1.
Auguste Comte did more than any preceding thinker to establish the
idea of Progress as a luminary which could not escape men's vision.
The brilliant suggestions of Saint-Simon, the writings of Bazard and
Enfantin, the vagaries of Fourier, might be dismissed as curious rather
than serious propositions, but the massive system wrought out by Comte's
speculative genius--his organic scheme of human knowledge, his elaborate
analysis of history, his new science of sociology--was a great fact with
which European thought was forced to reckon. The soul of this system
was Progress, and the most important problem he set out to solve was the
determination of its laws.
His originality is not dimmed by the fact that he owed to Saint-Simon
more than he afterwards admitted or than his disciples have been willing
to allow. He collaborated with him for several years, and at this time
enthusiastically acknowledged the intellectual stimulus he received from
the elder savant. [Footnote: Comte collaborated with Saint-Simon
from 1818-1822. The final rupture came in 1824. The question of their
relations is cleared up by Weill (Saint-Simon, chap. xi.). On the
quarrel see also Ostwald, Auguste Comte (1914), 13 sqq.] But he derived
from Saint-Simon much more than the stimulation of his thoughts in a
certain direction. He was indebted to him for some of the characteristic
ideas of his own system. He was indebted to him for the principle which
lay at the very basis of his system, that the social phenomena of
a given period and the intellectual state of the society cohere and
correspond. The conception that the coming age was to be a period of
organisation like the Middle Ages, and the idea of the government of
savants, are pure Saint-Simonian doctrine. And the fundamental idea of
a POSITIVE philosophy had been apprehended by Saint-Simon long before he
was acquainted with his youthful associate.
But Comte had a more methodical and scientific mind, and he thought that
Saint-Simon was premature in drawing conclusions as to the reformation
of societies and industries before the positive philosophy had been
constructed. He published--he was then only twenty-two--in 1822 a
"Plan of the scientific operations necessary for the re-organisation
of society," which was published under another title two years later by
Saint-Simon, and it was over this that the friends quarrelled. This work
contains the principles of the positive philosophy which he was soon to
begin to work out; it announces already the "law of the Three Stages."
The first volume of the "Cours de philisophie positive" appeared in
1830; it took him twelve years more to complete the exposition of his
system. [Footnote: With vol. vi., 1842.]
2.
The "law of Three Stages" is familiar to many who have never read a line
of his writings. That men first attempted to explain natural phenomena
by the operation of imaginary deities, then sought to interpret them by
abstractions, and finally came to see that they could only be understood
by scientific methods, observation, and experiment--this was a
generalisation which had already been thrown out by Turgot. Comte
adopted it as a fundamental psychological law, which has governed
every domain of mental activity and explains the whole story of
human development. Each of our principal conceptions, every branch of
knowledge, passes successively through these three states which he names
the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive or scientific. In
the first, the mind invents; in the second, it abstracts; in the third,
it submits itself to positive facts; and the proof that any branch of
knowledge has reached the third stage is the recognition of invariable
natural laws.
But, granting that this may be the key to the history of the sciences,
of physics, say, or botany, how can it explain the history of man, the
sequence of actual historical events? Comte replies that history has
been governed by ideas; "the whole social mechanism is ultimately
based on opinions." Thus man's history is essentially a history of his
opinions; and these are subject to the fundamental psychological law.
It must, however, be observed that all branches of knowledge are not in
the same stage simultaneously. Some may have reached the metaphysical,
while others are still lagging behind in the theological; some may have
become scientific, while others have not passed from the metaphysical.
Thus the study of physical phenomena has already reached the positive
stage; but the study of social phenomena has not. The central aim of
Comte, and his great achievement in his own opinion, was to raise the
study of social phenomena from the second to the third stage.
When we proceed to apply the law of the three stages to the general
course of historical development, we are met at the outset by the
difficulty that the advance in all the domains of activity is not
simultaneous. If at a given period thought and opinions are partly
in the theological, partly in the metaphysical, and partly in the
scientific state, how is the law to be applied to general development?
