Produced by Marc D'Hooghe
AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM
BY
JOHN STUART MILL
1865.
* * * * *
PART I.
THE COURS DE PHILOSOPHIE POSITIVE.
For some time much has been said, in England and on the Continent,
concerning "Positivism" and "the Positive Philosophy." Those phrases,
which during the life of the eminent thinker who introduced them had
made their way into no writings or discussions but those of his very few
direct disciples, have emerged from the depths and manifested themselves
on the surface of the philosophy of the age. It is not very widely known
what they represent, but it is understood that they represent something.
They are symbols of a recognised mode of thought, and one of sufficient
importance to induce almost all who now discuss the great problems of
philosophy, or survey from any elevated point of view the opinions of
the age, to take what is termed the Positivist view of things into
serious consideration, and define their own position, more or less
friendly or hostile, in regard to it. Indeed, though the mode of thought
expressed by the terms Positive and Positivism is widely spread, the
words themselves are, as usual, better known through the enemies of that
mode of thinking than through its friends; and more than one thinker who
never called himself or his opinions by those appellations, and
carefully guarded himself against being confounded with those who did,
finds himself, sometimes to his displeasure, though generally by a
tolerably correct instinct, classed with Positivists, and assailed as a
Positivist. This change in the bearings of philosophic opinion commenced
in England earlier than in France, where a philosophy of a contrary kind
had been more widely cultivated, and had taken a firmer hold on the
speculative minds of a generation formed by Royer-Collard, Cousin,
Jouffroy, and their compeers. The great treatise of M. Comte was
scarcely mentioned in French literature or criticism, when it was
already working powerfully on the minds of many British students and
thinkers. But, agreeably to the usual course of things in France, the
new tendency, when it set in, set in more strongly. Those who call
themselves Positivists are indeed not numerous; but all French writers
who adhere to the common philosophy, now feel it necessary to begin by
fortifying their position against "the Positivist school." And the mode
of thinking thus designated is already manifesting its importance by one
of the most unequivocal signs, the appearance of thinkers who attempt a
compromise or _juste milieu_ between it and its opposite. The acute
critic and metaphysician M. Taine, and the distinguished chemist M.
Berthelot, are the authors of the two most conspicuous of these
attempts.
The time, therefore, seems to have come, when every philosophic thinker
not only ought to form, but may usefully express, a judgment respecting
this intellectual movement; endeavouring to understand what it is,
whether it is essentially a wholesome movement, and if so, what is to be
accepted and what rejected of the direction given to it by its most
important movers. There cannot be a more appropriate mode of discussing
these points than in the form of a critical examination of the
philosophy of Auguste Comte; for which the appearance of a new edition
of his fundamental treatise, with a preface by the most eminent, in
every point of view, of his professed disciples, M. Littré, affords a
good opportunity. The name of M. Comte is more identified than any other
with this mode of thought. He is the first who has attempted its
complete systematization, and the scientific extension of it to all
objects of human knowledge. And in doing this he has displayed a
quantity and quality of mental power, and achieved an amount of success,
which have not only won but retained the high admiration of thinkers as
radically and strenuously opposed as it is possible to be, to nearly the
whole of his later tendencies, and to many of his earlier opinions. It
would have been a mistake had such thinkers busied themselves in the
first instance with drawing attention to what they regarded as errors in
his great work. Until it had taken the place in the world of thought
which belonged to it, the important matter was not to criticise it, but
to help in making it known. To have put those who neither knew nor were
capable of appreciating the greatness of the book, in possession of its
vulnerable points, would have indefinitely retarded its progress to a
just estimation, and was not needful for guarding against any serious
inconvenience. While a writer has few readers, and no influence except
on independent thinkers, the only thing worth considering in him is what
he can teach us: if there be anything in which he is less wise than we
are already, it may be left unnoticed until the time comes when his
errors can do harm. But the high place which M. Comte has now assumed
among European thinkers, and the increasing influence of his principal
work, while they make it a more hopeful task than before to impress and
enforce the strong points of his philosophy, have rendered it, for the
first time, not inopportune to discuss his mistakes. Whatever errors he
may have fallen into are now in a position to be injurious, while the
free exposure of them can no longer be so.
We propose, then, to pass in review the main principles of M. Comte's
philosophy; commencing with the great treatise by which, in this
country, he is chiefly known, and postponing consideration of the
writings of the last ten years of his life, except for the occasional
illustration of detached points.
