society; and however much this ideal differs from that which is implied
more or less confusedly in the negative philosophy of the last three
centuries, we hold the amount of truth in the two to be about the same.
M. Comte has got hold of half the truth, and the so-called liberal or
revolutionary school possesses the other half; each sees what the other
does not see, and seeing it exclusively, draws consequences from it
which to the other appear mischievously absurd. It is, without doubt,
the necessary condition of mankind to receive most of their opinions on
the authority of those who have specially studied the matters to which
they relate. The wisest can act on no other rule, on subjects with which
they are not themselves thoroughly conversant; and the mass of mankind
have always done the like on all the great subjects of thought and
conduct, acting with implicit confidence on opinions of which they did
not know, and were often incapable of understanding, the grounds, but on
which as long as their natural guides were unanimous they fully relied,
growing uncertain and sceptical only when these became divided, and
teachers who as far as they could judge were equally competent,
professed contradictory opinions. Any doctrines which come recommended
by the nearly universal verdict of instructed minds will no doubt
continue to be, as they have hitherto been, accepted without misgiving
by the rest. The difference is, that with the wide diffusion of
scientific education among the whole people, demanded by M. Comte, their
faith, however implicit, would not be that of ignorance: it would not be
the blind submission of dunces to men of knowledge, but the intelligent
deference of those who know much, to those who know still more. It is
those who have some knowledge of astronomy, not those who have none at
all, who best appreciate how prodigiously more Lagrange or Laplace knew
than themselves. This is what can be said in favour of M. Comte. On the
contrary side it is to be said, that in order that this salutary
ascendancy over opinion should be exercised by the most eminent
thinkers, it is not necessary that they should be associated and
organized. The ascendancy will come of itself when the unanimity is
attained, without which it is neither desirable nor possible. It is
because astronomers agree in their teaching that astronomy is trusted,
and not because there is an Academy of Sciences or a Royal Society
issuing decrees or passing resolutions. A constituted moral authority
can only be required when the object is not merely to promulgate and
diffuse principles of conduct, but to direct the detail of their
application; to declare and inculcate, not duties, but each person's
duty, as was attempted by the spiritual authority of the middle ages.
From this extreme application of his principle M. Comte does not shrink.
A function of this sort, no doubt, may often be very usefully discharged
by individual members of the speculative class; but if entrusted to any
organized body, would involve nothing less than a spiritual despotism.
This however is what M. Comte really contemplated, though it would
practically nullify that peremptory separation of the spiritual from the
temporal power, which he justly deemed essential to a wholesome state of
society. Those whom an irresistible public opinion invested with the
right to dictate or control the acts of rulers, though without the means
of backing their advice by force, would have all the real power of the
temporal authorities, without their labours or their responsibilities.
M. Comte would probably have answered that the temporal rulers, having
the whole legal power in their hands, would certainly not pay to the
spiritual authority more than a very limited obedience: which amounts to
saying that the ideal form of society which he sets up, is only fit to
be an ideal because it cannot possibly be realized.
That education should be practically directed by the philosophic class,
when there is a philosophic class who have made good their claim to the
place in opinion hitherto filled by the clergy, would be natural and
indispensable. But that all education should be in the hands of a
centralized authority, whether composed of clergy or of philosophers,
and be consequently all framed on the same model, and directed to the
perpetuation of the same type, is a state of things which instead of
becoming more acceptable, will assuredly be more repugnant to mankind,
with every step of their progress in the unfettered exercise of their
highest faculties. We shall see, in the Second Part, the evils with
which the conception of the new Spiritual Power is pregnant, coming out
into full bloom in the more complete development which M. Comte gave to
the idea in his later years.
After this unsatisfactory attempt to trace the outline of Social
Statics, M. Comte passes to a topic on which he is much more at
home--the subject of his most eminent speculations; Social Dynamics, or
the laws of the evolution of human society.