One class of ideas, Comte says, must be selected as the criterion, and
this class must be that of social and moral ideas, for two reasons.
In the first place, social science occupies the highest rank in the
hierarchy of sciences, on which he laid great stress. [Footnote: Cours
de phil. pos. v. 267. Law of consensus: op. cit. iv. 347 sqq., 364, 505,
721, 735.] In the second, those ideas play the principal part for the
majority of men, and the most ordinary phenomena are the most important
to consider. When, in other classes of ideas, the advance is at any time
more rapid, this only means an indispensable preparation for the ensuing
period.
The movement of history is due to the deeply rooted though complex
instinct which pushes man to ameliorate his condition incessantly, to
develop in all ways the sum of his physical, moral, and intellectual
life. And all the phenomena of his social life are closely cohesive,
as Saint-Simon had pointed out. By virtue of this cohesion, political,
moral, and intellectual progress are inseparable from material progress,
and so we find that the phases of his material development correspond to
intellectual changes. The principle of consensus or "solidarity," which
secures harmony and order in the development, is as important as the
principle of the three stages which governs the onward movement. This
movement, however, is not in a right line, but displays a series of
oscillations, unequal and variable, round a mean motion which tends to
prevail. The three general causes of variation, according to Comte, are
race, climate, and deliberate political action (such as the retrograde
policies of Julian the Apostate or Napoleon). But while they cause
deflections and oscillation, their power is strictly limited; they may
accelerate or retard the movement, but they cannot invert its order;
they may affect the intensity of the tendencies in a given situation,
but cannot change their nature.
3.
In the demonstration of his laws by the actual course of civilisation,
Comte adopts what he calls "the happy artifice of Condorcet," and treats
the successive peoples who pass on the torch as if they were a single
people running the race. This is "a rational fiction," for a people's
true successors are those who pursue its efforts. And, like Bossuet
and Condorcet, he confined his review to European civilisation; he
considered only the ELITE or advance guard of humanity. He deprecated
the introduction of China or India, for instance, as a confusing
complication. He ignored the ROLES of Brahmanism, Buddhism,
Mohammedanism. His synthesis, therefore, cannot claim to be a synthesis
of universal history; it is only a synthesis of the movement of European
history. In accordance with the law of the three stages, the development
falls into three great periods. The first or Theological came to an
end about A.D. 1400, and the second or Metaphysical is now nearing
its close, to make way for the third or Positive, for which Comte was
preparing the way.
The Theological period has itself three stages, in which Fetishism,
Polytheism, and Monotheism successively prevail. The chief social
characteristics of the Polytheistic period are the institution of
slavery and the coincidence or "confusion" of the spiritual and temporal
powers. It has two stages: the theocratic, represented by Egypt, and the
military, represented by Rome, between which Greece stands in a rather
embarrassing and uneasy position.
The initiative for the passage to the Monotheistic period came from
Judaea, and Comte attempts to show that this could not have been
otherwise. His analysis of this period is the most interesting part of
his survey. The chief feature of the political system corresponding to
monotheism is the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers; the
function of the spiritual power being concerned with education, and
that of the temporal with action, in the wide senses of those terms. The
defects of this dual system were due to the irrational theology. But
the theory of papal infallibility was a great step in intellectual
and social progress, by providing a final jurisdiction, without which
society would have been troubled incessantly by contests arising from
the vague formulae of dogmas. Here Comte had learned from Joseph de
Maistre. But that thinker would not have been edified when Comte went
on to declare that in the passage from polytheism to monotheism the
religious spirit had really declined, and that one of the merits of
Catholicism was that it augmented the domain of human wisdom at the
expense of divine inspiration. [Footnote: Cours de philosophic positive,
vi. 354.] If it be said that the Catholic system promoted the empire of
the clergy rather than the interests of religion, this was all to the
good; for it placed the practical use of religion in "the provisional
elevation of a noble speculative corporation eminently able to direct
opinions and morals."
