THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES
According to the law of the three States, all our conceptions in the
different orders of knowledge, begin by being theological, pass through
the metaphysical transition, and end by becoming positive. If this
evolution were terminated at the presented time, the philosophy which
Comte wishes to found would be _ipso facto_ established. But we are
far from such a state of things. On the contrary, the three modes of
thought theological, metaphysical, and positive, coexist, still to-day,
even in the most cultivated minds. In a different measure, all lack the
“logical coherence.”
Even in those sciences where the positive method has been finally
and for a long time established, in physics, and in chemistry, for
instance, we observe undoubted traces of the metaphysical spirit. To
a still greater degree this spirit is manifested in what are called
the moral and social sciences. Nevertheless, this “incoherence” cannot
last. Now that the positive spirit has assumed full consciousness of
itself, it is possible to proceed with a systematic purification, which
will disentangle it from the theological and metaphysical spirit.
But is not this critical review of the whole of human knowledge an
enterprise above the powers of a man?--Happily positive philosophy
itself furnishes a means of lightening the task. It establishes an
order which allows us to determine without too much trouble to what
degree of positiveness the conception of a given category of phenomena
has reached up to the present time. Comte calls this order the
classification, or, more precisely the “positive hierarchy” of the
fundamental sciences. It is “the plan which he will follow in the
exposition of positive philosophy.”[23]
This plan is not a simple artifice destined to make the entirety of
the doctrine clearer, or its exposition easier. It is not external
to the work. It is born from the very spirit of positive philosophy;
it expresses the spirit of that philosophy in a new form. It is
the natural complement of the law of the three States. Comte puts
it in plain words: “The different branches of our knowledge have
not been able with equal rapidity to pass through the three great
phases in their development, nor consequently to reach simultaneously
the positive state. There exists, in this respect, an invariable
and necessary order, which our different kinds of conceptions have
followed and have been obliged to follow in their progress, and of
which the exact consideration is the _indispensable complement_ to the
fundamental law previously enounced.”[24]
Comte did not, like his contemporary Ampère, set himself the logical
problem of the classification of the sciences in their entirety. He
did not seek according to what principle we could arrange them all in
an order where the fact of their respective subordination would be
maintained. He even doubts how far such a principle exists, and he is
so far from thinking of establishing a complete classification of the
sciences, that he begins by leaving out the greater number of them.
He first sets aside all forms of human knowledge which refer to art,
that is to say all the applied sciences, practical and technical.
Similarly he sets aside all the concrete sciences, such as zoology,
mineralogy, geography, etc. He only places within his classification
the _theoretical and abstract_ sciences, that is to say those which
have no other object but the knowledge of laws, and which study
phenomena, exclusive of the concrete beings in which these phenomena
present themselves. Comte calls them “fundamental” because the other
sciences suppose their existence, whereas the abstract sciences do not
suppose the existence of the others before them.
These sciences are the only ones whose consideration is of
consequence to the end which Comte has in view. For why does he need
a classification of the sciences? It is in order to study the ascent
of the positive spirit through the successive orders of phenomena. For
this, he has no occasion to consider the applied or concrete sciences,
which receive their principles from the theoretical and abstract
sciences. It suffices for him to be concerned with these. It is in the
methods and the progress of these sciences that the characteristic
efforts of the human mind have been manifested; and it is therefore
here that we can grasp the laws of its evolution.
In order to classify the fundamental sciences, Comte will conform
to the principles of the positive method. He will be guided by the
rational classifications of which the model is to be found in the
natural sciences. The classification must spring from the very study of
the objects which are to be classified, and must be determined by the
real affinities and the series of connected links which they present,
in such a way that this classification may itself be the expression of
the most general truth, made manifest by the searching comparison of
the objects which it embraces.
Comte will not therefore stop to consider the classifications which
have preceded his own. In the first place, when they appeared, the
rational method of classification was not established. Further, how
could anyone have united the whole of the sciences into an encyclopædic
conception, when some had already reached the positive state, while
others remained in the theological or metaphysical states? How could
anyone rationally arrange heterogenous conceptions in a single system?
Those premature attempts were doomed to failure. In order that the
undertaking might succeed, it was necessary that _all_ our conceptions,
relating to the various orders of phenomena should have reached the
positive form. Here again, the creation of sociology has been the
decisive event, for it has allowed the series of fundamental sciences
to be made complete. The discovery of the law of the three States
has founded sociology, and at the same time it has accomplished the
homogeneity of human knowledge. In its time, this homogeneity renders
possible the rational classification of the sciences.
II.
Henceforth, the fundamental sciences are all conceived as equally
positive. They have all given up the pursuit of the absolute for the
study of the relative, and the search after causes for the knowledge of
laws. All now proceed by means of the same general methods and their
differences can therefore only arise from their object, that is to say
from the nature of the phenomena which are studied. Consequently their
relations of mutual dependence will solely result from the relations
of these phenomena. Now, observation shows us that these phenomena
form themselves into a certain number of natural categories, such
that the rational study of each category presupposes a knowledge of
the laws of the preceding category, and that a knowledge of this one
is in turn presupposed for understanding the one that follows. This
order is determined by the degree of generality of the phenomena, from
which their successive dependence upon each other results, and as a
consequence the greater or lesser simplicity of each science results
from it also.