Two questions meet us at the outset: Is there a natural evolution in
human affairs? and is that evolution an improvement? M. Comte resolves
them both in the affirmative by the same answer. The natural progress of
society consists in the growth of our human attributes, comparatively to
our animal and our purely organic ones: the progress of our humanity
towards an ascendancy over our animality, ever more nearly approached
though incapable of being completely realized. This is the character and
tendency of human development, or of what is called civilization; and
the obligation of seconding this movement--of working in the direction
of it--is the nearest approach which M. Comte makes in this treatise to
a general principle or standard of morality.
But as our more eminent, and peculiarly human, faculties are of various
orders, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic, the question presents
itself, is there any one of these whose development is the predominant
agency in the evolution of our species? According to M. Comte, the main
agent in the progress of mankind is their intellectual development.
Not because the intellectual is the most powerful part of our nature,
for, limited to its inherent strength, it is one of the weakest: but
because it is the guiding part, and acts not with its own strength
alone, but with the united force of all parts of our nature which it can
draw after it. In a social state the feelings and propensities cannot
act with their full power, in a determinate direction, unless the
speculative intellect places itself at their head. The passions are,
in the individual man, a more energetic power than a mere intellectual
conviction; but the passions tend to divide, not to unite, mankind: it
is only by a common belief that passions are brought to work together,
and become a collective force instead of forces neutralizing one
another. Our intelligence is first awakened by the stimulus of our
animal wants and of our stronger and coarser desires; and these for
a long time almost exclusively determine the direction in which our
intelligence shall work: but once roused to activity, it assumes more
and more the management of the operations of which stronger impulses are
the prompters, and constrains them to follow its lead, not by its own
strength, but because in the play of antagonistic forces, the path it
points out is (in scientific phraseology) the direction of least
resistance. Personal interests and feelings, in the social state, can
only obtain the maximum of satisfaction by means of co-operation, and
the necessary condition of co-operation is a common belief. All human
society, consequently, is grounded on a system of fundamental opinions,
which only the speculative faculty can provide, and which when provided,
directs our other impulses in their mode of seeking their gratification.
And hence the history of opinions, and of the speculative faculty, has
always been the leading element in the history of mankind.
This doctrine has been combated by Mr Herbert Spencer, in the pamphlet
already referred to; and we will quote, in his own words, the theory he
propounds in opposition to it:--
/#
"Ideas do not govern and overthrow the world; the world is governed
or overthrown by feelings, to which ideas serve only as guides. The
social mechanism does not rest finally upon opinions, but almost
wholly upon character. Not intellectual anarchy, but moral
antagonism, is the cause of political crises. All social phaenomena
are produced by the totality of human emotions and beliefs, of
which the emotions are mainly predetermined, while the beliefs are
mainly post-determined. Men's desires are chiefly inherited; but
their beliefs are chiefly acquired, and depend on surrounding
conditions; and the most important surrounding conditions depend on
the social state which the prevalent desires have produced. The
social state at any time existing, is the resultant of all the
ambitions, self-interests, fears, reverences, indignations,
sympathies, &c., of ancestral citizens and existing citizens. The
ideas current in this social state must, on the average, lie
congruous with the feelings of citizens, and therefore, on the
average, with the social state these feelings have produced. Ideas
wholly foreign to this social state cannot be evolved, and if
introduced from without, cannot get accepted--or, if accepted, die
out when the temporary phase of feeling which caused their
acceptance ends. Hence, though advanced ideas, when once
established, act upon society and aid its further advance, yet the
establishment of such ideas depends on the fitness of society for
receiving them. Practically, the popular character and the social
state determine what ideas shall be current; instead of the current
ideas determining the social state and the character. The
modification of men's moral natures, caused by the continuous
discipline of social life, which adapts them more and more to
social relations, is therefore the chief proximate cause of social