When we extend our examination to these later productions, we shall
have, in the main, to reverse our judgment. Instead of recognizing, as
in the Cours de Philosophic Positive, an essentially sound view of
philosophy, with a few capital errors, it is in their general character
that we deem the subsequent speculations false and misleading, while in
the midst of this wrong general tendency, we find a crowd of valuable
thoughts, and suggestions of thought, in detail. For the present we put
out of the question this signal anomaly in M. Comte's intellectual
career. We shall consider only the principal gift which he has left to
the world, his clear, full, and comprehensive exposition, and in part
creation, of what he terms the Positive Philosophy: endeavouring to
sever what in our estimation is true, from the much less which is
erroneous, in that philosophy as he conceived it, and distinguishing, as
we proceed, the part which is specially his, from that which belongs to
the philosophy of the age, and is the common inheritance of thinkers.
This last discrimination has been partially made in a late pamphlet, by
Mr Herbert Spencer, in vindication of his own independence of thought:
but this does not diminish the utility of doing it, with a less limited
purpose, here; especially as Mr Spencer rejects nearly all which
properly belongs to M. Comte, and in his abridged mode of statement does
scanty justice to what he rejects. The separation is not difficult, even
on the direct evidence given by M. Comte himself, who, far from claiming
any originality not really belonging to him, was eager to connect his
own most original thoughts with every germ of anything similar which he
observed in previous thinkers.
The fundamental doctrine of a true philosophy, according to M. Comte,
and the character by which he defines Positive Philosophy, is the
following:--We have no knowledge of anything but Phaenomena; and our
knowledge of phaenomena is relative, not absolute. We know not the
essence, nor the real mode of production, of any fact, but only its
relations to other facts in the way of succession or of similitude.
These relations are constant; that is, always the same in the same
circumstances. The constant resemblances which link phaenomena together,
and the constant sequences which unite them as antecedent and
consequent, are termed their laws. The laws of phaenomena are all we
know respecting them. Their essential nature, and their ultimate causes,
either efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable to us.
M. Comte claims no originality for this conception of human knowledge.
He avows that it has been virtually acted on from the earliest period by
all who have made any real contribution to science, and became
distinctly present to the minds of speculative men from the time of
Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, whom he regards as collectively the
founders of the Positive Philosophy. As he says, the knowledge which
mankind, even in the earliest ages, chiefly pursued, being that which
they most needed, was _fore_knowledge: "savoir, pour prevoir." When they
sought for the cause, it was mainly in order to control the effect or if
it was uncontrollable, to foreknow and adapt their conduct to it. Now,
all foresight of phaenomena, and power over them, depend on knowledge of
their sequences, and not upon any notion we may have formed respecting
their origin or inmost nature. We foresee a fact or event by means of
facts which are signs of it, because experience has shown them to be its
antecedents. We bring about any fact, other than our own muscular
contractions, by means of some fact which experience has shown to be
followed by it. All foresight, therefore, and all intelligent action,
have only been possible in proportion as men have successfully attempted
to ascertain the successions of phaenomena. Neither foreknowledge, nor
the knowledge which is practical power, can be acquired by any other
means.
The conviction, however, that knowledge of the successions and
co-existences of phaenomena is the sole knowledge accessible to us,
could not be arrived at in a very early stage of the progress of
thought. Men have not even now left off hoping for other knowledge, nor
believing that they have attained it; and that, when attained, it is, in
some undefinable manner, greatly more precious than mere knowledge of
sequences and co-existences. The true doctrine was not seen in its full
clearness even by Bacon, though it is the result to which all his
speculations tend: still less by Descartes. It was, however, correctly
apprehended by Newton.[1]
But it was probably first conceived in its entire generality by Hume,
who carries it a step further than Comte, maintaining not merely that
the only causes of phaenomena which can be known to us are other
phaenomena, their invariable antecedents, but that there is no other
kind of causes: cause, as he interprets it, _means_ the invariable
antecedent. This is the only part of Hume's doctrine which was contested
by his great adversary, Kant; who, maintaining as strenuously as Comte
that we know nothing of Things in themselves, of Noumena, of real
Substances and real Causes, yet peremptorily asserted their existence.
But neither does Comte question this: on the contrary, all his language
implies it. Among the direct successors of Hume, the writer who has best
stated and defended Comte's fundamental doctrine is Dr Thomas Brown. The
doctrine and spirit of Brown's philosophy are entirely Positivist, and
no better introduction to Positivism than the early part of his Lectures
has yet been produced. Of living thinkers we do not speak; but the same
great truth formed the groundwork of all the speculative philosophy of
Bentham, and pre-eminently of James Mill: and Sir William Hamilton's
famous doctrine of the Relativity of human knowledge has guided many to
it, though we cannot credit Sir William Hamilton himself with having
understood the principle, or been willing to assent to it if he had.