But Catholic monotheism could not escape dissolution. The metaphysical
spirit began to operate powerfully on the notions of moral philosophy,
as soon as the Catholic organisation was complete; and Catholicism,
because it could not assimilate this intellectual movement, lost its
progressive character and stagnated.
The decay began in the fourteenth century, where Comte dates the
beginning of the Metaphysical period--a period of revolution and
disorder. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the movement is
spontaneous and unconscious; from the sixteenth till to-day it has
proceeded under the direction of a philosophical spirit which is
negative and not constructive. This critical philosophy has only
accelerated a decomposition which began spontaneously. For as theology
progresses it becomes less consistent and less durable, and as its
conceptions become less irrational, the intensity of the emotions which
they excite decreases. Fetishism had deeper roots than polytheism
and lasted longer; and polytheism surpassed monotheism in vigour and
vitality.
Yet the critical philosophy was necessary to exhibit the growing need of
solid reorganisation and to prove that the decaying system was incapable
of directing the world any longer. Logically it was very imperfect, but
it was justified by its success. The destructive work was mainly done
in the seventeenth century by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle, of whom
Hobbes was the most effective. In the eighteenth all prominent thinkers
participated in developing this negative movement, and Rousseau gave
it the practical stimulus which saved it from degenerating into an
unfruitful agitation. Of particular importance was the great fallacy,
which Helvetius propagated, that human intellects are equal. This error
was required for the full development of the critical doctrine. For
it supported the dogmas of popular sovranty and social equality, and
justified the principle of the right of private judgement.
These three principles--popular sovranty, equality, and what he
calls the right of free examination--are in Comte's eyes vicious and
anarchical.[Footnote #1 Op. cit. iv. 36-38.] But it was necessary that
they should be promulgated, because the transition from one organised
social system to another cannot be direct; it requires an anarchical
interregnum. Popular sovranty is opposed to orderly institutions and
condemns all superior persons to dependence on the multitude of their
inferiors. Equality, obviously anarchical in its tendency, and obviously
untrue (for, as men are not equal or even equivalent to one another,
their rights cannot be identical), was similarly necessary to break down
the old institutions. The universal claim to the right of free judgement
merely consecrates the transitional state of unlimited liberty in the
interim between the decline of theology and the arrival of positive
philosophy. Comte further remarks that the fall of the spiritual power
had led to anarchy in international relations, and if the spirit of
nationality were to prevail too far, the result would be a state of
things inferior to that of the Middle Ages.
But Comte says for the metaphysical spirit in France that with all its
vices it was more disengaged from the prejudices of the old theological
regime, and nearer to a true rational positivism than either the German
mysticism or the English empiricism of the same period.
The Revolution was a necessity, to disclose the chronic decomposition
of society from which it resulted, and to liberate the modern social
elements from the grip of the ancient powers. Comte has praise for the
Convention, which he contrasts with the Constituent Assembly with its
political fictions and inconsistencies. He pointed out that the great
vice in the "metaphysics" of the crisis--that is, in the principles of
the revolutionaries--lay in conceiving society out of relation to the
past, in ignoring the Middle Ages, and borrowing from Greek and Roman
society retrograde and contradictory ideals.
Napoleon restored order, but he was more injurious to humanity than
any other historical person. His moral and intellectual nature was
incompatible with the true direction of Progress, which involves the
extinction of the theological and military regime of the past. Thus his
work, like Julian the Apostate's, exhibits an instance of deflection
from the line of Progress. Then came the parliamentary system of
the restored Bourbons which Comte designates as a political Utopia,
destitute of social principles, a foolish attempt to combine political
retrogression with a state of permanent peace.
4.