Upon this principle, the encyclopædic ladder of the fundamental
sciences is easily constructed. After the mathematics, in an order of
diminishing generality and of growing complexity, come astronomy,
physics, chemistry, physiology or biology, social physics or sociology.
The first science considers the most general, the most simple, the
most abstract phenomena, and those furthest removed from humanity.
They influence all the others, without being influenced by them. The
phenomena considered by the last are the most particular, the most
complicated, the most concrete, and the most directly interesting for
man; they depend more or less upon all the preceding ones. “Between
these two extremes, the degrees of specialisation, of complication, and
of individualisation, are in an ever-growing quantity.”
This classification is confirmed, in fact, by the general usage of
learned men. It reproduces the historic order of the development of the
sciences. Thus, for a long time, mathematics was the only science of
a positive type. On the other hand, social science has been the last
to reach this point. Nevertheless, Comte does not mean to say that
the fundamental sciences came into existence one after the other, nor
that, for every one of them, each period is sufficiently explained by
the period immediately preceding it. His thought is very different. On
the contrary, he represents the development of the several sciences as
simultaneous. They act and react one upon another in a thousand ways.
Often some progress in a science is the direct effect of a discovery
made in an art which has apparently no affinities with it. Such is,
to quote an example which Comte could not in the least have foreseen,
the progress of astronomical observations due to photography. In fact,
the history of a science during a given period is closely allied to
that of the other sciences and arts during the same time, or rather,
to be more explicit, to the general history of civilisation. But their
respective transitions to the positive state is accomplished in the
order set forth in the classification. For individually they could not
reach this state, if the fundamental science immediately preceding had
not attained to it before them. “It is in this order that the progress,
although simultaneous, must have taken place.”[25]
III.
Mr. Herbert Spencer has made several objections to Auguste Comte’s
classification of the sciences; Littré has lengthily refuted them. It
is not in our design to reopen this discussion. But it results from
the preceding explanations that the greater number of Mr. Spencer’s
criticisms miss the mark, perhaps because he has not read Comte
properly. On his own admission, he only knows the two first lessons in
the _Cours de philosophie positive_ in the text, further the inorganic
Physics and the first chapter of the Biology in Miss Martineau’s
condensation, and finally the remainder in Lewes’s summing up in his
_History of Philosophy_.[26] If Mr. Spencer had been able to obtain a
knowledge of the _Cours de philosophie positive_ in its entirety, and
especially of the three last lessons, or at least of the _Discours sur
l’Esprit positif_ or of the _Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme_ he
would probably have appreciated differently the positive classification
of the sciences. His own classification, in which he includes the
concrete and concrete-abstract sciences, is not really opposed to that
of Auguste Comte who only wished to classify the fundamental _abstract_
sciences. Comte never sought to do what Mr. Spencer reproaches him with
not having done.
Among Mr. Spencer’s objections, there is one which, bearing upon the
very conception of the classification of the sciences, shows very
clearly the misunderstanding which we are pointing out.
Mr. Spencer insists upon the “anthropocentric” character of Comte’s
classification, which is indeed remarkable; and he is surprised
at what appears to him to be a glaring contradiction. Is not the
conception of things from man’s point of view, one of the essential
forms of the theological mode of thought, according to Comte himself?
Does not positive philosophy teach that man must not consider himself
as a sort of “imperium in imperio,” but as a being subordinate to the
whole of nature? If therefore we must substitute the objective to the
subjective point of view in which man at first spontaneously places
himself, how can the classification of the sciences be at the same time
“anthropocentric” and positive?
This objection would perhaps be a strong one against positive
philosophy as Littré understood it. Against Auguste Comte it has no
force, for he accepts it. He admits that his classification presents
these two characters at the same time, and he does not think that in so
doing he is contradicting himself. We must only distinguish with him
two successive and different periods. So long as positive philosophy
is in process of formation, (that is to say so long as the positive
spirit remains special) it is quite true that it is orientated from
the objective point of view, in other words, that it goes from the
world to man. During this period, it is indeed opposed to the naïve
belief which makes man the centre and the end of the universe. But,
when from special the positive spirit has become universal, when it has
risen from science to philosophy, when sociology is at length founded,
and when the understanding realises, from the positive point of view
the logical unity which is indispensable to it, this unity is only
completed when, in its turn, it takes man for its centre.
Considered as an exact reproduction of the real world, says Comte, our
science is not capable of being completely systematised; and in this
sense we must not seek for any unity save that of method, aspiring
only to homogeneity and to the convergence of the different doctrines.