The foundation of M. Comte's philosophy is thus in no way peculiar to
him, but the general property of the age, however far as yet from being
universally accepted even by thoughtful minds.
The philosophy called Positive is not a recent invention of M. Comte,
but a simple adherence to the traditions of all the great scientific
minds whose discoveries have made the human race what it is. M. Comte
has never presented it in any other light. But he has made the doctrine
his own by his manner of treating it. To know rightly what a thing is,
we require to know, with equal distinctness, what it is not. To enter
into the real character of any mode of thought, we must understand what
other modes of thought compete with it. M. Comte has taken care that we
should do so. The modes of philosophizing which, according to him,
dispute ascendancy with the Positive, are two in number, both of them
anterior to it in date; the Theological, and the Metaphysical.
We use the words Theological, Metaphysical, and Positive, because they
are chosen by M. Comte as a vehicle for M. Comte's ideas. Any
philosopher whose thoughts another person undertakes to set forth,
has a right to require that it should be done by means of his own
nomenclature. They are not, however, the terms we should ourselves
choose. In all languages, but especially in English, they excite ideas
other than those intended. The words Positive and Positivism, in the
meaning assigned to them, are ill fitted to take, root in English soil;
while Metaphysical suggests, and suggested even to M. Comte, much that
in no way deserves to be included in his denunciation. The term
Theological is less wide of the mark, though the use of it as a term of
condemnation implies, as we shall see, a greater reach of negation than
need be included in the Positive creed. Instead of the Theological we
should prefer to speak of the Personal, or Volitional explanation of
nature; instead of Metaphysical, the Abstractional or Ontological: and
the meaning of Positive would be less ambiguously expressed in the
objective aspect by Phaenomenal, in the subjective by Experiential. But
M. Comte's opinions are best stated in his own phraseology; several of
them, indeed, can scarcely be presented in some of their bearings
without it.
The Theological, which is the original and spontaneous form of thought,
regards the facts of the universe as governed not by invariable laws of
sequence, but by single and direct volitions of beings, real or
imaginary, possessed of life and intelligence. In the infantile state of
reason and experience, individual objects are looked upon as animated.
The next step is the conception of invisible beings, each of whom
superintends and governs an entire class of objects or events. The last
merges this multitude of divinities in a single God, who made the whole
universe in the beginning, and guides and carries on its phaenomena by
his continued action, or, as others think, only modifies them from time
to time by special interferences.
The mode of thought which M. Comte terms Metaphysical, accounts for
phaenomena by ascribing them, not to volitions either sublunary or
celestial, but to realized abstractions. In this stage it is no longer
a god that causes and directs each of the various agencies of nature:
it is a power, or a force, or an occult quality, considered as real
existences, inherent in but distinct from the concrete bodies in which
they reside, and which they in a manner animate. Instead of Dryads
presiding over trees, producing and regulating their phaenomena, every
plant or animal has now a Vegetative Soul, the [Greek: Threptikè phygè]
of Aristotle. At a later period the Vegetative Soul has become a Plastic
Force, and still later, a Vital Principle. Objects now do all that they
do because it is their Essence to do so, or by reason of an inherent
Virtue. Phaenomena are accounted for by supposed tendencies and
propensities of the abstraction Nature; which, though regarded as
impersonal, is figured as acting on a sort of motives, and in a manner
more or less analogous to that of conscious beings. Aristotle affirms a
tendency of nature towards the best, which helps him to a theory of many
natural phaenomena. The rise of water in a pump is attributed to
Nature's horror of a vacuum. The fall of heavy bodies, and the ascent of
flame and smoke, are construed as attempts of each to get to its
_natural_ place. Many important consequences are deduced from the
doctrine that Nature has no breaks (non habet saltum). In medicine the
curative force (vis medicatrix) of Nature furnishes the explanation of
the reparative processes which modern physiologists refer each to its
own particular agencies and laws.
