described--divided between a feudal and theological school, now effete,
and a democratic and metaphysical one, of no value except for the
destruction of the former; the problem, how to render the social science
positive, must naturally have presented itself, more or less distinctly,
to superior minds. M. Comte examines and criticises, for the most part
justly, some of the principal efforts which have been made by individual
thinkers for this purpose. But the weak side of his philosophy comes out
prominently in his strictures on the only systematic attempt yet made by
any body of thinkers, to constitute a science, not indeed of social
phenomena generally, but of one great class or division of them. We
mean, of course, political economy, which (with a reservation in favour
of the speculations of Adam Smith as valuable preparatory studies for
science) he deems unscientific, unpositive, and a mere branch of
metaphysics, that comprehensive category of condemnation in which he
places all attempts at positive science which are not in his opinion
directed by a right scientific method. Any one acquainted with the
writings of political economists need only read his few pages of
animadversions on them (iv. 193 to 205), to learn how extremely
superficial M. Comte can sometimes be. He affirms that they have added
nothing really new to the original _aperçus_ of Adam Smith; when every
one who has read them knows that they have added so much as to have
changed the whole aspect of the science, besides rectifying and clearing
up in the most essential points the _aperçus_ themselves. He lays an
almost puerile stress, for the purpose of disparagement, on the
discussions about the meaning of words which are found in the best books
on political economy, as if such discussions were not an indispensable
accompaniment of the progress of thought, and abundant in the history of
every physical science. On the whole question he has but one remark of
any value, and that he misapplies; namely, that the study of the
conditions of national wealth as a detached subject is unphilosophical,
because, all the different aspects of social phaenomena acting and
reacting on one another, they cannot be rightly understood apart: which
by no means proves that the material and industrial phaenomena of
society are not, even by themselves, susceptible of useful
generalizations, but only that these generalizations must necessarily be
relative to a given form of civilization and a given stage of social
advancement. This, we apprehend, is what no political economist would
deny. None of them pretend that the laws of wages, profits, values,
prices, and the like, set down in their treatises, would be strictly
true, or many of them true at all, in the savage state (for example), or
in a community composed of masters and slaves. But they do think, with
good reason, that whoever understands the political economy of a country
with the complicated and manifold civilization of the nations of Europe,
can deduce without difficulty the political economy of any other state
of society, with the particular circumstances of which he is equally
well acquainted.[14] We do not pretend that political economy has never
been prosecuted or taught in a contracted spirit. As often as a study is
cultivated by narrow minds, they will draw from it narrow conclusions.
If a political economist is deficient in general knowledge, he will
exaggerate the importance and universality of the limited class of
truths which he knows. All kinds of scientific men are liable to this
imputation, and M. Comte is never weary of urging it against them;
reproaching them with their narrowness of mind, the petty scale of their
thoughts, their incapacity for large views, and the stupidity of those
they occasionally attempt beyond the bounds of their own subjects.
Political economists do not deserve these reproaches more than other
classes of positive inquirers, but less than most. The principal error
of narrowness with which they are frequently chargeable, is that of
regarding, not any economical doctrine, but their present experience of
mankind, as of universal validity; mistaking temporary or local phases
of human character for human nature itself; having no faith in the
wonderful pliability of the human mind; deeming it impossible, in spite
of the strongest evidence, that the earth can produce human beings of a
different type from that which is familiar to them in their own age, or
even, perhaps, in their own country. The only security against this
narrowness is a liberal mental cultivation, and all it proves is that
a person is not likely to be a good political economist who is nothing
else.
Thus far, we have had to do with M. Comte, as a sociologist, only in his
critical capacity. We have now to deal with him as a constructor--the
author of a sociological system. The first question is that of the
Method proper to the study. His view of this is highly instructive.