It is otherwise in regard to the inner source of human theories
contemplated as the results of our individual and collective mental
evolution. “Thus referred, not to the universe, but to man, or rather
to humanity, our real knowledge tends on the contrary towards an entire
systematization. We must then conceive a single science, the human
science, more precisely social, of which our existence constitutes at
once the principle and the end. Into this human science the rational
study of the external world becomes fused, at once as a necessary
element and a fundamental preamble.”[27]
Comte would therefore not have repudiated, for his classification of
the sciences, the qualification of “anthropocentric” on condition
that it were understood. It is no longer the spontaneous subjectivism
from which the theological philosophy starts; it is the conscious
subjectivism to which the positive philosophy attains. It has the merit
of uniting in itself the two methods called objective and subjective.
The former has been in the ascendant during the long evolution of the
sciences, which were by degrees and successively reaching the positive
state. The latter allows us to concentrate the aim of the distinct
sciences thus constituted into a supreme science, which subordinates
all the others to itself, without absorbing them.
IV.
The classification of the sciences is, at the same time, a plan for
the setting forth of the positive philosophy, and a complement of the
law of the three States. But, while this law expresses the _progress_
of the human intellect in the constitution of science and philosophy,
the classification supposes that science and philosophy are already
constituted. It expresses their _order_, and enunciates from the static
point of view what the law formulates from the dynamic point of view.
It shows the relations of the various elements of philosophy among
themselves, and to the whole.
So long as this idea of the whole was not defined, that is to say, so
long as positive science remained special, these relations could not
be rationally established. But, once sociology was created, and with
it positive philosophy, it became possible to embrace the whole of the
fundamental sciences in a single conception. For, from that time, they
can be represented as being various aspects of the development of the
human intellect.
Truly, the object of science is single, and the divisions which are
introduced into it for our convenience, without being arbitrary, are
artificial. All the branches of our knowledge, that is to say all the
fundamental sciences, must be considered as issuing from a single
trunk. Not that these sciences can ever be reduced one to another.
It suffices that they be homogeneous, and their homogeneity results
from their subjection to the same method; further, from their tendency
towards the same end, and finally, from their subordination to the
same law of progress. In respect to the last and highest of these
sciences, the others “must only be finally regarded as indispensable
preliminaries in a progressive order.”[28]
Thus the ladder of the fundamental sciences represents, in Comte’s
mind, the methodical ascent of the positive spirit towards universality
and unity. It is a hierarchy, a _scala intellectus_, according to
Bacon’s expression. It includes the whole of the “philosophia prima”
also foreshadowed by Bacon and vainly sought after by philosophers.
The memory of Bacon does not prevent the preponderating influence in
this conception of Comte from being that of Descartes. Comte is far
from ignoring it. He calls himself the continuator and by a dreadful
barbarism, the _completer_ of Descartes.[29] Undoubtedly Descartes had
not like him conceived the series of the fundamental sciences. After
having applied a positive method to the study of inorganic nature, and
even of living nature, for the rest he had reverted to a metaphysical
method. But this “cartesian compromise” could only be provisional. None
the less to Descartes belongs the merit of having definitely acquired
several orders of phenomena for the positive spirit, and of affirming
the unity of science at the same time as the unity of method. He was
unable himself to realise this twofold unity, for its time had not
come, and the necessary conditions had not yet been brought together.
Moreover in the cartesian idea of science metaphysical elements
subsist, and Descartes wrongly believed that the universal method was
to be obtained by a transformation of the mathematical method.
Comte takes up the leading ideas of Descartes again, and, at the same
time, he corrects them, according as the progress of the positive
spirit during two centuries enabled him to do. The position of “leading
science,” if this expression can be allowed, passes from mathematics to
sociology. Moreover, the unity of science, as Comte conceives it, no
longer prevents the fundamental sciences from being irreducible to one
another. This unity is sufficiently secured by the homogeneity of the
sciences, which form a continuous series, an “encyclopædic hierarchy,”
and which are all subordinated to the final science. Lastly the unity
of the positive methods does not imply its uniformity everywhere. Each
fundamental science, as will be seen further on, has its methods which
are special to itself.[30]
The classification of the sciences thus shows how positive philosophy
stretches back over the XVIII. cent., whence it springs, to link itself
with Bacon and Descartes. Comte has retained Bacon’s view on this
point, that all scientific knowledge rests upon facts which have been
fully observed, and that a system of positive sciences constitutes the
indispensable basis for the only philosophy which is within our reach.
To Descartes he here owes the idea of the unity of method and of the
unity of science. We might almost say that he has received from Bacon
his idea of the contents of the sciences and from Descartes his idea of
their form. By what means did he invest such matter with such a form?
The answer to this question is found in the positive theory of science.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] Cours, I, 46-47.
[24] Cours, I, 14-15.
[25] Cours, I, 82, 12.
[26] Herbert Spencer: The Classification of the Sciences. London, 1864,
p. 42.
[27] Discours sur l’esprit positif (1844) p. 24.
[28] Cours, VI. 610.
[29] Correspondence de H. Comte and de John Stuart Mill. Lettre du 5
novembre 1842, p. 132.
[30] Cp. infra, book I, ch. VI.