Examples are not necessary to prove to those who are acquainted with the
past phases of human thought, how great a place both the theological and
the metaphysical interpretations of phaenomena have historically
occupied, as well in the speculations of thinkers as in the familiar
conceptions of the multitude. Many had perceived before M. Comte that
neither of these modes of explanation was final: the warfare against
both of them could scarcely be carried on more vigorously than it
already was, early in the seventeenth century, by Hobbes. Nor is it
unknown to any one who has followed the history of the various physical
sciences, that the positive explanation of facts has substituted itself,
step by step, for the theological and metaphysical, as the progress of
inquiry brought to light an increasing number of the invariable laws of
phaenomena. In these respects M. Comte has not originated anything, but
has taken his place in a fight long since engaged, and on the side
already in the main victorious. The generalization which belongs to
himself, and in which he had not, to the best of our knowledge, been at
all anticipated, is, that every distinct class of human conceptions
passes through all these stages, beginning with the theological, and
proceeding through the metaphysical to the positive: the metaphysical
being a mere state of transition, but an indispensable one, from the
theological mode of thought to the positive, which is destined finally
to prevail, by the universal recognition that all phaemomena without
exception are governed by invariable laws, with which no volitions,
either natural or supernatural, interfere. This general theorem is
completed by the addition, that the theological mode of thought has
three stages, Fetichism, Polytheism, and Monotheism: the successive
transitions being prepared, and indeed caused, by the gradual uprising
of the two rival modes of thought, the metaphysical and the positive,
and in their turn preparing the way for the ascendancy of these; first
and temporarily of the metaphysical, finally of the positive.
This generalization is the most fundamental of the doctrines which
originated with M. Comte; and the survey of history, which occupies the
two largest volumes of the six composing his work, is a continuous
exemplification and verification of the law. How well it accords with
the facts, and how vast a number of the greater historical phaenomena it
explains, is known only to those who have studied its exposition, where
alone it can be found--in these most striking and instructive volumes.
As this theory is the key to M. Comte's other generalizations, all of
which arc more or less dependent on it; as it forms the backbone, if we
may so speak, of his philosophy, and, unless it be true, he has
accomplished little; we cannot better employ part of our space than in
clearing it from misconception, and giving the explanations necessary to
remove the obstacles which prevent many competent persons from assenting
to it.
It is proper to begin by relieving the doctrine from a religious
prejudice. The doctrine condemns all theological explanations, and
replaces them, or thinks them destined to be replaced, by theories which
take no account of anything but an ascertained order of phaenomena. It
is inferred that if this change were completely accomplished, mankind
would cease to refer the constitution of Nature to an intelligent will
or to believe at all in a Creator and supreme Governor of the world.
This supposition is the more natural, as M. Comte was avowedly of that
opinion. He indeed disclaimed, with some acrimony, dogmatic atheism, and
even says (in a later work, but the earliest contains nothing at
variance with it) that the hypothesis of design has much greater
verisimilitude than that of a blind mechanism. But conjecture, founded
on analogy, did not seem to him a basis to rest a theory on, in a mature
state of human intelligence. He deemed all real knowledge of a
commencement inaccessible to us, and the inquiry into it an overpassing
of the essential limits of our mental faculties. To this point, however,
those who accept his theory of the progressive stages of opinion are not
obliged to follow him. The Positive mode of thought is not necessarily a
denial of the supernatural; it merely throws back that question to the
origin of all things. If the universe had a beginning, its beginning, by
the very conditions of the case, was supernatural; the laws of nature
cannot account for their own origin. The Positive philosopher is free to
form his opinion on the subject, according to the weight he attaches to
the analogies which are called marks of design, and to the general
traditions of the human race. The value of these evidences is indeed a
question for Positive philosophy, but it is not one upon which Positive
philosophers must necessarily be agreed. It is one of M. Comte's
mistakes that he never allows of open questions. Positive Philosophy
maintains that within the existing order of the universe, or rather of
the part of it known to us, the direct determining cause of every
phaenomenon is not supernatural but natural. It is compatible with this
to believe, that the universe was created, and even that it is
continuously governed, by an Intelligence, provided we admit that the
intelligent Governor adheres to fixed laws, which are only modified or
counteracted by other laws of the same dispensation, and are never
either capriciously or providentially departed from. 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 Positive 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.
