answered in full by Littré in _Auguste Comte et la Philosophie Positive_,
where Turgot’s name heads the third chapter. He shows that the latter
discovered the law of the three stages, theological, metaphysical, and
positive, by the following quotation from his _Histoire des progrès de
l’esprit humain_.
“While the connection between physical effects was yet unknown, nothing
was more natural than to suppose that they were produced by intelligent
beings, invisible and resembling ourselves; for what else could they have
resembled? Everything that happened without the intervention of man, had
its god, whose worship was soon established by fear or hope, and this
worship was conceived in accordance with the deference accorded powerful
men; for the gods were only more powerful men and more or less perfect
according as they were the product of an age more or less enlightened as
to the true perfections of humanity. When philosophers had recognised
the absurdity of these fables, without however having obtained true
light upon natural history, they imagined an explanation of the causes
of phenomena by abstract expressions, such as essences and faculties:
expressions that nevertheless explained nothing and that were reasoned
about as if they had been beings, new divinities substituted for the old
ones. These analogies were followed out, and faculties were multiplied
to account for each effect. It was only very late, in observing the
mechanical action that bodies have upon one another, that other
hypotheses were drawn from this mechanics, (_de cette mécanique_) which
mathematics could develop and experience verify.”
Littré calls attention to “the great sureness of judgment” that led
Turgot to cite only physical phenomena when he spoke of those that had
ceased to be interpreted either theologically or metaphysically. “When he
wrote this passage, positivity (I use this word, a necessary creation of
M. Comte’s) was only beginning to reach chemical phenomena and had not
yet attained those of biology and sociology.”
But, says Littré, “after reserving the rights of priority for this
eminent thinker, there is nothing to prevent M. Comte from keeping
all the part that he had made himself and that belongs to him. Three
principal points mark Comte’s independence of Turgot. The latter saw
in the conception nothing more than an idea to meditate upon; Comte
saw in it a sociological law; Turgot did not attach to it a sketch
of human development; Comte developed with the aid of this law the
whole historical series; Turgot did not perceive that he held one of
the necessary elements of a philosophy; Comte, in the same flight of
thought, went from history become science to philosophy become positive.
The sociological law, isolated in Turgot, makes part, in Comte, of a
vast whole: there were therefore two independent creations. Either M.
Comte had not read Turgot, or, more probably, he had read him at a time
when this passage, which to-day awakens attention, had no particular
significance.”
The fourth chapter in Littré’s Life of Comte has for heading the names
of Kant and Condorcet. The whole of the former’s remarkable sketch of
general history is given and reference is made to the letter in chap.
viii, where Comte, in 1824, being twenty-six years old, says to M.
d’Eichthal, his former pupil, “I have read and reread with infinite
pleasure Kant’s little treatise; it is prodigious for the epoch, and if
I had known it six or seven years sooner it would have saved me trouble.
I am delighted that you have translated it; it can contribute very
efficaciously to preparing minds for positive philosophy. Its general
conception or at least its method is still metaphysical, but the details
show the positive spirit at every instant. I had always regarded Kant not
only as a very strong head, but as the metaphysician that approaches the
nearest to positive philosophy. But this reading has greatly fortified
and especially given precision to my conviction in that regard. If
Condorcet had had knowledge of this writing, which I do not believe,
very little merit would remain to him, since he can pretend only to that
of the conception, which is almost as firm and, in some respects, even
clearer in Kant. As for me, after this reading I can find in myself, up
to the present time, no other value than that of having systematised and
fixed the conception that had been sketched by Kant unknown to me, which
I owe chiefly to a scientific education; and even the most positive and
distinct step that I have taken after him, seems to me only the discovery
of the law of the passage of human ideas through the three stages,
theological, metaphysical, and scientific; a law that appears to me to
be the foundation of the work whose execution Kant has counselled. I
thank my lack of erudition to-day; for if my work, such as it is now, had
been preceded by a study of Kant’s treatise, it would have lost much of
its value in my eyes. I conceive now, as you said, that, for the German
philosophers that are familiar with this treatise, my work will really
have a great effect only with the second part.” This work was a short
one reprinted in Saint-Simon’s _Catéchisme des industriels_ and called
“A System of Positive Politics.” It had been inserted two years before,
under the title of “A Plan of the Work Necessary for the Reorganisation
of Society,” in a pamphlet of Saint-Simon’s, without Comte’s name, and it
was because the latter insisted, this time, upon an acknowledgment of his
authorship that Saint-Simon broke with him. The “second part,” which was
to produce the great effect upon the German philosophers, never appeared;
or rather, it soon grew to be the _Course of Positive Philosophy_,
begun on the 2d of April, 1826, before Humboldt, Blainville, and other
celebrated listeners.
