this way. This "theory;" these principles anterior to external
observation, and which the mind absolutely requires in order to
be able to observe, are, according to him, pure inventions of the
human mind itself, temporary instruments which the mind creates
and employs in its labors until it can obtain better. "Between,"
says he, "two difficulties, pressed on the one hand by the
necessity of observing in order to form 'theories,' and on the
other by the no less imperious necessity of creating 'theories'
in order to be able to deliver itself up to a series of coherent
observations, the human mind at its birth would find itself shut
in by a vicious circle from which it would never have had any
means of escaping, had it not succeeded in opening a natural
issue by the spontaneous development of theological conceptions,
which presented a point to which his efforts might be
concentrated, and which might furnish aliment for his activity.
{290}
It is, in effect, very remarkable, that questions the most
radically inaccessible to our capacities, the intimate nature of
being, the origin and the end of all phenomena, should be
precisely those which the intelligence propounds to itself, as of
paramount importance in that primitive condition, all the other
problems really admitting of solution being almost regarded as
unworthy of serious meditation. The reason of this it is not
difficult to discover, for experience alone could have given us
the measure of our strength; and if man had not begun by
entertaining an exaggerated opinion of that strength, it would
never have been capable of acquiring all the development of which
it is susceptible. So much does our organization exact."
[Footnote 59]
[Footnote 59: Cours de philosophie positive, par M. Auguste
Comte, vol. i, pp. 9, 10.]
{291}
Strange error of a man, whose supreme pretension it is to found
all human knowledge upon the observation of facts! At his very
first step, at the first difficulty which he encounters, M. Comte
observes inexactly and incompletely, does not see in the facts
all that the facts contain, and only explains them by assigning
to the human mind, in its primitive and spontaneous operations, a
hypothesis, the hypothesis of "theological conceptions." God, and
man's relations with God, is a human invention, destined to
support man at the commencement of his career as an intelligent
being, and to occupy provisionally the place of science!
The source of this misapprehension, the capital error of
Positivism in its metaphysical argument, is, that it ignores the
nature and the limits of science.
The famous "enthymême" of Descartes, "I think, therefore I am,"
is a pleonasm. As soon as the human being says to itself "I," the
human being affirms its own existence, and distinguishes itself
from that external world whence it derives impressions of which
it is not the author.
{292}
In this primary fact are revealed the two primary objects of
human knowledge: on the one side the human being himself, the
individual person that feels and perceives, that feels himself
and perceives himself; on the other side, the external world that
is felt and perceived: the subject and the object, (the
_moi_ and the _non-moi_.) Such is the twofold field, at
the beginning of his intellectual existence, opened to the
knowing faculty of man.
In each of these fields, whether the human being makes himself or
whether he makes the external world the object of his
contemplation, he proceeds by the same method; he considers
particular facts, classes these under more general facts which
serve as their summary, and recognizes laws that govern them,
these laws being themselves facts. When this method of
observation and of generalization is applied to the outer world,
understanding by that world the human body also, it gives birth
to the sciences of physics and of physiology.
{293}
When such method is applied to the human being, regarded as
distinct from the body in which he lives and by which he acts, it
gives birth to the science of psychology, logic, and morals. It
is not here my intention to propose a classification of the
sciences, but only to determine the domain of science properly so
called--that is to say, the field in which the human mind by
observation gets directly at facts and at the laws of facts.
Philosophers, in their study of man and of the world, do not
sufficiently consult language, the general language, the common
language, that instinctive expression of the activity of the
human mind. I interrogate our native language upon the question
which now occupies me, and I find it reflecting the greatest
light. It has, to express the results of the intellectual process
which takes place in man, when regarded as the spectator of the
universe and of himself, many different words: "connaître,"
"savoir," "croire," "connaissance," "science," "croyance," "foi."