There is a corresponding misconception to be corrected respecting the
Metaphysical mode of thought. In repudiating metaphysics, M. Comte did
not interdict himself from analysing or criticising any of the abstract
conceptions of the mind. He was not ignorant (though he sometimes seemed
to forget) that such analysis and criticism are a necessary part of the
scientific process, and accompany the scientific mind in all its
operations. What he condemned was the habit of conceiving these mental
abstractions as real entities, which could exert power, produce
phaenomena, and the enunciation of which could be regarded as a theory
or explanation of facts. Men of the present day with difficulty believe
that so absurd a notion was ever really entertained, so repugnant is it
to the mental habits formed by long and assiduous cultivation of the
positive sciences. But those sciences, however widely cultivated, have
never formed the basis of intellectual education in any society. It is
with philosophy as with religion: men marvel at the absurdity of other
people's tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities remain in their own,
and the same man is unaffectedly astonished that words can be mistaken
for things, who is treating other words as if they were things every
time he opens his mouth to discuss. No one, unless entirely ignorant of
the history of thought, will deny that the mistaking of abstractions for
realities pervaded speculation all through antiquity and the middle
ages. The mistake was generalized and systematized in the famous Ideas
of Plato. The Aristotelians carried it on. Essences, quiddities, virtues
residing in things, were accepted as a _bonâ fide_ explanation of
phaenomena. Not only abstract qualities, but the concrete names of
genera and species, were mistaken for objective existences. It was
believed that there were General Substances corresponding to all the
familiar classes of concrete things: a substance Man, a substance Tree,
a substance Animal, which, and not the individual objects so called,
were directly denoted by those names. The real existence of Universal
Substances was the question at issue in the famous controversy of the
later middle ages between Nominalism and Realism, which is one of the
turning points in the history of thought, being its first struggle to
emancipate itself from the dominion of verbal abstractions. The Realists
were the stronger party, but though the Nominalists for a time
succumbed, the doctrine they rebelled against fell, after a short
interval, with the rest of the scholastic philosophy. But while
universal substances and substantial forms, being the grossest kind of
realized abstractions, were the soonest discarded, Essences, Virtues,
and Occult Qualities long survived them, and were first completely
extruded from real existence by the Cartesians. In Descartes' conception
of science, all physical phaenomena were to be explained by matter and
motion, that is, not by abstractions but by invariable physical laws:
though his own explanations were many of them hypothetical, and turned
out to be erroneous. Long after him, however, fictitious entities (as
they are happily termed by Bentham) continued to be imagined as means of
accounting for the more mysterious phaenomena; above all in physiology,
where, under great varieties of phrase, mysterious _forces_ and
_principles_ were the explanation, or substitute for explanation, of the
phaenomena of organized beings. To modern philosophers these fictions
are merely the abstract names of the classes of phaenomena which
correspond to them; and it is one of the puzzles of philosophy, how
mankind, after inventing a set of mere names to keep together certain
combinations of ideas or images, could have so far forgotten their own
act as to invest these creations of their will with objective reality,
and mistake the name of a phaenomenon for its efficient cause. What was
a mystery from the purely dogmatic point of view, is cleared up by the
historical. These abstract words are indeed now mere names of
phaenomena, but were not so in their origin. To us they denote only the
phaenomena, because we have ceased to believe in what else they once
designated; and the employment of them in explanation is to us
evidently, as M. Comte says, the naïf reproduction of the phaenomenon
as the reason for itself: but it was not so in the beginning. The
metaphysical point of view was not a perversion of the positive, but a
transformation of the theological. The human mind, in framing a class of
objects, did not set out from the notion of a name, but from that of a
divinity. The realization of abstractions was not the embodiment of a
word, but the gradual disembodiment of a Fetish.
The primitive tendency or instinct of mankind is to assimilate all the
agencies which they perceive in Nature, to the only one of which they
are directly conscious, their own voluntary activity. Every object which
seems to originate power, that is, to act without being first visibly
acted upon, to communicate motion without having first received it, they
suppose to possess life, consciousness, will. This first rude conception
of nature can scarcely, however, have been at any time extended to all
phaenomena. The simplest observation, without which the preservation of
life would have been impossible, must have pointed out many uniformities
in nature, many objects which, under given circumstances, acted exactly
like one another: and whenever this was observed, men's natural and
untutored faculties led them to form the similar objects into a class,
and to think of them together: of which it was a natural consequence to
refer effects, which were exactly alike, to a single will, rather than
to a number of wills precisely accordant. But this single will could not
be the will of the objects themselves, since they were many: it must be
the will of an invisible being, apart from the objects, and ruling them
from an unknown distance. This is Polytheism. We are not aware that in
any tribe of savages or negroes who have been observed, Fetichism has
been found totally unmixed with Polytheism, and it is probable that the
two coexisted from the earliest period at which the human mind was
capable of forming objects into classes. Fetichism proper gradually
becomes limited to objects possessing a marked individuality. A
particular mountain or river is worshipped bodily (as it is even now by
the Hindoos and the South Sea Islanders) as a divinity in itself, not
the mere residence of one, long after invisible gods have been imagined
as rulers of all the great classes of phaenomena, even intellectual and
moral, as war, love, wisdom, beauty, &c. The worship of the earth
(Tellus or Pales) and of the various heavenly bodies, was prolonged into
the heart of Polytheism. Every scholar knows, though _littérateurs_ and
men of the world do not, that in the full vigour of the Greek religion,
the Sun and Moon, not a god and goddess thereof, were sacrificed to as
deities--older deities than Zeus and his descendants, belonging to the
earlier dynasty of the Titans (which was the mythical version of the
fact that their worship was older), and these deities had a distinct set
of fables or legends connected with them. The father of Phaëthon and the
lover of Endymion were not Apollo and Diana, whose identification with
the Sungod and the Moongoddess was a late invention. Astrolatry, which,
as M. Comte observes, is the last form of Fetichism, survived the other
forms, partly because its objects, being inaccessible, were not so soon
discovered to be in themselves inanimate, and partly because of the
persistent spontaneousness of their apparent motions.
