is encyclopaedic--not one whit less so than Spencer's--but the aim he
persistently kept in view was the service of man by the reconstruction,
through philosophy and religion, of the foundations on which
civilisation rests. It is impossible not to be impressed by the
grandeur of his conception, and the consuming energy with which he
addressed himself to its realisation. He seems to recall to us
Browning's Paracelsus, whose "vast longings" urged him forward to some
surpassing achievement, to some heroic attempt
To save mankind,
To make some unexampled sacrifice
In their behalf, to wring some wonderous good
From heaven or earth for them.
When a young man of only twenty-four years, he had already published
his first work, entitled _A Plan of Scientific Works necessary to
reorganise Society_, thus striking the keynote of his career. We can
feel nothing but the strongest admiration for the man who from the
first determines to subordinate knowledge, life and love, to the
service of the human race. It was Comte's incessant teaching that the
sciences were to be cultivated, not as ends in themselves, but as means
whereby to further human welfare. He would have the astronomer and
physiologist pursue their tasks, not merely for the sake of acquiring
knowledge, for the gratification of the curiosity to know, but for the
betterment of man's lot. And for the same reason he insisted on the
pre-eminence of the sympathetic affections over the intellect. The
reason, he declared, must ever be the servant, _though not the slave_,
of the emotions. Altruism, or the service of others (a word of his own
coining), must be made to prevail over egoism or selfishness. There
could not be a nobler conception of human duty.
What was the source of the miseries which had driven the people of
France to rebellion but the selfishness of absolute monarchs, of
dissolute nobles who ground their dependants to the dust of
destitution, and of a corrupt hierarchy of clergymen contemptuous of
the people, hypocritical in their conduct, and slaves of the crown? An
astounding revelation that elementary religion should be preached again
in France by a layman who had turned his back in disappointment on all
that priests and the past represented!
And what is the source of the degradation of our own cities but this
same curse of selfishness which is ready to march to opulence and
luxury over the bodies of the starved and poisoned toilers of our towns
and factories, and thinks it can justify its barbarity by an off-hand
reference to Political Economy and its irrefragable laws? "Supply and
demand"--sacrosanct enactments of man's brains--how shall they prevail
over the clear dictates of the conscience that thunder in our ears that
it is murderous to grind the life out of the poor in the name of an
economical fetish? Is not the man more than the meat, and the body
more than the raiment? How shall not man, then, be better than many
economical laws? If the laws outrage our sense of justice, then are
they false laws, because false to reason, and they must be abolished.
The unrestricted domination of the competition theory which urges men
to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, and pay the very
lowest wages that poor outcasts are forced in their destitution to
accept--is that to be the permanent condition of large masses of
toilers in the towns of the richest country in the world? Is the
matchbox-maker to go on for ever turning out a gross for 2 1/4d.,
providing her own paste and string? Are wretched women to toil from
morning till night folding sheets--sheets of cheap bibles at 10s. a
week and pay lodging and keep a family out of it? Are men and women to
be decimated by consumption in the poisoned atmosphere of some of our
factories? No commonwealth can exist on such a basis, and if
economical laws are invoked in its support, those laws are an infamy.
No wonder Carlyle fiercely denounced it all as "a wretched,
unsympathetic, scraggy atheism and egoism".
Well, Auguste Comte had witnessed all this and possibly worse than this
in Prance. He knew the institutions of his country and of his age, and
he came to the deliberate conclusion that if any progress was to be
made, if this degrading egoism was to be put down, this callous
insensibility on the part of employers towards the labourers, whose
slow martyrdom produces the wealth they enjoy, the whole scheme of
social philosophy would have to be reconsidered and a new foundation
provided whereon to build the commonwealth. "You want altruism in
place of egoism; sympathy instead of selfishness," he preached. "How
are you going to obtain it? For eighteen centuries now you have been
walking in one beaten path, following one and the same light, listening
to the same spiritual guides. What have they taught you? Whither have
they led you? To the impasse which you have now reached. Has not the
time come to begin anew; to reconstruct, to reorganise society? And
this time it must be _sans dieu, sans roi, par le culte systématique de
l'Humanité_."
Such is the remedy proposed by Auguste Comte for the malady of the
modern world; this is his revolutionary scheme for the establishment of
society on such a basis as would conduce to progress. It involves, as
may be seen, the disavowal of the belief in God and king; the
substitution of a republic for a monarchy, and of humanity for God.