The Method proper to the Science of Society must be, in substance, the
same as in all other sciences; the interrogation and interpretation of
experience, by the twofold process of Induction and Deduction. But its
mode of practising these operations has features of peculiarity. In
general, Induction furnishes to science the laws of the elementary
facts, from which, when known, those of the complex combinations are
thought out deductively: specific observation of complex phaenomena
yields no general laws, or only empirical ones; its scientific function
is to verify the laws obtained by deduction. This mode of philosophizing
is not adequate to the exigencies of sociological investigation. In
social phaemomena the elementary facts are feelings and actions, and the
laws of these are the laws of human nature, social facts being the
results of human acts and situations. Since, then, the phaenomena of man
in society result from his nature as an individual being, it might be
thought that the proper mode of constructing a positive Social Science
must be by deducing it from the general laws of human nature, using the
facts of history merely for verification. Such, accordingly, has been
the conception of social science by many of those who have endeavoured
to render it positive, particularly by the school of Bentham. M. Comte
considers this as an error. We may, he says, draw from the universal
laws of human nature some conclusions (though even these, we think,
rather precarious) concerning the very earliest stages of human
progress, of which there are either no, or very imperfect, historical
records. But as society proceeds in its development, its phaenomena are
determined, more and more, not by the simple tendencies of universal
human nature, but by the accumulated influence of past generations over
the present. The human beings themselves, on the laws of whose nature
the facts of history depend, are not abstract or universal but
historical human beings, already shaped, and made what they are, by
human society. This being the case, no powers of deduction could enable
any one, starting from the mere conception of the Being Man, placed in a
world such as the earth may have been before the commencement of human
agency, to predict and calculate the phaenomena of his development such
as they have in fact proved. If the facts of history, empirically
considered, had not given rise to any generalizations, a deductive study
of history could never have reached higher than more or less plausible
conjecture. By good fortune (for the case might easily have been
otherwise) the history of our species, looked at as a comprehensive
whole, does exhibit a determinate course, a certain order of
development: though history alone cannot prove this to be a necessary
law, as distinguished from a temporary accident. Here, therefore, begins
the office of Biology (or, as we should say, of Psychology) in the
social science. The universal laws of human nature are part of the data
of sociology, but in using them we must reverse the method of the
deductive physical sciences: for while, in these, specific experience
commonly serves to verify laws arrived at by deduction, in sociology it
is specific experience which suggests the laws, and deduction which
verifies them. If a sociological theory, collected from historical
evidence, contradicts the established general laws of human nature; if
(to use M. Comte's instances) it implies, in the mass of mankind, any
very decided natural bent, either in a good or in a bad direction; if it
supposes that the reason, in average human beings, predominates over the
desires, or the disinterested desires over the personal; we may know
that history has been misinterpreted, and that the theory is false. On
the other hand, if laws of social phaenomena, empirically generalized
from history, can when once suggested be affiliated to the known laws of
human nature; if the direction actually taken by the developments and
changes of human society, can be seen to be such as the properties of
man and of his dwelling-place made antecedently probable, the empirical
generalizations are raised into positive laws, and Sociology becomes a
science.
Much has been said and written for centuries past, by the practical or
empirical school of politicians, in condemnation of theories founded on
principles of human nature, without an historical basis; and the
theorists, in their turn, have successfully retaliated on the
practicalists. But we know not any thinker who, before M. Comte, had
penetrated to the philosophy of the matter, and placed the necessity of
historical studies as the foundation of sociological speculation on the
true footing. From this time any political thinker who fancies himself
able to dispense with a connected view of the great facts of history, as
a chain of causes and effects, must be regarded as below the level of
the age; while the vulgar mode of using history, by looking in it for
parallel cases, as if any cases were parallel, or as if a single
instance, or even many instances not compared and analysed, could reveal
a law, will be more than ever, and irrevocably, discredited.
The inversion of the ordinary relation between Deduction and Induction
is not the only point in which, according to M. Comte, the Method proper
to Sociology differs from that of the sciences of inorganic nature. The
common order of science proceeds from the details to the whole. The
method of Sociology should proceed from the whole to the details. There
is no universal principle for the order of study, but that of proceeding
from the known to the unknown; finding our way to the facts at whatever
point is most open to our observation. In the phaenomena of the social
state, the collective phaenomenon is more accessible to us than the
parts of which it is composed. This is already, in a great degree, true
of the mere animal body. It is essential to the idea of an organism, and
it is even more true of the social organism than of the individual. The
state of every part of the social whole at any time, is intimately
connected with the contemporaneous state of all the others. Religious
belief, philosophy, science, the fine arts, the industrial arts,
commerce, navigation, government, all are in close mutual dependence on
one another, insomuch that when any considerable change takes place in
one, we may know that a parallel change in all the others has preceded
or will follow it. The progress of society from one general state to
another is not an aggregate of partial changes, but the product of a
single impulse, acting through all the partial agencies, and can
therefore be most easily traced by studying them together. Could it even
be detected in them separately, its true nature could not be understood
except by examining them in the _ensemble_. In constructing, therefore,
a theory of society, all the different aspects of the social
organization must be taken into consideration at once.
Our space is not consistent with inquiring into all the limitations of
this doctrine. It requires many of which M. Comte's theory takes no
account. There is one, in particular, dependent on a scientific artifice
familiar to students of science, especially of the applications of
mathematics to the study of nature. When an effect depends on several
variable conditions, some of which change less, or more slowly, than
others, we are often able to determine, either by reasoning or by
experiment, what would be the law of variation of the effect if its
changes depended only on some of the conditions, the remainder being
supposed constant. The law so found will be sufficiently near the truth
for all times and places in which the latter set of conditions do not
vary greatly, and will be a basis to set out from when it becomes
necessary to allow for the variations of those conditions also. Most of
the conclusions of social science applicable to practical use are of
this description. M. Comte's system makes no room for them. We have seen
how he deals with the part of them which are the most scientific in
character, the generalizations of political economy.