The critical doctrine has performed its historical function, and the
time has come for man to enter upon the Positive stage of his career. To
enable him to take this step forward, it is necessary that the study of
social phenomena should become a positive science. As social science is
the highest in the hierarchy of sciences, it could not develop until
the two branches of knowledge which come next in the scale, biology and
chemistry, assumed a scientific form. This has recently been achieved,
and it is now possible to found a scientific sociology.
This science, like mechanics and biology, has its statics and its
dynamics. The first studies the laws of co-existence, the second those
of succession; the first contains the theory of order, the second
that of progress. The law of consensus or cohesion is the fundamental
principle of social statics; the law of the three stages is that of
social dynamics. Comte's survey of history, of which I have briefly
indicated the general character, exhibits the application of these
sociological laws.
The capital feature of the third period, which we are now approaching,
will be the organisation of society by means of scientific sociology.
The world will be guided by a general theory, and this means that it
must be controlled by those who understand the theory and will know
how to apply it. Therefore society will revive the principle which
was realised in the great period of Monotheism, the distinction of a
spiritual and a temporal order. But the spiritual order will consist of
savants who will direct social life not by theological fictions but
by the positive truths of science. They will administer a system of
universal education and will draw up the final code of ethics. They will
be able, more effectively than the Church, to protect the interests of
the lower classes.
Comte's conviction that the world is prepared for a transformation
of this kind is based principally on signs of the decline of the
theological spirit and of the military spirit, which he regarded as the
two main obstacles to the reign of reason. Catholicism, he says, is now
no more than "an imposing historical ruin." As for militarism, the epoch
has arrived in which serious and lasting warfare among the ELITE nations
will totally cease. The last general cause of warfare has been the
competition for colonies. But the colonial policy is now in its
decadence (with the temporary exception of England), so that we need not
look for future trouble from this source. The very sophism, sometimes
put forward to justify war, that it is an instrument of civilisation, is
a homage to the pacific nature of modern society.
We need not follow further the details of Comte's forecast of the
Positive period, except to mention that he did not contemplate a
political federation. The great European nations will develop each
in its own way, with their separate "temporal" organisations. But he
contemplated the intervention of a common "spiritual" power, so that all
nationalities "under the direction of a homogeneous speculative class
will contribute to an identical work, in a spirit of active European
patriotism, not of sterile cosmopolitanism."
Comte claimed, like Saint-Simon, that the data of history,
scientifically interpreted, afford the means of prevision. It is
interesting to observe how he failed himself as a diviner; how utterly
he misapprehended the vitality of Catholicism, how completely his
prophecy as to the cessation of wars was belied by the event. He lived
to see the Crimean war. [Footnote: He died in 1857.] As a diviner he
failed as completely as Saint-Simon and Fourier, whose dream that the
nineteenth century would see the beginning of an epoch of harmony and
happiness was to be fulfilled by a deadly struggle between capitalism
and labour, the civil war in America, the war of 1870, the Commune,
Russian pogroms, Armenian massacres, and finally the universal
catastrophe of 1914.
5.
For the comprehension of history we have perhaps gained as little from
Comte's positive laws as from Hegel's metaphysical categories. Both
thinkers had studied the facts of history only slightly and partially,
a rather serious drawback which enabled them to impose their own
constructions with the greater ease. Hegel's method of a PRIORI
synthesis was enjoined by his philosophical theory; but in Comte we also
find a tendency to a PRIORI treatment. He expressly remarks that
the chief social features of the Monotheistic period might almost be
constructed a PRIORI.