Comte conceived religion as the concentration of the three great
altruistic affections, namely, of _reverence_ towards that which is
above us; of _love_ towards that which helps and sustains us, and
_benevolence_ towards that which needs our co-operation. Religion
being in his judgment a supreme concern of life, though always
subordinated to the larger interest of social welfare, he was anxious
to provide the new commonwealth with an idealism which should set
before man a Being able to evoke these three great emotions. Formerly
man had bestowed them on God; Comte thought he had found a more
excellent way in suggesting that they might far more appropriately and
profitably be exercised on mankind. The service of God, therefore,
being changed into the service of man, he contended that the course of
things would set steadily in a higher direction, because all the
immense energy and enthusiasm which the worship of God had been able to
provoke in the past would be available in the cause of suffering,
down-trodden and persecuted humanity. He wished to dam the stream of
devotion flowing towards the churches and God, and divert it into
channels that had far greater need of it--the unsatisfied and
unprovided needs of all mankind.
Is it urged that religion apart from a belief in God is an
impossibility? Doubtless such is the conviction of great numbers of
people, and, it must be confessed, such usage of the word is not
consonant with prevalent custom. Still the emotion which Comte
experienced for Humanity was such as no other word would adequately
express. As Mr. Mill remarks in his chapters on the Positivist System
(p. 133)--
It has been said that whoever believes in the infinite nature of duty,
even if he believe in nothing else, is religious. Comte believes in
what is meant by the infinite nature of duty, but he refers the
obligations of duty, as well as all sentiments of devotion, to a
concrete object, at once ideal and real; the human race, conceived as a
continuous whole, including the past, the present and the future. . . .
Candid persons of all creeds may be willing to admit that if a person
has an ideal object, his attachment and sense of duty towards which are
able to control and discipline all his other sentiments and
propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life, that person has a
religion. . . . The power which may be acquired over the mind by the
idea of the general interest of the human race, both as a source of
emotion and as a motive to conduct, many have perceived; but we know
not if any one before Comte realised so fully as he has done all the
majesty of which that idea is susceptible. It ascends into the unknown
recesses of the past, embraces the manifold present, and descends into
the indefinite and unforeseeable future. Forming a collective
existence without assignable beginning or end, it appeals to that
feeling of the infinite which is deeply rooted in human nature, and
which seems necessary to the imposingness of all our highest
conceptions.
However, we must now endeavour to briefly trace the steps whereby Comte
arrived at what certainly must be acknowledged a most startling
conclusion.
A study of universal history, of which he must be acknowledged an
absolute master, had convinced him that all human institutions, be they
beliefs, forms of society or government, scientific conceptions, or
modes of thought in general, have passed through three distinct stages.
These three stages he called the theological, metaphysical and
positive. In the first stage history shows that man explained the
origin of everything by explicit reference to wills like his own,
though, of course, invisible; and ultimately, by an appeal to one
supreme Will. Thus, a thunderstorm, the rise and setting of the sun,
the ebb and flow of tides, the succession of seasons and crops are all
explained by the agency of unseen wills, powers, or divinities. As
time advances, progress is so far made that all minor deities are
merged in the belief in one supreme Being who created the universe and
is ever responsible for its continuance in existence.
But man at length awakens to the need of a more proximate explanation
of phenomena, and, by such experiment as he is capable of, endeavours
to ascertain, through their intrinsic properties or their outward
manifestations, the cause or causes of their being. He leaves the
skies and comes to earth, and seeks to read the secret of things by
examining the things in themselves. This, Comte denominates the
"metaphysical" stage, mainly, because the solutions given were bound up
with abstractions of physical realities. Thus, if you asked Aristotle
why a vegetable grew, he would reply that it had a "nutritive soul," or
principle, which enabled it to assimilate food. If one asked why heavy
bodies fall, or why flame and smoke ascend, the answer would be because
everything tends to go to its _natural_ place, implying, thereby, that
there was some occult power or tendency in bodies to behave in certain
definite ways. Those were the days of the time-honoured legends about
Nature "abhorring a vacuum," tolerating no "breaks," and the wonders of
her "curative force". These phrases about abstractions were held to be
adequate explanations of any of the facts about nature or man.
At length, there came the period when men demanded a straightforward
answer to plain questions, and refused to acquiesce in the reply that
opium puts us to sleep because there is a _dormitive virtue_ resident
in it. The powers of observation and experiment having increased, it
became possible by scientific test and analysis to satisfy the desire
for a more immediate knowledge, and thus to discover, for example, that
water is water, not because it possesses the form of _aquosity_, as the
Scholastics would have said, but because it is chemically composed of
oxygen and hydrogen. This last stage Comte called the "positive," and
hence we perceive what he means when he calls his entire system by that
name. It marks his conviction that those methods which are so
successful in the discovery of truth in scientific matters should be
applied to the solution of the problems of sociology and religion. In
other words, "positive" and scientific are practically synonymous
terms, the system pledging its followers to hold nothing which is not
its own evidence, to abandon all attempts to know anything which is not
phenomenal, that is, an object of sense-experience, and consequently to
disavow metaphysics as practically equivalent to the unreal. Thus, for
Comte, sociology, of which he may truthfully be described as the
founder, is as much a science as chemistry or astronomy. It deals with
its subject-matter, man, in precisely the same way as the astronomer
with the stars. And the same is also true of religion.
