hatred for scientific and all purely intellectual pursuits, and was bent
on retaining no more of them than was strictly indispensable. The
greatest of his anxieties is lest people should reason, and seek to
know, more than enough. He regards all abstraction and all reasoning as
morally dangerous, by developing an inordinate pride (orgueil), and
still more, by producing dryness (scheresse). Abstract thought, he says,
is not a wholesome occupation for more than a small number of human
beings, nor of them for more than a small part of their time. Art, which
calls the emotions into play along with and more than the reason, is the
only intellectual exercise really adapted to human nature. It is
nevertheless indispensable that the chief theories of the various
abstract sciences, together with the modes in which those theories were
historically and logically arrived at, should form a part of universal
education: for, first, it is only thus that the methods can be learnt,
by which to attain the results sought by the moral and social sciences:
though we cannot perceive that M. Comte got at his own moral and social
results by those processes. Secondly, the principal truths of the
subordinate sciences are necessary to the systematization (still
systematization!) of our conceptions, by binding together our notions of
the world in a set of propositions, which are coherent, and are a
sufficiently correct representation of fact for our practical wants.
Thirdly, a familiar knowledge of the invariable laws of natural
phaenomena is a great elementary lesson of submission, which, he is
never weary of saying, is the first condition both of morality and of
happiness. For these reasons, he would cause to be taught, from the age
of fourteen to that of twenty-one, to all persons, rich and poor, girls
or youths, a knowledge of the whole series of abstract sciences, such as
none but the most highly instructed persons now possess, and of a far
more systematic and philosophical character than is usually possessed
even by them. (N.B.--They are to learn, during the same years, Greek and
Latin, having previously, between the ages of seven and fourteen, learnt
the five principal modern languages, to the degree necessary for
reading, with due appreciation, the chief poetical compositions in
each.) But they are to be taught all this, not only without encouraging,
but stifling as much as possible, the examining and questioning spirit.
The disposition which should be encouraged is that of receiving all on
the authority of the teacher. The Positivist faith, even in its
scientific part, is _la foi démontrable_, but ought by no means to be
_la foi toujours démontrée_. The pupils have no business to be
over-solicitous about proof. The teacher should not even present the
proofs to them in a complete form, or as proofs. The object of
instruction is to make them understand the doctrines themselves,
perceive their mutual connexion, and form by means of them a consistent
and _systematized_ conception of nature. As for the demonstrations, it
is rather desirable than otherwise that even theorists should forget
them, retaining only the results. Among all the aberrations of
scientific men, M. Comte thinks none greater than the pedantic anxiety
they show for complete proof, and perfect rationalization of scientific
processes. It ought to be enough that the doctrines afford an
explanation of phaenomena, consistent with itself and with known facts,
and that the processes are justified by their fruits. This over-anxiety
for proof, he complains, is breaking down, by vain scruples, the
knowledge which seemed to have been attained; witness the present state
of chemistry. The demand of proof for what has been accepted by
Humanity, is itself a mark of "distrust, if not hostility, to the
sacerdotal order" (the naïveté of this would be charming, if it were not
deplorable), and is a revolt against the traditions of the human race.
So early had the new High Priest adopted the feelings and taken up the
inheritance of the old. One of his favourite aphorisms is the strange
one, that the living are more and more governed by the dead. As is not
uncommon with him, he introduces the dictum in one sense, and uses it in
another. What he at first means by it, is that as civilization advances,
the sum of our possessions, physical and intellectual, is due in a
decreasing proportion to ourselves, and in an increasing one to our
progenitors. The use he makes of it is, that we should submit ourselves
more and more implicitly to the authority of previous generations, and
suffer ourselves less and less to doubt their judgment, or test by our
own reason the grounds of their opinions. The unwillingness of the human
intellect and conscience, in their present state of "anarchy," to sign
their own abdication, lie calls "the insurrection of the living against
the dead." To this complexion has Positive Philosophy come at last!