As far as Fetichism reached, and as long as it lasted, there was no
abstraction, or classification of objects, and no room consequently for
the metaphysical mode of thought. But as soon as the voluntary agent,
whose will governed the phaenomenon, ceased to be the physical object
itself, and was removed to an invisible position, from which he or she
superintended an entire class of natural agencies, it began to seem
impossible that this being should exert his powerful activity from a
distance, unless through the medium of something present on the spot.
Through the same Natural Prejudice which made Newton unable to conceive
the possibility of his own law of gravitation without a subtle ether
filling up the intervening space, and through which the attraction could
be communicated--from this same natural infirmity of the human mind, it
seemed indispensable that the god, at a distance from the object, must
act through something residing in it, which was the immediate agent, the
god having imparted to the intermediate something the power whereby it
influenced and directed the object. When mankind felt a need for naming
these imaginary entities, they called them the _nature_ of the object,
or its _essence_, or _virtues_ residing in it, or by many other
different names. These metaphysical conceptions were regarded as
intensely real, and at first as mere instruments in the hands of the
appropriate deities. But the habit being acquired of ascribing not only
substantive existence, but real and efficacious agency, to the abstract
entities, the consequence was that when belief in the deities declined
and faded away, the entities were left standing, and a semblance of
explanation of phaenomena, equal to what existed before, was furnished
by the entities alone, without referring them to any volitions. When
things had reached this point, the metaphysical mode of thought, had
completely substituted itself for the theological.
Thus did the different successive states of the human intellect, even at
an early stage of its progress, overlap one another, the Fetichistic,
the Polytheistic, and the Metaphysical modes of thought coexisting even
in the same minds, while the belief in invariable laws, which
constitutes the Positive mode of thought, was slowly winning its way
beneath them all, as observation and experience disclosed in one class
of phaenomena after another the laws to which they are really subject.
It was this growth of positive knowledge which principally determined
the next transition in the theological conception of the universe, from
Polytheism to Monotheism.
It cannot be doubted that this transition took place very tardily. The
conception of a unity in Nature, which would admit of attributing it to
a single will, is far from being natural to man, and only finds
admittance after a long period of discipline and preparation, the
obvious appearances all pointing to the idea of a government by many
conflicting principles. We know how high a degree both of material
civilization and of moral and intellectual development preceded the
conversion of the leading populations of the world to the belief in one
God. The superficial observations by which Christian travellers have
persuaded themselves that they found their own Monotheistic belief in
some tribes of savages, have always been contradicted by more accurate
knowledge: those who have read, for instance, Mr Kohl's Kitchigami, know
what to think of the Great Spirit of the American Indians, who belongs
to a well-defined system of Polytheism, interspersed with large remains
of an original Fetichism. We have no wish to dispute the matter with
those who believe that Monotheism was the primitive religion,
transmitted to our race from its first parents in uninterrupted
tradition. By their own acknowledgment, the tradition was lost by all
the nations of the world except a small and peculiar people, in whom it
was miraculously kept alive, but who were themselves continually lapsing
from it, and in all the earlier parts of their history did not hold it
at all in its full meaning, but admitted the real existence of other
gods, though believing their own to be the most powerful, and to be the
Creator of the world. A greater proof of the unnaturalness of Monotheism
to the human mind before a certain period in its development, could not
well be required. The highest form of Monotheism, Christianity, has
persisted to the present time in giving partial satisfaction to the
mental dispositions that lead to Polytheism, by admitting into its
theology the thoroughly polytheistic conception of a devil. When
Monotheism, after many centuries, made its way to the Greeks and Romans
from the small corner of the world where it existed, we know how the
notion of daemons facilitated its reception, by making it unnecessary
for Christians to deny the existence of the gods previously believed in,
it being sufficient to place them under the absolute power of the new
God, as the gods of Olympus were already under that of Zeus, and as the
local deities of all the subjugated nations had been subordinated by
conquest to the divine patrons of the Roman State.