progress."[17]
#/
A great part of these statements would have been acknowledged as true by
M. Comte, and belong as much to his theory as to Mr Spencer's. The
re-action of all other mental and social elements upon the intellectual
not only is fully recognized by him, but his philosophy of history makes
great use of it, pointing out that the principal intellectual changes
could not have taken place unless changes in other elements of society
had preceded; but also showing that these were themselves consequences
of prior intellectual changes. It will not be found, on a fair
examination of what M. Comte has written, that he has overlooked any of
the truth that there is in Mr Spencer's theory. He would not indeed have
said (what Mr Spencer apparently wishes us to say) that the effects
which can be historically traced, for example to religion, were not
produced by the belief in God, but by reverence and fear of him. He
would have said that the reverence and fear presuppose the belief: that
a God must be believed in before he can be feared or reverenced. The
whole influence of the belief in a God upon society and civilization,
depends on the powerful human sentiments which are ready to attach
themselves to the belief; and yet the sentiments are only a social force
at all, through the definite direction given to them by that or some
other intellectual conviction; nor did the sentiments spontaneously
throw up the belief in a God, since in themselves they were equally
capable of gathering round some other object. Though it is true that
men's passions and interests often dictate their opinions, or rather
decide their choice among the two or three forms of opinion, which the
existing condition of human intelligence renders possible, this
disturbing cause is confined to morals, politics, and religion; and it
is the intellectual movement in other regions than these, which is at
the root of all the great changes in human affairs. It was not human
emotions and passions which discovered the motion of the earth, or
detected the evidence of its antiquity; which exploded Scholasticism,
and inaugurated the exploration of nature; which invented printing,
paper, and the mariner's compass. Yet the Reformation, the English and
French revolutions, and still greater moral and social changes yet to
come, are direct consequences of these and similar discoveries. Even
alchemy and astrology were not believed because people thirsted for gold
and were anxious to pry into the future, for these desires are as strong
now as they were then: but because alchemy and astrology were
conceptions natural to a particular stage in the growth of human
knowledge, and consequently determined during that stage the particular
means whereby the passions which always exist, sought their
gratification. To say that men's intellectual beliefs do not determine
their conduct, is like saying that the ship is moved by the steam and
not by the steersman. The steam indeed is the motive power; the
steersman, left to himself, could not advance the vessel a single inch;
yet it is the steersman's will and the steersman's knowledge which
decide in what direction it shall move and whither it shall go.
Examining next what is the natural order of intellectual progress among
mankind, M. Comte observes, that as their general mode of conceiving the
universe must give its character to all their conceptions of detail, the
determining fact in their intellectual history must be the natural
succession of theories of the universe; which, it has been seen,
consists of three stages, the theological, the metaphysical, and the
positive. The passage of mankind through these stages, including the
successive modifications of the theological conception by the rising
influence of the other two, is, to M. Comte's mind, the most decisive
fact in the evolution of humanity. Simultaneously, however, there has
been going on throughout history a parallel movement in the purely
temporal department of things, consisting of the gradual decline of the
military mode of life (originally the chief occupation of all freemen)
and its replacement by the industrial. M. Comte maintains that there
is a necessary connexion and interdependence between this historical
sequence and the other: and he easily shows that the progress of
industry and that of positive science are correlative; man's power to
modify the facts of nature evidently depending on the knowledge he has
acquired of their laws. We do not think him equally successful in
showing a natural connexion between the theological mode of thought and
the military system of society: but since they both belong to the same
age of the world--since each is, in itself, natural and inevitable, and
they are together modified and together undermined by the same cause,
the progress of science and industry, M. Comte is justified in
considering them as linked together, and the movement by which mankind
emerge from them as a single evolution.