Worse, however, remains to be told. M. Comte selects a hundred volumes
of science, philosophy, poetry, history, and general knowledge, which he
deems a sufficient library for every positivist, even of the theoretic
order, and actually proposes a systematic holocaust of books in
general--it would almost seem of all books except these. Even that to
which he shows most indulgence, poetry, except the very best, is to
undergo a similar fate, with the reservation of select passages, on the
ground that, poetry being intended to cultivate our instinct of ideal
perfection, any kind of it that is less than the best is worse than
none. This imitation of the error, we will call it the crime, of the
early Christians--and in an exaggerated form, for even they destroyed
only those writings of pagans or heretics which were directed against
themselves--is the one thing in M. Comte's projects which merits real
indignation. When once M. Comte has decided, all evidence on the other
side, nay, the very historical evidence on which he grounded his
decision, had better perish. When mankind have enlisted under his
banner, they must burn their ships. There is, though in a less offensive
form, the same overweening presumption in a suggestion he makes, that
all species of animals and plants which are useless to man should be
systematically rooted out. As if any one could presume to assert that
the smallest weed may not, as knowledge advances, be found to have some
property serviceable to man. When we consider that the united power of
the whole human race cannot reproduce a species once eradicated--that
what is once done, in the extirpation of races, can never be repaired;
one can only be thankful that amidst all which the past rulers of
mankind have to answer for, they have never come up to the measure of
the great regenerator of Humanity; mankind have not yet been under the
rule of one who assumes that he knows all there is to be known, and that
when he has put himself at the head of humanity, the book of human
knowledge may be closed.
Of course M. Comte does not make this assumption consistently. He does
not imagine that he actually possesses all knowledge, but only that he
is an infallible judge what knowledge is worth possessing. He does not
believe that mankind have reached in all directions the extreme limits
of useful and laudable scientific inquiry. He thinks there is a large
scope for it still, in adding to our power over the external world, but
chiefly in perfecting our own physical, intellectual, and moral nature.
He holds that all our mental strength should be economized, for the
pursuit of this object in the mode leading most directly to the end.
With this view, some one problem should always be selected, the solution
of which would be more important than any other to the interests of
humanity, and upon this the entire intellectual resources of the
theoretic mind should be concentrated, until it is either resolved, or
has to be given up as insoluble: after which mankind should go on to
another, to be pursued with similar exclusiveness. The selection of this
problem of course rests with the sacerdotal order, or in other words,
with the High Priest. We should then see the whole speculative intellect
of the human race simultaneously at work on one question, by orders from
above, as a French minister of public instruction once boasted that a
million of boys were saying the same lesson during the same half-hour in
every town and village of France. The reader will be anxious to know,
how much better and more wisely the human intellect will be applied
under this absolute monarchy, and to what degree this system of
government will be preferable to the present anarchy, in which every
theorist does what is intellectually right in his own eyes. M. Comte has
not left us in ignorance on this point. He gives us ample means of
judging. The Pontiff of Positivism informs us what problem, in his
opinion, should be selected before all others for this united pursuit.
What this problem is, we must leave those who are curious on the subject
to learn from the treatise itself. When they have done so, they will be
qualified to form their own opinion of the amount of advantage which the
general good of mankind would be likely to derive, from exchanging the
present "dispersive speciality" and "intellectual anarchy" for the
subordination of the intellect to the _coeur_, personified in a High
Priest, prescribing a single problem for the undivided study of the
theoretic mind.