In whatever mode, natural or supernatural, we choose to account for the
early Monotheism of the Hebrews, there can be no question that its
reception by the Gentiles was only rendered possible by the slow
preparation which the human mind had undergone from the philosophers.
In the age of the Caesars nearly the whole educated and cultivated class
had outgrown the polytheistic creed, and though individually liable to
returns of the superstition of their childhood, were predisposed (such
of them as did not reject all religion whatever) to the acknowledgment
of one Supreme Providence. It is vain to object that Christianity did
not find the majority of its early proselytes among the educated class:
since, except in Palestine, its teachers and propagators were mainly of
that class--many of them, like St Paul, well versed in the mental
culture of their time; and they had evidently found no intellectual
obstacle to the new doctrine in their own minds. We must not be deceived
by the recrudescence, at a much later date, of a metaphysical Paganism
in the Alexandrian and other philosophical schools, provoked not by
attachment to Polytheism, but by distaste for the political and social
ascendancy of the Christian teachers. The fact was, that Monotheism had
become congenial to the cultivated mind: and a belief which has gained
the cultivated minds of any society, unless put down by force, is
certain, sooner or later, to reach the multitude. Indeed the multitude
itself had been prepared for it, as already hinted, by the more and more
complete subordination of all other deities to the supremacy of Zeus;
from which the step to a single Deity, surrounded by a host of angels,
and keeping in recalcitrant subjection an army of devils, was by no
means difficult.
By what means, then, had the cultivated minds of the Roman Empire been
educated for Monotheism? By the growth of a practical feeling of the
invariability of natural laws. Monotheism had a natural adaptation to
this belief, while Polytheism naturally and necessarily conflicted with
it. As men could not easily, and in fact never did, suppose that beings
so powerful had their power absolutely restricted, each to its special
department, the will of any divinity might always be frustrated by
another: and unless all their wills were in complete harmony (which
would itself be the most difficult to credit of all cases of
invariability, and would require beyond anything else the ascendancy
of a Supreme Deity) it was impossible that the course of any of the
phaenomena under their government could be invariable. But if, on the
contrary, all the phaenomena of the universe were under the exclusive
and uncontrollable influence of a single will, it was an admissible
supposition that this will might be always consistent with itself, and
might choose to conduct each class of its operations in an invariable
manner. In proportion, therefore, as the invariable laws of phaenomena
revealed themselves to observers, the theory which ascribed them all to
one will began to grow plausible; but must still have appeared
improbable until it had come to seem likely that invariability was the
common rule of all nature. The Greeks and Romans at the Christian era
had reached a point of advancement at which this supposition had become
probable. The admirable height to which geometry had already been
carried, had familiarized the educated mind with the conception of laws
absolutely invariable. The logical analysis of the intellectual
processes by Aristotle had shown a similar uniformity of law in the
realm of mind. In the concrete external world, the most imposing
phaenomena, those of the heavenly bodies, which by their power over the
imagination had done most to keep up the whole system of ideas connected
with supernatural agency, had been ascertained to take place in so
regular an order as to admit of being predicted with a precision which
to the notions of those days must have appeared perfect. And though an
equal degree of regularity had not been discerned in natural phaenomena
generally, even the most empirical observation had ascertained so many
cases of an uniformity _almost_ complete, that inquiring minds were
eagerly on the look-out for further indications pointing in the same
direction; and vied with one another in the formation of theories which,
though hypothetical and essentially premature, it was hoped would turn
out to be correct representations of invariable laws governing large
classes of phaenomena. When this hope and expectation became general,
they were already a great encroachment on the original domain of the
theological principle. Instead of the old conception, of events
regulated from day to day by the unforeseen and changeable volitions of
a legion of deities, it seemed more and more probable that all the
phaenomena of the universe took place according to rules which must have
been planned from the beginning; by which conception the function of the
gods seemed to be limited to forming the plans, and setting the
machinery in motion: their subsequent office appeared to be reduced to
a sinecure, or if they continued to reign, it was in the manner of
constitutional kings, bound by the laws to which they had previously
given their assent. Accordingly, the pretension of philosophers to
explain physical phaenomena by physical causes, or to predict their
occurrence, was, up to a very late period of Polytheism, regarded as
a sacrilegious insult to the gods. Anaxagoras was banished for it,
Aristotle had to fly for his life, and the mere unfounded suspicion of
it contributed greatly to the condemnation of Socrates. We are too well
acquainted with this form of the religious sentiment even now, to have
any difficulty in comprehending what must have been its violence then.
