discerning master of the positive system. M. LÉvy-Bruhl opens his analysis of Comte’s philosophy by examining his main conceptions:—(1) The law of the three states, theological, metaphysical, and positive, through which all human ideas pass; (2) the Classification of the Sciences; (3) the scheme of each science in turn. And he closes with an explanation of the general doctrines of Humanity, as the centre of human thought, feeling, and activity. The law of the three states announced by Comte in 1822, is thoroughly explained and entirely assimilated by M. LÉvy-Bruhl. Its demonstration, he thinks, is complete when we recognise that, although many orders of ideas have not finally reached their positive state, all of them exhibit the tendency to the same Our professor is equally conclusive in his estimate of Comte’s classification of the sciences. He quite demolishes the objections made to it by Mr. Herbert Spencer in his essay with that title. M. LÉvy-Bruhl repeats the criticisms to which Spencer has been exposed in this country and abroad by LittrÉ, Lewes, Mill, and others. And he has no difficulty in showing that Mr. Spencer’s objections are due to his very slight acquaintance with Comte’s text, and his own superficial study of the English abridgments. In proposing a classification of the concrete sciences, Mr. Spencer enters on a task which Comte distinctly repudiates, and which on good grounds he treats as philosophically impracticable for purposes of evolutionary sequence. Comte’s strictly relative theory excludes such a scale of concrete science; whilst Spencer’s absolute theory of the universe forces him to attempt it in vain. If it be objected that Comte’s ascending scale of the sciences is “anthropocentric,” the answer is that, when reason It would need a long essay even to sketch M. LÉvy-Bruhl’s analysis of Comte’s conception of science, of law, and of the six dominant sciences. He has thoroughly assimilated the positive spirit, that science implies a co-ordination of laws, not an encyclopÆdia of facts, that it is relative to our powers of observation and reasoning and not an absolute explanation of the universe in itself. He goes through the sciences, physical, social, and moral, in turn, as treated by Comte, and justly explains that Comte never attempted or conceived a vade-mecum or handbook of contemporary scientific knowledge, but a scheme for the co-ordination of general ideas of science. A real “philosophy of the sciences” is something wholly distinct from a compendium of all the sciences—a thing which in 1840 was far less possible than it might be now. Controversialists have reproached Comte with the obvious fact that his concrete science is now sixty years old. In dealing with these shallow criticisms, M. LÉvy-Bruhl has shown how little able is any narrow specialist to understand the abstract conceptions of a real philosopher. One of the most common of these misconceptions is the ignorant charge that Comte repudiated “psycho M. LÉvy-Bruhl concludes his study with a co-ordinate table of twelve contrasted propositions of the metaphysical and of the positive systems respectively. These show how simple and rational a transition is that between Positivism and the older theological and metaphysical hypotheses of the universe and of Man. We welcome a book which all positivists will regard as fair, learned, and instructive, and which all students of philosophy must regard as a masterly study of a comprehensive subject. 45th Anniversary of the death of Comte, |
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