We have given a sufficient general idea of M. Comte's plan for the
regeneration of human society, by putting an end to anarchy, and
"systematizing" human thought and conduct under the direction of
feeling. But an adequate conception will not have been formed of the
height of his self-confidence, until something more has been told. Be it
known, then, that M. Comte by no means proposes this new constitution of
society for realization in the remote future. A complete plan of
measures of transition is ready prepared, and he determines the year,
before the end of the present century, in which the new spiritual and
temporal powers will be installed, and the regime of our maturity will
begin. He did not indeed calculate on converting to Positivism, within
that time, more than a thousandth part of all the heads of families in
Western Europe and its offshoots beyond the Atlantic. But he fixes the
time necessary for the complete political establishment of Positivism at
thirty-three years, divided into three periods, of seven, five, and
twenty-one years respectively. At the expiration of seven, the direction
of public education in France would be placed in M. Comte's hands. In
five years more, the Emperor Napoleon, or his successor, will resign his
power to a provisional triumvirate, composed of three eminent
proletaires of the positivist faith; for proletaires, though not fit for
permanent rule, are the best agents of the transition, being the most
free from the prejudices which are the chief obstacle to it. These
rulers will employ the remaining twenty-one years in preparing society
for its final constitution; and after duly installing the Spiritual
Power, and effecting the decomposition of France into the seventeen
republics before mentioned, will give over the temporal government of
each to the normal dictatorship of the three bankers. A man may be
deemed happy, but scarcely modest, who had such boundless confidence in
his own powers of foresight, and expected so complete a triumph of his
own ideas on the reconstitution of society within the possible limits of
his lifetime. If he could live (he said) to the age of Pontenelle, or of
Hobbes, or even of Voltaire, he should see all this realized, or as good
as realized. He died, however, at sixty, without leaving any disciple
sufficiently advanced to be appointed his successor. There is now a
College, and a Director, of Positivism; but Humanity no longer possesses
a High Priest.
What more remains to be said may be despatched more summarily. Its
interest is philosophic rather than practical. In his four volumes of
"Politique Positive," M. Comte revises and reelaborates the scientific
and historical expositions of his first treatise. His object is to
systematize (again to systematize) knowledge from the human or
subjective point of view, the only one, he contends, from which a real
synthesis is possible. For (he says) the knowledge attainable by us of
the laws of the universe is at best fragmentary, and incapable of
reduction to a real unity. An objective synthesis, the dream of
Descartes and the best thinkers of old, is impossible. The laws of the
real world are too numerous, and the manner of their working into one
another too intricate, to be, as a general rule, correctly traced and
represented by our reason. The only connecting principle in our
knowledge is its relation to our wants, and it is upon that we must
found our systematization. The answer to this is, first, that there is
no necessity for an universal synthesis; and secondly, that the same
arguments may be used against the possibility of a complete subjective,
as of a complete objective systematization. A subjective synthesis must
consist in the arrangement and co-ordination of all useful knowledge, on
the basis of its relation to human wants and interests. But those wants
and interests are, like the laws of the universe, extremely
multifarious, and the order of preference among them in all their
different gradations (for it varies according to the degree of each)
cannot be cast into precise general propositions. M. Comte's subjective
synthesis consists only in eliminating from the sciences everything that
he deems useless, and presenting as far as possible every theoretical
investigation as the solution of a practical problem. To this, however,
he cannot consistently adhere; for, in every science, the theoretic
truths are much more closely connected with one another than with the
human purposes which they eventually serve, and can only be made to
cohere in the intellect by being, to a great degree, presented as if
they were truths of pure reason, irrespective of any practical
application.
There are many things eminently characteristic of M. Comte's second
career, in this revision of the results of his first. Under the head of
Biology, and for the better combination of that science with Sociology
and Ethics, he found that he required a new system of Phrenology, being
justly dissatisfied with that of Gall and his successors. Accordingly he
set about constructing one _è priori_, grounded on the best enumeration
and classification he could make of the elementary faculties of our
intellectual, moral, and animal nature; to each of which he assigned an
hypothetical place in the skull, the most conformable that he could to
the few positive facts on the subject which he considered as
established, and to the general presumption that functions which react
strongly on one another must have their organs adjacent: leaving the
localities avowedly to be hereafter verified, by anatomical and
inductive investigation. There is considerable merit in this attempt,
though it is liable to obvious criticisms, of the same nature as his own
upon Gall. But the characteristic thing is, that while presenting all
this as hypothesis waiting for verification, he could not have taken its
truth more completely for granted if the verification had been made. In
all that he afterwards wrote, every detail of his theory of the brain is
as unhesitatingly asserted, and as confidently built upon, as any other
doctrine of science. This is his first great attempt in the "Subjective
Method," which, originally meaning only the subordination of the pursuit
of truth to human uses, had already come to mean drawing truth itself
from the fountain of his own mind. He had become, on the one hand,
almost indifferent to proof, provided he attained theoretic coherency,
and on the other, serenely confident that even the guesses which
originated with himself could not but come out true.