The law of the Three Stages is discredited. It may be contended that
general Progress depends on intellectual progress, and that theology,
metaphysics, and science have common roots, and are ultimately
identical, being merely phases in the movement of the intelligence. But
the law of this movement, if it is to rank as a scientific hypothesis,
must be properly deduced from known causes, and must then be verified
by a comparison with historical facts. Comte thought that he fulfilled
these requirements, but in both respects his demonstration was
defective. [Footnote: Criticism of Comte's assumption that civilisation
begins with animism: Weber's criticisms from this point of view are
telling (Le Rythme du progres, 73-95). He observes that if Comte had
not left the practical and active side of intelligence in the shade and
considered only its speculative side, he could not have formulated
the law of the Three Stages. He would have seen that "the positive
explanation of phenomena has played in every period a preponderant role,
though latent, in the march of the human mind." Weber himself suggests
a scheme of two states (corresponding to the two-sidedness of the
intellect), technical and speculative, practical and theoretical,
through the alternation of which intellectual progress has been
effected. The first stage was probably practical (he calls it
proto-technic). It is to be remembered that when Comte was constructing
his system palaeontology was in its infancy.]
The gravest weakness perhaps in his historical sketch is the gratuitous
assumption that man in the earliest stage of his existence had animistic
beliefs and that the first phase of his progress was controlled by
fetishism. There is no valid evidence that fetishism is not a relatively
late development, or that in the myriads of years stretching back beyond
our earliest records, during which men decided the future of the human
species by their technical inventions and the discovery of fire, they
had any views which could be called religious or theological. The
psychology of modern savages is no clew to the minds of the people who
wrought tools of stone in the world of the mammoth and the RHINOCEROS
TICHIRHINUS. If the first stage of man's development, which was of such
critical importance for his destinies, was pre-animistic, Comte's law of
progress fails, for it does not cover the ground.
In another way, Comte's system may be criticised for failing to cover
the ground, if it is regarded as a philosophy of history. In accordance
with "the happy artifice of Condorcet," he assumes that the growth of
European civilisation is the only history that matters, and discards
entirely the civilisations, for instance, of India and China. This
assumption is much more than an artifice, and he has not scientifically
justified it. [Footnote: A propos of the view that only European
civilisation matters it has been well observed that "human history is
not unitary but pluralistic": F. J. Teggart, The Processes of History,
p. 24 (1918).]
The reader of the PHILOSOPHIE POSITIVE will also observe that Comte
has not grappled with a fundamental question which has to be faced in
unravelling the woof of history or seeking a law of events. I mean the
question of contingency. It must be remembered that contingency does not
in the least affect the doctrine of determinism; it is compatible with
the strictest interpretation of the principle of causation. A particular
example may be taken to show what it implies. [Footnote: On contingency
and the "chapter of accidents" see Cournot, Considerations sur la marche
des idees et des evenements dans les temps modernes (1872), i. 16 sqq.
I have discussed the subject and given some illustrations in a short
paper, entitled "Cleopatra's Nose," in the Annual of the Rationalist
Press Association for 1916.]
It may plausibly be argued that a military dictatorship was an
inevitable sequence of the French Revolution. This may not be true, but
let us assume it. Let us further assume that, given Napoleon, it was
inevitable that he should be the dictator. But Napoleon's existence was
due to an independent causal chain which had nothing whatever to do with
the course of political events. He might have died in his boyhood by
disease or by an accident, and the fact that he survived was due to
causes which were similarly independent of the causal chain which, as we
are assuming, led necessarily to an epoch of monarchical government. The
existence of a man of his genius and character at the given moment was
a contingency which profoundly affected the course of history. If he
had not been there another dictator would have grasped the helm, but
obviously would not have done what Napoleon did.
It is clear that the whole history of man has been modified at every
stage by such contingencies, which may be defined as the collisions
of two independent causal chains. Voltaire was perfectly right when he
emphasised the role of chance in history, though he did not realise what
it meant. This factor would explain the oscillations and deflections
which Comte admits in the movement of historical progression. But the
question arises whether it may not also have once and again definitely
altered the direction of the movement. Can the factor be regarded as
virtually negligible by those who, like Comte, are concerned with the
large perspective of human development and not with the details of an
episode? Or was Renouvier right in principle when he maintained "the
real possibility that the sequence of events from the Emperor Nerva to
the Emperor Charlemagne might have been radically different from what it
actually was"? [Footnote: He illustrated this proposition by a fanciful
reconstruction of European history from 100 to 800 A.D. in his UCHRONIE,
1876. He contended that there is no definite law of progress: "The true
law lies in the equal possibility of progress or regress for societies
as for individuals."]