There is one more point in the general philosophy of sociology requiring
notice. Social phaenomena, like all others, present two aspects, the
statical, and the dynamical; the phaenomena of equilibrium, and those of
motion. The statical aspect is that of the laws of social existence,
considered abstractedly from progress, and confined to what is common to
the progressive and the stationary state. The dynamical aspect is that
of social progress. The statics of society is the study of the
conditions of existence and permanence of the social state. The dynamics
studies the laws of its evolution. The first is the theory of the
_consensus,_ or interdependence of social phaenomena. The second is the
theory of their filiation.
The first division M. Comte, in his great work, treats in a much more
summary manner than the second; and it forms, to our thinking, the
weakest part of the treatise. He can hardly have seemed even to himself
to have originated, in the statics of society, anything new,[15] unless
his revival of the Catholic idea of a Spiritual Power may be so
considered. The remainder, with the exception of detached thoughts, in
which even his feeblest productions are always rich, is trite, while in
our judgment far from being always true.
He begins by a statement of the general properties of human nature which
make social existence possible. Man has a spontaneous propensity to the
society of his fellow-beings, and seeks it instinctively, for its own
sake, and not out of regard to the advantages it procures for him,
which, in many conditions of humanity, must appear to him very
problematical. Man has also a certain, though moderate, amount of
natural benevolence. On the other hand, these social propensities are by
nature weaker than his selfish ones; and the social state, being mainly
kept in existence through the former, involves an habitual antagonism
between the two. Further, our wants of all kinds, from the purely
organic upwards, can only be satisfied by means of labour, nor does
bodily labour suffice, without the guidance of intelligence. But labour,
especially when prolonged and monotonous, is naturally hateful, and
mental labour the most irksome of all; and hence a second antagonism,
which must exist in all societies whatever. The character of the society
is principally determined by the degree in which the better incentive,
in each of these cases, makes head against the worse. In both the
points, human nature is capable of great amelioration. The social
instincts may approximate much nearer to the strength of the personal
ones, though never entirely coming up to it; the aversion to labour in
general, and to intellectual labour in particular, may be much weakened,
and the predominance of the inclinations over the reason greatly
diminished, though never completely destroyed. The spirit of improvement
results from the increasing strength of the social instincts, combined
with the growth of an intellectual activity, which guiding the personal
propensities, inspires each individual with a deliberate desire to
improve his condition. The personal instincts left to their own
guidance, and the indolence and apathy natural to mankind, are the
sources which mainly feed the spirit of Conservation. The struggle
between the two spirits is an universal incident of the social state.
The next of the universal elements in human society is family life;
which M. Comte regards as originally the sole, and always the principal,
source of the social feelings, and the only school open to mankind in
general, in which unselfishness can be learnt, and the feelings and
conduct demanded by social relations be made habitual. M. Comte takes
this opportunity of declaring his opinions on the proper constitution of
the family, and in particular of the marriage institution. They are of
the most orthodox and conservative sort. M. Comte adheres not only to
the popular Christian, but to the Catholic view of marriage in its
utmost strictness, and rebukes Protestant nations for having tampered
with the indissolubility of the engagement, by permitting divorce. He
admits that the marriage institution has been, in various respects,
beneficially modified with the advance of society, and that we may not
yet have reached the last of these modifications; but strenuously
maintains that such changes cannot possibly affect what he regards as
the essential principles of the institution--the irrevocability of the
engagement, and the complete subordination of the wife to the husband,
and of women generally to men; which are precisely the great vulnerable
points of the existing constitution of society on this important
subject. It is unpleasant to have to say it of a philosopher, but the
incidents of his life which have been made public by his biographers
afford an explanation of one of these two opinions: he had quarrelled
with his wife.[16] At a later period, under the influence of
circumstances equally personal, his opinions and feelings respecting
women were very much modified, without becoming more rational: in his
final scheme of society, instead of being treated as grown children,
they were exalted into goddesses: honours, privileges, and immunities,
were lavished on them, only not simple justice. On the other question,
the irrevocability of marriage, M. Comte must receive credit for
impartiality, since the opposite doctrine would have better suited his
personal convenience: but we can give him no other credit, for his
argument is not only futile but refutes itself. He says that with
liberty of divorce, life would be spent in a constant succession of
experiments and failures; and in the same breath congratulates himself
on the fact, that modern manners and sentiments have in the main
prevented the baneful effects which the toleration of divorce in
Protestant countries might have been expected to produce. He did not
perceive that if modern habits and feelings have successfully resisted
what he deems the tendency of a less rigorous marriage law, it must be
because modern habits and feelings are inconsistent with the perpetual
series of new trials which he dreaded. If there are tendencies in human
nature which seek change and variety, there are others which demand
fixity, in matters which touch the daily sources of happiness; and one
who had studied history as much as M. Comte, ought to have known that
ever since the nomad mode of life was exchanged for the agricultural,
the latter tendencies have been always gaining ground on the former. All
experience testifies that regularity in domestic relations is almost in
direct proportion to industrial civilization. Idle life, and military
life with its long intervals of idleness, are the conditions to which,
either sexual profligacy, or prolonged vagaries of imagination on that
subject, are congenial. Busy men have no time for them, and have too
much other occupation for their thoughts: they require that home should
be a place of rest, not of incessantly renewed excitement and
disturbance. In the condition, therefore, into which modern society has
passed, there is no probability that marriages would often be contracted
without a sincere desire on both sides that they should be permanent.