The term _positive philosophy_ had long been used by Saint-Simon and his
school, Comte among the rest, not in the special sense that the latter
now gave it, but as a “generic name for the whole of science.” The first
use of the words as we now understand them is in a letter from Comte
to M. d’Eichthal, dated Aug. 5, 1824. “I cannot help recalling your
judicious reflection upon the influence that social physics, once formed,
will have upon scientific philosophy. I go even further than you, for
I think that it will be only then that a veritable philosophy of the
sciences can exist. All the philosophical ideas that are there to-day,
although very precious up to that time, appear to me to have nothing
more than a simply provisory (provisoire) character. I shall speak a
little about this relation in the general preface that I announce to you,
where I shall explain that the true title of my work would be _positive
philosophy_, and that if I preferred _politics_, it is because that is
the most urgent philosophical application and the one that is to found
the science, but that later I or you or others will complete this system
of ideas by the encyclopedic re-coinage of all our positive cognitions
(connaissances), which ought really to be conceived as a single mass,
although, for good culture, it is indispensable to preserve and to push
even, in one sense, further than it is, the division of labor, so that
each special savant can always, subsequently, conceive the relation of
his branch and even of his twig to the universal trunk.”
In a letter of about this date Comte refers to his habit of never
rewriting anything. His memory permitted him to look upon a volume as
finished when it had been thought out and before a line had been written.
But even in his letters we notice some of the disadvantages of this
procedure, which, while conducive to unity, sacrifices literary form.
It is true that Comte studied under Saint-Simon; but, according to
Littré, his purely philosophical dependence was very slight, while his
influence upon his master was important. “What forms the distinguishing
characteristic of Saint-Simon at the epoch when he lived, is the social
destination that he assigns without hesitating to the ideas that
preoccupy him. He has, as we have seen, only the most confused notion
of what this philosophy will be; but, no matter what it is to be, he
consecrates it in advance to the reorganisation of society.”
As regards Condorcet, Comte enthusiastically acknowledges his
indebtedness to the “Sketch of an Historical Table of the Progress of the
Human Mind,” and even goes beyond the facts, as he did in his praise of
Kant.
Littré makes a fair division of credit among others as well as those
already named, and concludes as follows: “Turgot had discovered that
human conceptions, at first theological, afterwards become metaphysical
and end by being positive. Kant had known that history is a natural
phenomenon, subjected to a determinate course, and Condorcet, pushed
harder than his predecessors by advancing time,” (he had been condemned
to death) “had attempted to trace a table that should put in evidence
the enchainment of the progresses of civilisation. These are great
things, but they are still only rudiments; for neither Turgot nor his
successors make use of the discovered law to found upon this general
fact evolution; Kant, who perceives clearly the necessity of conceiving
history as regulated by the conditions inherent to humanity, is unable to
base this important notion on anything better than an _à priori_ idea”
(the metaphysical principle that nature does nothing in vain, and that as
human faculties do not reach their development in the individual, who is
ephemeral, they must do so in the species, which is durable) “and thus he
leaves it incapable of fixing the attention of a century whose tendencies
were more and more positive; lastly Condorcet has no other guide than the
negative philosophy of the eighteenth century in a work to which it could
bring only contradiction.”