6.
It does not concern us here to examine the defects of Comte's view of
the course of European history. But it interests us to observe that
his synthesis of human Progress is, like Hegel's, what I have called a
closed system. Just as his own absolute philosophy marked for Hegel the
highest and ultimate term of human development, so for Comte the coming
society whose organisation he adumbrated was the final state of humanity
beyond which there would be no further movement. It would take time
to perfect the organisation, and the period would witness a continuous
increase of knowledge, but the main characteristics were definitely
fixed. Comte did not conceive that the distant future, could he survive
to experience it, could contain any surprises for him. His theory of
Progress thus differed from the eighteenth century views which vaguely
contemplate an indefinite development and only profess to indicate some
general tendencies. He expressly repudiated this notion of INDEFINITE
progress; the data, he said, justify only the inference of CONTINUOUS
progress, which is a different thing.
A second point in which Comte in his view of Progress differed from
the French philosophers of the preceding age is this. Condorcet and his
predecessors regarded it exclusively from the eudaemonic point of view.
The goal of Progress for them was the attainment of human felicity. With
felicity Comte is hardly more concerned than Hegel. The establishment
of a fuller harmony between men and their environment in the third stage
will no doubt mean happiness. But this consideration lies outside the
theory, and to introduce it would only intrude an unscientific
element into the analysis. The course of development is determined
by intellectual ideas, and he treats these as independent of, and
indifferent to, eudaemonic motives.
A third point to be noted is the authoritarian character of the regime
of the future. Comte's ideal state would be as ill to live in for any
unfortunate being who values personal liberty as a theocracy or any
socialistic Utopia. He had as little sympathy with liberty as Plato
or as Bossuet, and less than the eighteenth century philosophers. This
feature, common to Comte and the Saint-Simonians, was partly due to the
reaction against the Revolution, but it also resulted from the logic of
the man of science. If sociological laws are positively established as
certainly as the law of gravitation, no room is left for opinion; right
social conduct is definitely fixed; the proper functions of every member
of society admit of no question; therefore the claim to liberty is
perverse and irrational. It is the same argument which some modern
exponents of Eugenics use to advocate a state tyranny in the matter of
human breeding.
When Comte was writing, the progressive movement in Europe was towards
increase of liberty in all its forms, national, civic, political, and
economical. On one hand there was the agitation for the release of
oppressed nationalities, on the other the growth of liberalism in
England and France. The aim of the liberalism of that period was to
restrict the functions of government; its spirit was distrust of the
state. As a political theory it was defective, as modern Liberals
acknowledge, but it was an important expression of the feeling that
the interests of society are best furthered by the free interplay of
individual actions and aims. It thus implicitly contained or pointed to
a theory of Progress sharply opposed to Comte's: that the realisation of
the fullest possible measure of individual liberty is the condition
of ensuring the maximum of energy and effectiveness in improving our
environment, and therefore the condition of attaining public felicity.
Right or wrong, this theory reckons with fundamental facts of human
nature which Comte ignored.
7.
Comte spent the later years of his life in composing another huge work,
on social reorganisation. It included a new religion, in which Humanity
was the object of worship, but made no other important addition to the
speculations of his earlier manhood, though he developed them further.
The Course of Positive Philosophy was not a book that took the public by
storm. We are told by a competent student of social theories in France
that the author's name was little known in his own country till about
1855, when his greatness began to win recognition, and his influence to
operate. [Footnote: Weill, Hist. du mouvement social, p. 21.] Even then
his work can hardly have been widely read. But through men like Littre
and Taine, whose conceptions of history were moulded by his teaching,
and men like Mill, whom he stimulated, as well as through the disciples
who adopted Positivism as a religion, his leading principles, detached
from his system, became current in the world of speculation.