It was inevitable that philosophers should be anxious to get rid of at
least _these_ gods, and so escape from the particular fables which stood
immediately in their way; accepting a notion of divine government which
harmonized better with the lessons they learnt from the study of nature,
and a God concerning whom no mythos, as far as they knew, had yet been
invented.
Again, when the idea became prevalent that the constitution of every
part of Nature had been planned from the beginning, and continued to
take place as it had been planned, this was itself a striking feature of
resemblance extending through all Nature, and affording a presumption
that the whole was the work, not of many, but of the same hand. It must
have appeared vastly more probable that there should be one indefinitely
foreseeing Intelligence and immovable Will, than hundreds and thousands
of such. The philosophers had not at that time the arguments which might
have been grounded on universal laws not yet suspected, such as the law
of gravitation and the laws of heat; but there was a multitude, obvious
even to them, of analogies and homologies in natural phaenomena, which
suggested unity of plan; and a still greater number were raised up by
their active fancy, aided by their premature scientific theories, all of
which aimed at interpreting some phaenomenon by the analogy of others
supposed to be better known; assuming, indeed, a much greater similarity
among the various processes of Nature, than ampler experience has since
shown to exist. The theological mode of thought thus advanced from
Polytheism to Monotheism through the direct influence of the Positive
mode of thought, not yet aspiring to complete speculative ascendancy.
But, inasmuch as the belief in the invariability of natural laws was
still imperfect even in highly cultivated minds, and in the merest
infancy in the uncultivated, it gave rise to the belief in one God, but
not in an immovable one. For many centuries the God believed in was
flexible by entreaty, was incessantly ordering the affairs of mankind by
direct volitions, and continually reversing the course of nature by
miraculous interpositions; and this is believed still, wherever the
invariability of law has established itself in men's convictions as a
general, but not as an universal truth.
In the change from Polytheism to Monotheism, the Metaphysical mode of
thought contributed its part, affording great aid to the up-hill
struggle which the Positive spirit had to maintain against the
prevailing form, of the Theological. M. Comte, indeed, has considerably
exaggerated the share of the Metaphysical spirit in this mental
revolution, since by a lax use of terms he credits the Metaphysical mode
of thought with all that is due to dialectics and negative criticism--to
the exposure of inconsistencies and absurdities in the received
religions. But this operation is quite independent of the Metaphysical
mode of thought, and was no otherwise connected with it than in being
very generally carried on by the same minds (Plato is a brilliant
example), since the most eminent efficiency in it does not necessarily
depend on the possession of positive scientific knowledge. But the
Metaphysical spirit, strictly so called, did contribute largely to the
advent of Monotheism. The conception of impersonal entities, interposed
between the governing deity and the phaenomena, and forming the
machinery through which these are immediately produced, is not
repugnant, as the theory of direct supernatural volitions is, to the
belief in invariable laws. The entities not being, like the gods, framed
after the exemplar of men--being neither, like them, invested with human
passions, nor supposed, like them, to have power beyond the phaenomena
which are the special department of each, there was no fear of offending
them by the attempt to foresee and define their action, or by the
supposition that it took place according to fixed laws. The popular
tribunal which condemned Anaxagoras had evidently not risen to the
metaphysical point of view. Hippocrates, who was concerned only with a
select and instructed class, could say with impunity, speaking of what
were called the god-inflicted diseases, that to his mind they were
neither more nor less god-inflicted than all others. The doctrine of
abstract entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation between the
observed uniformity of the facts of nature, and their dependence on
arbitrary volition; since it was easier to conceive a single volition as
setting a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of itself, than to
suppose an inflexible constancy in so capricious and changeable a thing
as volition must then have appeared. But though the régime of
abstractions was in strictness compatible with Polytheism, it demanded
Monotheism as the condition of its free development. The received
Polytheism being only the first remove from Fetichism, its gods were too
closely mixed up in the daily details of phaenomena, and the habit of
propitiating them and ascertaining their will before any important
action of life was too inveterate, to admit, without the strongest shock
to the received system, the notion that they did not habitually rule by
special interpositions, but left phaenomena in all ordinary cases to the
operation of the essences or peculiar natures which they had first
implanted in them. Any modification of Polytheism which would have made
it fully compatible with the Metaphysical conception of the world, would
have been more difficult to effect than the transition to Monotheism, as
Monotheism was at first conceived.