John Stuart Mill says of Comte that “far from pretending to originality
when he had really no right to do so, he was eager to attach his most
original thoughts to every germ of a similar idea that he met with among
his predecessors.”
Speaking for himself, Littré says of the law of the three stages, “I do
not reject it, I restrain it. As long as we remain in the scientific
order and consider the conception of the world first theological,
then metaphysical, finally positive, the law of the three stages has
its full efficacy in directing the speculations of history.... But in
history all is not comprised in the scientific order. M. Comte, who has
said somewhere that it is necessary to suppose, at the beginning of
humanity, certain notions that were neither theological nor metaphysical,
has indicated the germ, I will not say of my objection, but of my
restriction. In fact this law of the three stages comprehends neither
industrial, nor moral, nor æsthetic development. It has however, the
excellent character of being relative to the speculations in which
evolution by filiation is most manifest and consequently of giving a
positive notion of the march of history.”
Is it true, as stated on p. 565 of _The Monist_ for July, that Stuart
Mill adopted Hume’s “erroneous conception of causality” to the extent
implied in the following passage? “This idea of ‘sequence’ however
was exactly Hume’s mistake, adopted by Mr. Mill, and through Mr. Mill
popularised among English thinkers. If the nature of cause and effect
were really constituted by invariable sequence, then the night might be
called the effect of the day because night is invariably consequent upon
day.”
The only authority at hand on the island from which I write is
Clemenceau’s translation of Mill’s “Auguste Comte and Positivism,” where,
on p. 61, I read as follows, “The succession of day and night is just as
much an invariable succession as the alternate exposition of the earth’s
two opposite sides to the sun. Yet day and night are not the cause of
each other; why? Because their succession, although invariable, according
to our experience, is not so unconditionally: these phenomena succeed
each other only upon the condition that the presence and the absence
of the sun succeed each other; and if this alternation were to cease,
day and night would not follow each other. There are thus two kinds of
uniformities of succession, one without conditions, the other dependent
on the former: laws of causation, and other successions which depend on
these laws.”
In a note Mill refers to his _System of Deductive and Inductive Logic_.
LOUIS BELROSE, JR.
SOME REMARKS UPON PROFESSOR JAMES’S DISCUSSION OF ATTENTION.
In his recent treatise on psychology Professor James discusses
in an interesting and suggestive way the relation of ideation to
attention, maintaining that “ideational preparation ... is concerned
in all attentive acts.” Attention is “anticipatory imagination” or
“preperception” which prepares the mind for what it is to experience.
Thus the schoolboy, listening for the clock to strike twelve, anticipates
in imagination and is prepared to hear perfectly the very first sound of
the striking.
It is undoubtedly true that in the form of attention we term expectant,
where we are awaiting _some given impression_, there is a representing,
antedating experience, which may be a preparatory preperception. But with
a wrong imaging of what is to be experienced there is hindrance, as when
in a dark quiet room we are led to expect sensation of light but actually
receive sensation of sound. Very often, indeed, our anticipations make us
unprepared for experience. Further, the experiments adduced by Professor
James from Wundt and Helmholtz are in the single form of expectant
attention, and we must remark that in these experiments the reagent is
also experimenter, and this introduces a new attention, consciousness of
consciousness, and that of a peculiar kind, which complicates an already
complex consciousness. In general we may say that experimentally incited
consciousness is artificial, at least as far as it feels itself as such,
and for certain points like simple attention this tends to vitiate
results. Self-experimentation or experiment on those conscious of it
as such may mislead in certain cases, and must, so far as this element
of consciousness of experiment is not allowed for. In physical science
things always act naturally whether with observation or experiment, but
in psychology observation, other things being equal, is more trustworthy
than experiment.