These propositions having been laid down as the first principles of
social dynamics, M. Comte proceeds to verify and apply them by a
connected view of universal history. This survey nearly fills two large
volumes, above a third of the work, in all of which there is scarcely a
sentence that does not add an idea. We regard it as by far his greatest
achievement, except his review of the sciences, and in some respects
more striking even than that. We wish it were practicable in the compass
of an essay like the present, to give even a faint conception of the
extraordinary merits of this historical analysis. It must be read to be
appreciated. Whoever disbelieves that the philosophy of history can be
made a science, should suspend his judgment until he has read these
volumes of M. Comte. We do not affirm that they would certainly change
his opinion; but we would strongly advise him to give them a chance.
We shall not attempt the vain task of abridgment, a few words are all we
can give to the subject. M. Comte confines himself to the main stream of
human progress, looking only at the races and nations that led the van,
and regarding as the successors of a people not their actual
descendants, but those who took up the thread of progress after them.
His object is to characterize truly, though generally, the successive
states of society through which the advanced guard of our species has
passed, and the filiation of these states on one another--how each grew
out of the preceding and was the parent of the following state. A more
detailed explanation, taking into account minute differences and more
special and local phaenomena, M. Comte does not aim at, though he does
not avoid it when it falls in his path. Here, as in all his other
speculations, we meet occasional misjudgments, and his historical
correctness in minor matters is now and then at fault; but we may well
wonder that it is not oftener so, considering the vastness of the field,
and a passage in one of his prefaces in which he says of himself that he
_rapidly_ amassed the materials for his great enterprise (vi. 34). This
expression in his mouth does not imply what it would in that of the
majority of men, regard being had to his rare capacity of prolonged and
concentrated mental labour: and it is wonderful that he so seldom gives
cause to wish that his collection of materials had been less "rapid."
But (as he himself remarks) in an inquiry of this sort the vulgarest
facts are the most important. A movement common to all mankind--to all
of them at least who do move--must depend on causes affecting them all;
and these, from the scale on which they operate, cannot require abstruse
research to bring them to light: they are not only seen, but best seen,
in the most obvious, most universal, and most undisputed phaenomena.
Accordingly M. Comte lays no claim to new views respecting the mere
facts of history; he takes them as he finds them, builds almost
exclusively on those concerning which there is no dispute, and only
tries what positive results can be obtained by combining them. Among
the vast mass of historical observations which he has grouped and
co-ordinated, if we have found any errors they are in things which do
not affect his main conclusions. The chain of causation by which he
connects the spiritual and temporal life of each era with one another
and with the entire series, will be found, we think, in all essentials,
irrefragable. When local or temporary disturbing causes have to be taken
into the account as modifying the general movement, criticism has more
to say. But this will only become important when the attempt is made to
write the history or delineate the character of some given society on M.
Comte's principles.
Such doubtful statements, or misappreciations of states of society, as
we have remarked, are confined to cases which stand more or less apart
from the principal line of development of the progressive societies. For
instance, he makes greatly too much of what, with many other Continental
thinkers, he calls the Theocratic state. He regards this as a natural,
and at one time almost an universal, stage of social progress, though
admitting that it either never existed or speedily ceased in the two
ancient nations to which mankind are chiefly indebted for being
permanently progressive. We hold it doubtful if there ever existed what
M. Comte means by a theocracy. There was indeed no lack of societies in
which, the civil and penal law being supposed to have been divinely
revealed, the priests were its authorized interpreters. But this is the
case even in Mussulman countries, the extreme opposite of theocracy. By
a theocracy we understand to be meant, and we understand M. Comte to
mean, a society founded on caste, and in which the speculative,
necessarily identical with the priestly caste, has the temporal
government in its hands or under its control. We believe that no such
state of things ever existed in the societies commonly cited as
theocratic. There is no reason to think that in any of them, the king,
or chief of the government, was ever, unless by occasional usurpation,
a member of the priestly caste.[18] It was not so in Israel, even in the
time of the Judges; Jephtha, for example, was a Gileadite, of the tribe
of Manasseh, and a military captain, as all governors in such an age and
country needed to be. Priestly rulers only present themselves in two
anomalous cases, of which next to nothing is known: the Mikados of Japan
and the Grand Lamas of Thibet: in neither of which instances was the
general constitution of society one of caste, and in the latter of them
the priestly sovereignty is as nominal as it has become in the former.