{294}
These are not mere different names to express the same idea and
the same fact, they are signs of different facts and of diverse
states of the human soul. If we interrogate the languages of
civilized nations, ancient or modern, we find in all of them,
with more or less abundance, precision or subtlety, a similar
variety of terms corresponding to a similar diversity of facts.
Talleyrand said once in the chamber of Peers, "There is somebody
who has more intellect than Napoleon, more intellect than
Voltaire; that somebody is the Public." I also say, there is a
more profound observer than Bacon, a greater philosopher than
Kant; it is mankind. Mankind is right when it distinguishes in
its languages knowledge from science and from belief, science
from belief and from faith. Bossuet wrote a book entitled "De la
Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même;" the idea would never have
occurred to him of entitling it "De la science de Dieu et de
soi-même;" it would have shocked his good sense as much as his
piety.
{295}
The child believes the smile and the speech of its mother; in its
belief there is certainly no scientific appreciation (no science)
of the relations which unite it to its mother, and of the reasons
which make it believe in her. Knowledge, science, belief, and
faith, are facts essentially distinct, although all equally
natural to the human soul; and it is impossible to confound them,
to take one for the other, to annul one in favor of the other, or
to attempt to reduce them to one term, without ignoring
realities, and falling into enormous errors.
Such has been the constant error of M. Auguste Comte, and such is
the radical vice of Positivism. M. Comte ignores the natural and
permanent diversity in the intellectual states through which a
man may pass in his ardent pursuit of truth. He refuses here to
recognize any state as legitimate and definitive except the
scientific state. He regards intuitive knowledge and instinctive
belief as preparatory and transitory states, states without any
rational authority; as, in short, simple steps on the way to that
scientific state which alone sets man in possession of the truth.
{296}
Positivism is thus led to extend the pretensions of science
beyond its proper domain, that is, beyond the finite world, its
facts and its laws; and as science finds itself incapable of
observing and of defining infinity, Positivism is, perforce,
reduced either to deny infinity, or to declare infinity
absolutely inaccessible to the human mind, and so to pass it over
in silence.
This negation discovers another immense error of the school and
of its chief. Convinced, and with reason, that the observation of
facts is the natural and constant process of the human
understanding in its labor after knowledge, M. Auguste Comte has
ill understood, and incompletely understood, the results of this
labor. He failed to perceive that it was observation itself,
carried on and accomplished by the process, no less natural and
no less legitimate, of induction, which was revealing to the mind
its peculiar facts and its peculiar laws, as well as the facts
and the laws of the external world, within which that mind is
placed.
{297}
M. Comte ended by ignoring or denying the elements _à
priori_ of human knowledge; that is to say, the universal and
necessary principles by which man raises himself to God, and has
relations with God. Thus M. Comte mutilates the human mind,
because he fails to observe it and to recognize it in its
entirety.
He is impelled by his system to another and still more serious
mutilation of human nature. After having declared matter, its
forces and its laws, to be the single object of human knowledge,
and these laws to be inherent in matter, eternal and invariable,
what is to be said of human liberty? What place is to be assigned
to human liberty in this world, in which it is powerless to
create anything or to change anything, and in which there exists
no power from which it can demand anything or obtain anything?
{298}
Evidently, in such a system human liberty is a chimera, an idle
luxury of human nature; man, with all his faculties, has nothing
to do but to study matter carefully, its forces and its laws, to
adapt himself to them, and to make the best use he can of them,
with a view to his welfare and to the satisfaction of his
desires. Fatalism is the law of man as of the world within which
he lives!
The moral instincts, and the naturally lofty mind of M. Comte
revolted at this consequence, although it flowed imperiously from
his system. The respect which he felt for the method of
observation, and for the facts which it attains to, did not
permit him absolutely to ignore or expressly to deny the
psychological fact of man's liberty. Sometimes he attempts to
find it a place in that sum of external facts and fixed laws
which is, in his opinion, the sole field for man's activity and
for man's science.