In all cases of expectant or experimentally expectant attention, the
attention does not, however, lie in the expectancy or in the imaging as
such, but it is merely the will effort concerned in these operations.
Yet as we may expect without effort, and preconceive without volition,
attention is necessarily involved in neither. A perception or a
preperception is an attention only as accomplished by will with effort,
but only an unattention when purely involuntary. Professor James’s
use of attention as preperception brings us back to the common idea
of attention, as any consciousness which cognises something. This is
so inbred in thought and language that it is most difficult to avoid
using the term in this sense. Many psychologists like Mr. James and Mr.
Sully frequently mention attention as a will phenomenon but they do
not treat it under will, and they constantly return to the cognition
meaning. Höffding, however, treats attention under psychology of will.
Attention as the exercise of will in building up and maintaining
cognitive activity, is naturally treated under cognition; but it is on
the whole safer and better to discuss attention under will so as to keep
it sharply distinguished from the presentation form which it vitalises.
I have endeavored to hold the term strictly to this sense, yet it is not
unlikely I may sometimes unwittingly countenance the common confusion,
but trust the instances will be few.
When we have, then, a case of expectant attention we must distinguish
the attention in the imaging from the attention in the actual cognising.
It is, indeed, true for us almost invariably that cognitive strain
without immediate realisation is incentive to ideating. In listening
in the night in vain for a sound we hear in imagination many sounds,
and we form preparatory ideas of what we are to hear. Sense-adjustments
call up a train of sensations in ideal form. But it is obvious that low
intelligences which have no power of expectancy or ideation do yet really
attend. The very first cognitions and all early cognitions by their very
newness and difficulty were attentions long before ideation was evolved.
With low organisms, as cognitive power extends only to the present in
time and space, immediacy of reaction is imperatively demanded, and
every tension of cognitive apparatus is immediately directive of motor
apparatus so that suitable motion is at once accomplished. The cognition,
though dim and evanescent factor, is yet powerfully energised, and so a
true attention. Always with lowest sentiencies, and often with higher,
pain is suddenly realised without anticipation, followed quickly by
attention as strong effort to cognise the nature and quality of the
pain-giver and so to effectually get rid of pain-giver and pain.
Preliminary idea, then, cannot occur in early attentions and in late
attentions it is by no means necessary. It is said that we see only
what we look for, but it must be answered that seeing commonly happens
without any looking for. The kindergarten child, Professor James to the
contrary notwithstanding, is not confined in his seeing to merely those
things which he has been told to see and whose names have been given
him. A child continually asks, What is that? and is quick to discern
the absolutely new and strange. He accomplishes a wide variety of
attentions without ideas and gives himself almost entirely to immediate
presentations.
To be sure, every one sees only what he is prepared to see, only what is
made possible for him by his mental constitution as determined by his own
pre-experience and the experience of his ancestors, but this does not
signify ideation. Every cognising is conditioned by the past, but this
does not call for a reawakening and projecting in ideal form at every
instance of cognitive effort, before any real cognition is reached.
In fact, many, if not the most of our attentions, are merely
intensifyings of some present cognition, of some cognitive psychosis
which has simply come or happened. Take the instance of attention
to marginal retinal images, this certainly does not always imply
preperception, the forming of an idea of what we are to see, though
in the cases mentioned by Professor James it may. For example, I was
writing the above seated with my profile to the window when I became
suddenly aware, through the physiological agency of a marginal image, of
a moving object to my right. This perception of bare undefined object was
spontaneous, a pure given; I exercised no will in attaining it, and so
the state of cognition was not an attention. However, by attending, by
intensifying the cognition by will effort, I perceive that the indefinite
object is a man walking on the sidewalk, who is of a certain height,
clothed in a certain way, etc. I do not trace the least ideation in the
whole process, the slight attending as act of will did not imply any
anterior or posterior idea or representation. The reason for the will
act was the intrinsic interest of movement, and this intrinsic interest
arises in the fact that moving objects have had for all life a special
pleasure-pain significance, the moving object is the most dangerous, and
so motion perceived has become ingrained in mind as a special stimulant
of attention. This habit of attentiveness to things in motion survives
and continues for cases where it is of no use and even of harm; thus,
in the present instance, it diverts me from my work. It is obvious
that attention often occurs in the same way for other senses without
preliminary idea.