India is the typical specimen of the institution of caste--the only case
in which we are certain that it ever really existed, for its existence
anywhere else is a matter of more or less probable inference in the
remote past. But in India, where the importance of the sacerdotal order
was greater than in any other recorded state of society, the king not
only was not a priest, but, consistently with the religious law, could
not be one: he belonged to a different caste. The Brahmins were invested
with an exalted character of sanctity, and an enormous amount of civil
privileges; the king was enjoined to have a council of Brahmin advisers;
but practically he took their advice or disregarded it exactly as he
pleased. As is observed by the historian who first threw the light of
reason on Hindoo society,[19] the king, though in dignity, to judge by
the written code, he seemed vastly inferior to the Brahmins, had always
the full power of a despotic monarch: the reason being that he had the
command of the army, and the control of the public revenue. There is no
case known to authentic history in which either of these belonged to the
sacerdotal caste. Even in the cases most favourable to them, the
priesthood had no voice in temporal affairs, except the "consultative"
voice which M. Comte's theory allows to every spiritual power. His
collection of materials must have been unusually "rapid" in this
instance, for he regards almost all the societies of antiquity, except
the Greek and Roman, as theocratic, even Gaul under the Druids, and
Persia under Darius; admitting, however, that in these two countries,
when they emerge into the light of history, the theocracy had already
been much broken down by military usurpation. By what evidence he could
have proved that it ever existed, we confess ourselves unable to divine.
The only other imperfection worth noticing here, which we find in M.
Comte's view of history, is that he has a very insufficient
understanding of the peculiar phaenomena of English development; though
he recognizes, and on the whole correctly estimates, its exceptional
character in relation to the general European movement. His failure
consists chiefly in want of appreciation of Protestantism; which, like
almost all thinkers, even unbelievers, who have lived and thought
exclusively in a Catholic atmosphere, he sees and knows only on its
negative side, regarding the Reformation as a mere destructive movement,
stopped short in too early a stage. He does not seem to be aware that
Protestantism has any positive influences, other than the general ones
of Christianity; and misses one of the most important facts connected
with it, its remarkable efficacy, as contrasted with Catholicism, in
cultivating the intelligence and conscience of the individual believer.
Protestantism, when not merely professed but actually taken into the
mind, makes a demand on the intelligence; the mind is expected to be
active, not passive, in the reception of it. The feeling of a direct
responsibility of the individual immediately to God, is almost wholly
a creation of Protestantism. Even when Protestants were nearly as
persecuting as Catholics (quite as much so they never were); even when
they held as firmly as Catholics that salvation depended on having the
true belief, they still maintained that the belief was not to be
accepted from a priest, but to be sought and found by the believer, at
his eternal peril if he failed; and that no one could answer to God for
him, but that he had to answer for himself. The avoidance of fatal error
thus became in a great measure a question of culture; and there was the
strongest inducement to every believer, however humble, to seek culture
and to profit by it. In those Protestant countries, accordingly, whose
Churches were not, as the Church of England always was, principally
political institutions--in Scotland, for instance, and the New England
States--an amount of education was carried down to the poorest of the
people, of which there is no other example; every peasant expounded the
Bible to his family (many to their neighbours), and had a mind practised
in meditation and discussion on all the points of his religious creed.
The food may not have been the most nourishing, but we cannot be blind
to the sharpening and strengthening exercise which such great topics
gave to the understanding--the discipline in abstraction and reasoning
which such mental occupation brought down to the humblest layman, and
one of the consequences of which was the privilege long enjoyed by
Scotland of supplying the greater part of Europe with professors for its
universities, and educated and skilled workmen for its practical arts.