That this has been the case hitherto in countries where divorce was
permitted, we have on M. Comte's own showing: and everything leads us to
believe that the power, if granted elsewhere, would in general be used
only for its legitimate purpose--for enabling those who, by a blameless
or excusable mistake, have lost their first throw for domestic
happiness, to free themselves (with due regard for all interests
concerned) from the burthensome yoke, and try, under more favourable
auspices, another chance. Any further discussion of these great social
questions would evidently be incompatible with the nature and limits of
the present paper.
Lastly, a phaenomenon universal in all societies, and constantly
assuming a wider extension as they advance in their progress, is the
co-operation of mankind one with another, by the division of employments
and interchange of commodities and services; a communion which extends
to nations as well as individuals. The economic importance of this
spontaneous organization of mankind as joint workers with and for one
another, has often been illustrated. Its moral effects, in connecting
them by their interests, and as a more remote consequence, by their
sympathies, are equally salutary. But there are some things to be said
on the other side. The increasing specialisation of all employments; the
division of mankind into innumerable small fractions, each engrossed by
an extremely minute fragment of the business of society, is not without
inconveniences, as well moral as intellectual, which, if they could not
be remedied, would be a serious abatement from the benefits of advanced
civilization. The interests of the whole--the bearings of things on the
ends of the social union--are less and less present to the minds of men
who have so contracted a sphere of activity. The insignificant detail
which forms their whole occupation--the infinitely minute wheel they
help to turn in the machinery of society--does not arouse or gratify any
feeling of public spirit, or unity with their fellow-men. Their work is
a mere tribute to physical necessity, not the glad performance of a
social office. This lowering effect of the extreme division of labour
tells most of all on those who are set up as the lights and teachers of
the rest. A man's mind is as fatally narrowed, and his feelings towards
the great ends of humanity as miserably stunted, by giving all his
thoughts to the classification of a few insects or the resolution of a
few equations, as to sharpening the points or putting on the heads of
pins. The "dispersive speciality" of the present race of scientific men,
who, unlike their predecessors, have a positive aversion to enlarged
views, and seldom either know or care for any of the interests of
mankind beyond the narrow limits of their pursuit, is dwelt on by M.
Comte as one of the great and growing evils of the time, and the one
which most retards moral and intellectual regeneration. To contend
against it is one of the main purposes towards which he thinks the
forces of society should be directed. The obvious remedy is a large and
liberal general education, preparatory to all special pursuits: and this
is M. Comte's opinion: but the education of youth is not in his
estimation enough: he requires an agency set apart for obtruding upon
all classes of persons through the whole of life, the paramount claims
of the general interest, and the comprehensive ideas that demonstrate
the mode in which human actions promote or impair it. In other words,
he demands a moral and intellectual authority, charged with the duty of
guiding men's opinions and enlightening and warning their consciences;
a Spiritual Power, whose judgments on all matters of high moment should
deserve, and receive, the same universal respect and deference which is
paid to the united judgment of astronomers in matters astronomical. The
very idea of such an authority implies that an unanimity has been
attained, at least in essentials, among moral and political thinkers,
corresponding or approaching to that which already exists in the other
sciences. There cannot be this unanimity, until the true methods of
positive science have been applied to all subjects, as completely as
they have been applied to the study of physical science: to this,
however, there is no real obstacle; and when once it is accomplished,
the same degree of accordance will naturally follow. The undisputed
authority which astronomers possess in astronomy, will be possessed on
the great social questions by Positive Philosophers; to whom will belong
the spiritual government of society, subject to two conditions: that
they be entirely independent, within their own sphere, of the temporal
government, and that they be peremptorily excluded from all share in it,
receiving instead the entire conduct of education.