[Footnote: The influence of Comte. The manner in which ideas filter
through, as it were, underground and emerge oblivious of their source
is illustrated by the German historian Lamprecht's theory of historical
development. He surveyed the history of a people as a series of what
he called typical periods, each of which is marked by a collective
psychical character expressing itself in every department of life. He
named this a diapason. Lamprecht had never read Comte, and he imagined
that this principle, on which he based his kulturhistorische Methode,
was original. But his psychical diapason is the psychical consensus of
Comte, whose system, as we have seen, depended on the proposition that
a given social organisation corresponds in a definite way to the
contemporary stage of mental development; and Comte had derived the
principle from Saint-Simon. Cf. his pamphlet Die kulturhistorische
Methode (1900). The succession of "typical period" was worked out for
Germany in his History of the German People.]
He laid the foundations of sociology, convincing many minds that the
history of civilisation is subject to general laws, or, in other words,
that a science of society is possible. In England this idea was still a
novelty when Mill's System of Logic appeared in 1843.
The publication of this work, which attempted to define the rules for
the investigation of truth in all fields of inquiry and to provide tests
for the hypotheses of science, was a considerable event, whether we
regard its value and range or its prolonged influence on education.
Mill, who had followed recent French thought attentively and was
particularly impressed by the system of Comte, recognised that a new
method of investigating social phenomena had been inaugurated by the
thinkers who set out to discover the "law" of human progression. He
proclaimed and welcomed it as superior to previous methods, and at the
same time pointed out its limitations.
Till about fifty years ago, he said, generalisations on man and society
have erred by implicitly assuming that human nature and society will for
ever revolve in the same orbit and exhibit virtually the same phenomena.
This is still the view of the ostentatiously practical votaries of
common sense in Great Britain; whereas the more reflective minds of the
present age, analysing historical records more minutely, have adopted
the opinion that the human race is in a state of necessary progression.
The reciprocal action between circumstances and human nature, from which
social phenomena result, must produce either a cycle or a trajectory.
While Vico maintained the conception of periodic cycles, his successors
have universally adopted the idea of a trajectory or progress, and are
endeavouring to discover its law. [Footnote: Philosophical writers in
England in the middle of the century paid more attention to Cousin than
to Comte or Saint-Simon. J. D. Morell, in his forgotten History and
Critical View of Speculative Philosophy (1846), says that eclecticism is
the philosophy of human progress (vol. ii. 635, 2nd ed.). He conceived
the movement of humanity as that of a spiral, ever tending to a higher
perfection (638).]
But they have fallen into a misconception in imagining that if they can
find a law of uniformity in the succession of events they can infer the
future from the past terms of the series. For such a law would only be
an "empirical law"; it would not be a causal law or an ultimate law.
However rigidly uniform, there is no guarantee that it would apply to
phenomena outside those from which it was derived. It must itself depend
on laws of mind and character (psychology and ethology). When those
laws are known and the nature of the dependence is explained, when the
determining causes of all the changes constituting the progress are
understood, then the empirical law will be elevated to a scientific law,
then only will it be possible to predict.
Thus Mill asserted that if the advanced thinkers who are engaged on
the subject succeed in discovering an empirical law from the data of
history, it may be converted into a scientific law by deducing it a
priori from the principles of human nature. In the meantime, he argued
that what is already known of those principles justifies the important
conclusion that the order of general human progression will mainly
depend on the order of progression in the intellectual convictions of
mankind.
Throughout his exposition Mill uses "progress" in a neutral sense,
without implying that the progression necessarily means improvement.
Social science has still to demonstrate that the changes determined by
human nature do mean improvement. But in warning the reader of this
he declares himself to be personally an optimist, believing that the
general tendency, saving temporary exceptions, is in the direction of a
better and happier state.
8.