{299}
But such is the want of coherence of idea, that M. Comte is
visibly embarrassed; consequently, in his works--more especially
in his "Cours de philosophie positive,"--the most solid and
consistent of all his writings in its fundamental principles--he
sets almost completely aside the essential fact of human liberty,
and of free will in the individual man; and in those books in
which he treats of social organization, when he finds himself
face to face with the wants and the rights of political liberty,
that natural consequence of individual free will and of the
responsibility attaching to it, he struggles to elude questions
of this kind, feeling the impossibility of reconciling the
principle of moral order with the despotism and the fatalism of
the material world; and when he explains his views as to the
government of human societies, it is easy to see that, although
writing "I am, head and heart Republican," [Footnote 60] he is,
in his dreams, rather substituting a scientific domination for a
theocratic domination than instituting any liberal _régime_.
[Footnote 60: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré,
p. 251.]
{300}
After metaphysics comes history. M. Comte appeals to the annals
of all nations and all ages in confirmation of his system of the
world and of humanity. This history is to be divided, according
to him, into three successive states, the theological state, the
metaphysical state, and the scientific state. In the theological
state and epoch, the human mind and social institutions are under
the empire of pretended supernatural powers, of several such or
of only one such, invented by man for the solution of the natural
problems which lay siege to man, and for the determination of the
laws, with which the social order cannot dispense. In the
metaphysical epoch and state, vain abstractions essay to replace
the supernatural powers of the theological state, and only end in
an anarchy, both of opinions and society. The third epoch is
destined to be the reign of positive science, founded solely upon
observation and respect for the facts, the forces, and the laws
of that external world which is the theater of man's existence.
The first two states are, according to him, essentially
irrational and transitory. They are the first steps of that which
M. Comte styles the grand evolution of humanity, of which the
_régime_ of science is the end and the summit.
{301}
It would be difficult more entirely to deform, difficult to show
greater ignorance of man's general history. That which M. Comte
regards as three successive states in the history of the human
race is only the complex and permanent condition of humanity,
agitated by movements swaying in different directions, according
as it meets with the successes or encounters the reverses, the
hopes, or the fears to which different nations and generations
are subject. That theological conceptions and metaphysical
meditations are only transitory facts, "which," according to the
expression of M. Comte, "will have henceforth only an historical
existence," is an assertion no more true of such facts than of
those that the study of physics supplies. These different
yearnings of the mind, and their different labors, are the very
essence--the indestructible and indivisible essence--of human
nature.
{302}
At no time and in no country have men more ceased, or will they
more cease, to pray to God, and to strive to comprehend him, than
they will cease to study the physical world, and to make it
subserve their interests. Nations and generations of individuals,
in different ages, have advanced more or less in one or other of
these careers of intellectual activity; and so they will continue
to advance. Religious faith, metaphysical meditation, and
scientific inquiry have their alternations of enthusiasm and of
languor, of glory and of sterility; they appear and they prosper,
sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously. If India plunged
herself deep among the symbols of mythology and amid the void of
Pantheism, Greece cultivated with like success the metaphysical
and the natural sciences--Aristotle was the contemporary of
Plato. Where other nations fluctuated variously between
theological conceptions, metaphysical abstractions, and
scientific studies, the Hebrew people continued, in the
theological state, Monotheists.
{303}
In the sixteenth century, when the spirit of free inquiry and of
independence was awakened, and made its influence felt far and
wide, Christian faith, at the same time, was resuscitated and
confirmed; and the eighteenth century founded at once the
political liberty of Protestant England and the philosophical and
literary glory of Catholic France. The human mind has, according
to time and place, its favorite labors and its favorite impulses;
but it subsists always one and entire; it never renounces any one
of its grand hopes or of its grand operations; and those men
strangely mutilate and debase it who represent the mind as
having, during ages, lost itself in the vain effort to attain a
knowledge of God and of its own nature, and who condemn it
henceforth to take up its quarters in the science of matter--of
its forces--of its laws.