Such is the famous _Law of the three States_, which has always been
treated by friend and foe as the key to the Comtean philosophy. It
only concerns us now to describe the use he made of it in abolishing
the belief in God, and thus attempting to revolutionise the conception
of religion.
Closely associated with his Law of the three States is another which he
calls the _Law of the Wills and Causes_. In fact, there is practically
no difference between that law and the first or theological stage
through which human knowledge goes. It may be enunciated thus:
Whenever the human mind is in ignorance of the proximate causes of a
given phenomenon, it tends to ascribe it to the agency of superior and
invisible powers. Hence, ignorance of nature, which modern science has
largely remedied, led men to ascribe to "the act of God" innumerable
events, even the appearance of Halley's comet, which we now
unhesitatingly refer to subordinate agencies. Why, then, urged Comte,
should we continue to believe in even one supreme Cause, when we may
hope, with the advance of science, to give an explanation of every
natural occurrence or fact? Convinced on social grounds that belief in
the Deity had been of no service to mankind, he sought for
philosophical reasons to justify his surrendering the tenet, and thus
formulated the famous law which has just been enunciated. If that law
is valid and universal in its application, we should have to surrender
all hope of Comte's co-operation with what we hold to be rational
religion. But it is because I am so convinced that it is that very
law, so finely framed and stated by Comte, which makes it impossible to
dispense with belief in a supra-mundane Power, that I adhere to the
ideal which I sketched in the beginning, that Kant and Comte will be
found to be, after Christ, the master builders of the second temple
which is to be the religious home of the ages to come.
For what does his famous law amount to? To nothing beyond this, that
we are warranted in believing that no single fact, no individual
phenomenon, of nature exists, but will be one day explained by the
all-conquering advance of physical science. But surely his most
enthusiastic adherent will admit that when every phenomenon has been
singly explained, only half the work, and that by far the less
significant part, has been done. If the human mind is eager, and
legitimately eager, to explore the scene of nature's manifestations,
much more will it be necessary to attempt some solution of the vaster
fact of their concatenation, of their miraculous combination into that
whole which we call the universe. It is not so much the isolated
phenomena which strike the mind with such overpowering bewilderment, as
the manifest fact that in their infinite diversity and innumerable
varieties, they are all subordinated to one vast end--the constitution
and the good of the whole. Explain every sun that lines the eternal
path into the Infinities, where no telescope can penetrate--what is
that to the mind that knows that the numberless series is bound
together by laws which they as unhesitatingly obey as an animal when it
walks? Hence, by the very terms of his own law, Comte is compelled to
restore to the human mind its belief in a Power other than the world,
for if our only justification for discarding that belief is that
science will explain one day the _individual_ phenomena of the
universe, it is plain that man's science can never hope to explain the
origin of the worlds themselves and the infinite complexities of their
mutual relations. And if science cannot hope to do that, the mind of
man must, under penalty of going to disruption, assent to the belief
that there is a World-Power who is responsible for the conscious
production of the universe, and therefore of ourselves.
And I am glad to be able to say that Comte never expressly excluded
this belief. On the contrary, he asserts that if a cosmic hypothesis
is to be held at all, that of an intelligent Mind is far more probable
than atheism. Indeed of atheism he has written as caustically as the
most orthodox could wish. He expressly contends that the theory of
design is far more probable than blind mechanism, and if he excludes
theism, it is not so much for philosophical as for social reasons.
Consumed with a passion for human betterment, seeing that the "love of
God" had deplorably failed as an incentive to morality, he made the
tremendous effort of endeavouring to substitute the love of man as a
stimulus towards the accomplishment of duty. If Comte denied God, let
the Churches and ecclesiastics of France and of Europe bear the
responsibility. It was the disastrous condition into which Europe had
fallen under their guidance which led him to despair of "God" as a
rallying point for humanity.