Twenty years later [Footnote: In later editions of the Logic.] Mill was
able to say that the conception of history as subject to general
laws had "passed into the domain of newspaper and ordinary political
discussion." Buckle's HISTORY OF CIVILISATION IN ENGLAND [Footnote: 2
Vol. i. appeared in 1857, vol. ii. in 1861.] which enjoyed an immediate
success, did a great deal to popularise the idea. In this stimulating
work Buckle took the fact of Progress for granted; his purpose was to
investigate its causes. Considering the two general conditions on which
all events depend, human nature and external nature, he arrived at two
conclusions: (1) In the early stage of history the influence of man's
external environment is the more decisive factor; but as time goes on
the roles are gradually inverted, and now it is his own nature that is
principally responsible for his development. (2) Progress is determined,
not by the emotional and moral faculties, but by the intellect;
[Footnote: This was the view of Jouffroy, Comte, and Mill; Buckle
popularised it.] the emotional and moral faculties are stationary, and
therefore religion is not a decisive influence in the onward movement
of humanity. "I pledge myself to show that the progress Europe has
made from barbarism to civilisation is entirely due to its intellectual
activity.... In what may be called the innate and original morals of
mankind there is, so far as we are aware, no progress." [Footnote:
Buckle has been very unjustly treated by some critics, but has found an
able defender in Mr. J.M. Robertson (Buckle and his Critics (1895)). The
remarks of Benn (History of Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, ii.
182 sqq.) are worth reading.]
Buckle was convinced that social phenomena exhibit the same undeviating
regularity as natural phenomena. In this belief he was chiefly
influenced by the investigations of the Belgian statistician Quetelet
(1835). "Statistics," he said, "has already thrown more light on the
study of human nature than all the sciences put together." From the
regularity with which the same crimes recur in the same state of
society, and many other constant averages, he inferred that all actions
of individuals result directly from the state of society in which they
live, and that laws are operating which, if we take large enough numbers
into account, scarcely undergo any sensible perturbation. [Footnote:
Kant had already appealed to statistics in a similar sense; see above,
p. 243.] Thus the evidence of statistics points to the conclusion that
progress is not determined by the acts of individual men, but depends
on general laws of the intellect which govern the successive stages of
public opinion. The totality of human actions at any given time depends
on the totality of knowledge and the extent of its diffusion.
There we have the theory that history is subject to general laws in its
most unqualified form, based on a fallacious view of the significance
of statistical facts. Buckle's attempt to show the operation of general
laws in the actual history of man was disappointing. When he went on to
review the concrete facts of the historical process, his own political
principles came into play, and he was more concerned with denouncing
the tendencies of which he did not approve than with extricating general
laws from the sequence of events. His comments on religious persecution
and the obscurantism of governments and churches were instructive
and timely, but they did not do much to exhibit a set of rigid laws
governing and explaining the course of human development.
The doctrine that history is under the irresistible control of law
was also popularised by an American physiologist, J. W. Draper, whose
HISTORY OF THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE appeared in 1864 and
was widely read. His starting-point was a superficial analogy between
a society and an individual. "Social advancement is as completely under
the control of natural law as a bodily growth. The life of an individual
is a miniature of the life of a nation," and "particles" in the
individual organism answer to persons in the political organism. Both
have the same epochs--infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old age--and
therefore European progress exhibits five phases, designated as
Credulity, Inquiry, Faith, Reason, Decrepitude. Draper's conclusion was
that Europe, now in the fourth period, is hastening to a long period
of decrepitude. The prospect did not dismay him; decrepitude is
the culmination of Progress, and means the organisation of national
intellect. That has already been achieved in China, and she owes to it
her well-being and longevity. "Europe is inevitably hastening to become
what China is. In her we may see what we shall be like when we are old."
Judged by any standard, Draper's work is much inferior to Buckle's, but
both these books, utterly different though they were in both conception
and treatment, performed a similar function. Each in its own way
diffused the view which had originated in France, that civilisation is
progression and, like nature, subject to general laws.