{304}
Why need I appeal to history for a proof of the simultaneous and
indestructible co-existence of these different conditions of
humanity, among which M. Auguste Comte refuses to admit more than
one as rational and definitive? M. Comte has himself
undertaken--he alone--to furnish me with this proof. This
intractable adversary of all religious belief and tendency could
not, even for the short space of this life, himself remain
indifferent to such belief and tendency; during this brief period
he traversed, and in the inverse order of his own theories, each
of the different intellectual states which he had assigned as the
successive stages of the human race. He had placed the
theological state at the beginning and the scientific state at
the close of the career of humanity; after having made his own
_début_ by the scientific state, it was as impossible for
him, as it is for the human race, to content himself with that,
and he himself ended there, where, according to him, mankind had
commenced, namely, with the theological state. He had declared
his positive philosophy to be "in radical and absolute
contradiction to every kind of religious or metaphysical
tendency."
{305}
He had separated with _éclat_ from the Saint-Simonians, "for
they will soon," he said, "sink themselves in ridicule and
contempt. Only imagine, their heads are turned to such a degree,
that they propose nothing less than the establishment of a real,
new religion, a sort of incarnation of the divinity in the person
of Saint-Simon." [Footnote 61]
[Footnote 61: Letter of the 9th December, 1828, to M. Gustave
d'Eichthal. Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, by M.
Littré, p. 173.]
And some years after holding this language, and while still in
the plenitude of bodily vigor and thought, M. Comte in his turn
launched into a theological career; he took it upon him to
transform Positivism into a religion. By the most violent of all
personified abstractions, he made out of humanity the great
being, the real being, sovereign and adorable, and he placed that
being in the place of God, declaring himself at the same time to
be his chief priest.
{306}
He had more than once proclaimed that all religion was
essentially founded upon the supernatural; and yet a religion all
natural--the religion of humanity, the worship of humanity, the
church of humanity, were summoned by him to succeed to the
Christian religion and to the Church of Christ. On the 19th of
October, 1851, when terminating his third philosophical course on
the general histories of humanity, M. Comte summed it up in these
words: "In the name of the past and of the future, the
theoretical servitors and the practical servitors of humanity are
about to assume worthily the direction of the general affairs of
this world, in order to construct, at last, the true providence,
moral, intellectual, and material, at the same time excluding
irrevocably from political supremacy all the different slaves of
God--Catholics, Protestants, or Deists--as being at once in
arrear of the age and its perturbators." The positivist religion
thus proclaimed, a positivist catechism and a positivist
calendar--these last both composed by M. Comte--reduced his
principles to practice.
{307}
In a series of conversations between "The Priest and the Woman,"
the catechism first establishes and explains the dogma, then the
worship, of the new religion, its internal order and its external
order, its private worship and its public worship. And the
calendar, by a retrospective chronology, determines for any given
year of thirteen months, and for the seven days of the week, the
names of the grand servitors in every department of humanity, who
are to replace the Christian saints: three hundred and sixty-four
names, men and women, with one hundred and sixty-five additional
names, are inscribed upon this list, which begins with Moses and
ends with Bichat, passing through Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes,
Cæsar, Saint Paul, Charlemagne, Dante, Gutenburg, Shakspeare,
Descartes, and Frederic the Second!
A chaos is a sorry sight; a chaos of the soul a still sorrier
spectacle than a chaos of worlds! Epochs of moral and social
crises, even while they bring on and prepare for mankind eras of
mighty progress, throw also great and potent intellects into
chaos.
{308}
Under the seduction of a noble ambition, and the delusion of a
partial success, they enthusiastically attach themselves to some
special subject, some incomplete idea; vain of their shallow and
confused systems, or rather of the brilliant coloring in which
they invest them, they pretend to explain and regulate man and
the world, and yet are nothing more than their superficial and
presumptuous observers. Among these "great lost ones of
humanity," (I borrow a phrase of their own,) M. Comte was one of
the most disinterested and the most sincere. The sincerity and
the courage evinced by him in expressing his convictions led him
on from inconsequence to inconsequence; in his benighted course
he caught glimpses occasionally of grand ideas, and of these he
apprehended neither the scope nor the connection: first it was an
idea of a science excluding all idea of religion; and then a
certain idea of a religion reconciled with and intimately united
with the idea of science; turn by turn he gave himself up to the
one and to the other with a blind and a daring devotedness.