But there is, I submit, no inherent necessity in the Positivist system
to insist on the dogmatic exclusion of such theism as we profess under
the guidance of Emerson and Kant, and it is gratifying to be able to
quote so sympathetic a supporter as J. S. Mill in favour of this
interpretation. "Whoever regards all events as parts of a constant
order, each one being the invariable consequent of some antecedent
condition, or combination of conditions, accepts fully the positivist
mode of thought: whether he acknowledges or not an universal antecedent
on which the whole system of nature was originally consequent, and
whether that universal antecedent is conceived as an intelligence or
not." [1]
I need not say that to us who believe in Mind as the necessary
antecedent to all things, the positivist spirit, so defined, is
essential truth. We believe in the Great Being revealed in the eternal
order of the physical worlds and in the eternal order of the moral law.
Our worship of God is therefore a worship of goodness or morality, an
ideal of justice, as seen in the lives of only the elect spirits of the
race, and thus "the worship of Humanity" is also the worship of God.
For where is God revealed as _worshipful_ except in the lives of the
great and good? And if religion be defined to be morality as taught in
the lives of the holiest servants of mankind, in what do we differ
essentially from the ennobling conceptions of Auguste Comte? The
service of man is seen to be the service of God, for we know nothing of
God until we have learnt to serve goodness and minister to our brother
man. The day will come when Comte will be honoured in the universal
Church as an apostle of true religion, because, like Kant, he showed
men that there is nothing holier or diviner on this earth than a life
consciously conformed to the obedience of august laws. Comte, no less
than his brother philosopher, is a servant of humanity, and therefore a
servant of God, and we conceive that both thinkers have laid mankind
under an immeasurable debt by showing us that that emotion of reverence
which all men instinctively feel towards a Power greater than man,
cannot be worthily satisfied except by a conscious endeavour to live as
befits our rational nature, and to serve "the brethren" out of love.
[1] _Auguste Comte and Positivism_, p. 15.
XIII.
THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW
AS SEEN IN _HELBECK OF BANNISDALE_.
Cynical observers of the tendencies of the age tell us that, like the
Athenians of Paul's days, we are "lovers of new things". Doubtless we
are, for this century, this "wonderful century," as it has recently
been described, is a new age or there never was one. Hence, just as
Spinoza saw everything _sub specie aeternitatis_, we may very well have
a tendency to see many things _sub specie novi_. New things,
astonishingly new things, in every imaginable department of life have
been witnessed by men who saw the opening years of the century, and
_fin-de-siècle_ as we are, the capacities of man are apparently as
inexhaustible as ever.
It would indeed be passing strange were religion an exception to the
uniform progress everywhere in operation. Doubtless the aspect of that
supreme concern of life does change less rapidly, but change it does
and must: _eppur si muove_. And it is significant, as one of the most
striking results of the beneficent movements of our time, that, in the
English-speaking countries at least, one of the most powerful, because
the most far-reaching, stimuli to religious progress has been supplied
by the hand of a woman.
It has always seemed to me that Mrs. Humphry Ward's _Robert Elsmere_
was the making of an epoch, and when so shrewd an observer of the
times, so enthusiastic an admirer of "the old ways" as Mr. Gladstone,
thought the book worth criticising and censuring, he bore eloquent
testimony to the effect it was evidently destined to produce. Its
influence has unquestionably been great. There are many people who owe
to it their first acquaintance with modern religious thought. Numbers
of the younger clergymen of the Establishment must have been profoundly
moved by it, because the faith of an Anglican is a comparatively
elastic thing compared with the rigidity of supernatural conceptions
which distinguishes the Roman Catholic communion. It may even be true
that these sporadic outbreaks of Ritualism, which are so seriously
threatening to "trouble Israel's peace," owe no little of their force
to the far-reaching effects of the new religious controversy. The
Newcomes of to-day, like their prototype in the novel, may very well
have come to the belief that there is no salvation from that besetting
demon of reason and "intellectual pride," but in a religion of
sensuousness and externalism which Sydney Smith, himself, of course, a
clergyman, once contemptuously designated as "painted jackets and
sanctified watering-pots". _Panem et Circenses_! Bread and games!
Give them fumes of incense, blare and blaze of sounds and lights, and
they may learn to forget that there ever was such a thing as a school
of biblical criticism which has turned orthodoxy into a heresy against
reason by telling the truth about the Bible.
Biblical inspiration being attenuated to almost vanishing point, there
is nothing left but to appeal to the Church--not, indeed, to the Church
of to-day, lost amid the mazes and intricacies of sects and schisms,
but to that venerable fiction, "the undivided Church" of the first few
centuries of our era, and thus brand religion with the stigma of
retrogression by proclaiming it the only thing which is incapable of
progress.
Not infrequently is a progressive movement attended at first by a
partial reaction, and it is not at all unlikely that Ritualistic
clergymen have been terrified into an increased reliance upon forms and
rites by the disastrous effects produced upon many of their followers
or fellow-churchmen by the new controversial methods of Mrs. Humphry
Ward.