On the whole we must conclude that attention is a much abused term, and
it is to be hoped that psychologists will for the future keep to the
definite and best use of the term; namely, to denote cognitive effort in
all its degrees and modes.
HIRAM M. STANLEY.
IS MONISM ARBITRARY?
In Vol. II, No. 3, of _The Monist_, a very kind criticism appeared from
the pen of Mr. Francis C. Russell of the doctrine of a double-faced unity
of mind and matter. It was said that this doctrine is very far from
inducing that final satisfaction which we rightly expect of a competent
theory, and the critic propounded as a possible explanation of mental
phenomena the postulate of a conservation of spirit. He calls spirit the
elementary basis of consciousness considered as a quality. Spirit would
be the subjectivity of nature, the elements of feeling, or as Professor
Morgan calls it metakinesis; and consciousness would originate in the
same way as electricity, i. e., by rending spirit asunder into positive
and negative spirit so as to produce a tension. This would account for
the appearance and disappearance of consciousness in that spiritual
“dynamo” which is called the nervous system.
This proposition seems to be highly acceptable because it stands upon the
principle of a conservation of substance and attempts to represent the
phenomenon of consciousness as due to a transformation. But does it for
that reason remove the difficulties of the doctrine of a double-faced
unity of nature, which, as Mr. Russell says, “is open to the charge of
being arbitrary and brings no access of insight”? Is not perhaps the term
double-faced unity (which is none of my invention, and which I have been
careful to avoid) a misleading and unsatisfactory term? Why should nature
be double-faced? Why are feeling and motion the only two attributes of
natural phenomena? Is this not arbitrary? Could nature not be just as
well a treble or quadruple-faced unity. Nature might possess, as Spinoza
actually declares, infinite attributes of which these two only, viz.
extension and thought, i. e. motion and feeling, happen to be known to us.
It is this apparent arbitrariness which bars our insight and deprives us
of the satisfaction that ought to attend the real solution of a problem.
But let us avoid the term double-faced unity; let us speak of the
subjectivity and the objectivity of nature, and the clouds will disappear.
The doctrine of a double-faced unity has been criticised as dualism,
and the proposition that nature consists of two radically different
attributes—exactly of two, not more and not less—must most decidedly
appear as dualism. But is it dualistic to say that every subject appears
to its objects not as a subject but as an object among other objects?
Certainly not.
The relativity of the terms subject and object affords us the key to
a comprehension of the situation. This world of ours is a world of
relations. The phenomena of nature exhibit an unceasing activity; they
consist of constant changes, and every change, every motion, has a whence
and a whither. Every transformation is a series of events among which any
prior one is called cause and any subsequent one effect.
If we regard feeling and motion as two attributes of nature, we are
actually on the brink of dualism, and we shall understand how Spinoza,
in order to escape from dualism and arrive at a monistic view, assumed
without any plausible argument the existence of an infinite number of
attributes. This assumption however is of no avail, for the problem would
arise: How is it that we know only two of all these infinite attributes?
Why do we not know any other? and why are we unable to form even a dim
notion of any other? If they exist why do they exhibit no effects upon
us? Perhaps because we ourselves and this world of ours consist only
of two! And if they exhibit no effects upon us and upon our world, can
they be said to exist at all? Might we not, in that case, consider them
as non-existent and count the two known attributes alone as actual
realities? Thus the dualism would remain; and Spinoza’s monism is only
apparent.