{309}
Had he appeared in Greece at the great era of philosophy, or in
France in the seventeenth century, in the midst of the great
Christian controversy, he would have been taxed with insanity--at
the one epoch, not only by Plato but by Aristotle; at the other,
not only by Bossuet but by Spinoza. In our days he has been more
fortunate: he attached himself passionately to the method of
observation of facts, which is the very character of science, and
although his observations were superficial, inexact, and
incomplete--although he fell into the strangest
inconsistencies--the fundamental principle of his system, and the
coincidence of his primary ideas with the method and the tendency
of the physical sciences, the darling study of our age, have
given him more importance and more influence than were really his
due.
-------------------------------
{310}
Fifth Meditation.
Pantheism.
No two essays at philosophy are more dissimilar--I should indeed
say more contradictory--than Pantheism and Positivism. What
Positivism declares to be impossible, Pantheism seeks to
accomplish; what Positivism forbids man to seek, Pantheism
promises to give him. It is the fundamental principle of
Positivism to confine the human mind to the finite world, its
facts and its laws; Pantheism aspires at a knowledge and a
comprehension of Infinity, and of the relations of the finite
with Infinity. "I have explained God, God's nature and his
attributes," says Spinoza. [Footnote 62]
[Footnote 62: Ethics, 1st part; of God: Appendix, vol. i, p.
39. French translation by M. Saisset.]
{311}
I hasten to explain, in order to prevent misconstruction; it is
to Pantheism, properly so called--to the sole system that merits
the name--that my remarks are here applicable. "We must," says
M. Cousin, "it seems, distinguish two kinds of Pantheism. The
assertion that this visible universe, indefinite or infinite,
suffices to itself, and that there is nothing to be sought for
beyond, is the Pantheism of Diderot, Helvetius, de la Mettrie,
d'Holbach. This Pantheism is clearly Atheism, and it would not be
very easy to comprehend the complacent indulgence that should
spare it that name of Atheism--a name, unfortunately, of ancient
date, which would then have no longer any object to fit it, and
would need to be erased from our dictionary. But is it possible
for a similar Pantheism to be imputed to Spinoza? With the French
Encyclopedists, things exist in particularity and individuals
singly: the universe is an assemblage of individuals--an
assemblage without unity, or of which the sole unity is a
presumed primary matter, which the philosopher admits or which he
does not admit, but with which his thought has no business, to
occupy itself.
{312}
With Spinoza, on the contrary, the single substance is all, and
the individuals are nothing. This substance is not the nominal
unity of the assemblage of individuals, each of which exists
singly, but is the single really existing substance, and in the
presence of that substance the world and man are but shadows; so
that from the 'Ethics' may be gathered an exaggerated Theism
which leaves no individual existing as such. Rigorously, and at
bottom, there is here perhaps only one and the same system, but a
system, nevertheless, with two very different forms--the one,
where God is nothing but the Universe; the other, where the
Universe exists only in God." [Footnote 63]
[Footnote 63: Histoire générale de la philosophie, p. 433,
ed. 1863.]
{313}
I think, with M. Cousin, that, rigorously and at bottom, there is
here but one and the same system, but in appearance, and I say
besides, in the opinion of its authors, the difference is great,
and requires to be noticed. I postpone for the subject
"Materialism," all that I have to say upon the subject of the
so-called Pantheism, which admits no other existence than either
that of the individualities that people the visible universe, or
that of the primary matter whence they have issued. I occupy
myself, at this moment, solely with the idealistic Pantheism.