There is one point in his later view of the sciences, which appears to
us a decided improvement on his earlier. He adds to the six fundamental
sciences of his original scale, a seventh under the name of Morals,
forming the highest step of the ladder, immediately after Sociology:
remarking that it might, with still greater propriety, be termed
Anthropology, being the science of individual human nature, a study,
when rightly understood, more special and complicated than even that of
Society. For it is obliged to take into consideration the diversities of
constitution and temperament (la réaction cérébrale des viscères
végétatifs) the effects of which, still very imperfectly understood, are
highly important in the individual, but in the theory of society may be
neglected, because, differing in different persons, they neutralize one
another on the large scale. This is a remark worthy of M. Comte in his
best days; and the science thus conceived is, as he says, the true
scientific foundation of the art of Morals (and indeed of the art of
human life), which, therefore, may, both philosophically and
didactically, be properly combined with it.
His philosophy of general history is recast, and in many respects
changed; we cannot but say, greatly for the worse. He gives much greater
development than before to the Fetishistic, and to what he terms the
Theocratic, periods. To the Fetishistic view of nature he evinces a
partiality, which appears strange in a Positive philosopher. But the
reason is that Fetish-worship is a religion of the feelings, and not at
all of the intelligence. He regards it as cultivating universal love: as
a practical fact it cultivates much rather universal fear. He looks upon
Fetishism as much more akin to Positivism than any of the forms of
Theology, inasmuch as these consider matter as inert, and moved only by
forces, natural and supernatural, exterior to itself: while Fetishism
resembles Positivism in conceiving matter as spontaneously active, and
errs only by not distinguishing activity from life. As if the
superstition of the Fetishist consisted only in believing that the
objects which produce the phaenomena of nature involuntarily, produce
them voluntarily. The Fetishist thinks not merely that his Fetish is
alive, but that it can help him in war, can cure him of diseases, can
grant him prosperity, or afflict him with all the contrary evils.
Therein consists the lamentable effect of Fetishism--its degrading and
prostrating influence on the feelings and conduct, its conflict with all
genuine experience, and antagonism to all real knowledge of nature.
M. Comte had also no small sympathy with the Oriental theocracies, as he
calls the sacerdotal castes, who indeed often deserved it by their early
services to intellect and civilization; by the aid they gave to the
establishment of regular government, the valuable though empirical
knowledge they accumulated, and the height to which they helped to carry
some of the useful arts. M. Comte admits that they became oppressive,
and that the prolongation of their ascendancy came to be incompatible
with further improvement. But he ascribes this to their having arrogated
to themselves the temporal government, which, so far as we have any
authentic information, they never did. The reason why the sacerdotal
corporations became oppressive, was because they were organized: because
they attempted the "unity" and "systematization" so dear to M. Comte,
and allowed no science and no speculation, except with their leave and
under their direction. M. Comte's sacerdotal order, which, in his
system, has all the power that ever they had, would be oppressive in the
same manner; with no variation but that which arises from the altered
state of society and of the human mind.
M. Comte's partiality to the theocracies is strikingly contrasted with
his dislike of the Greeks, whom as a people he thoroughly detests, for
their undue addiction to intellectual speculation, and considers to have
been, by an inevitable fatality, morally sacrificed to the formation of
a few great scientific intellects,--principally Aristotle, Archimedes,
Apollonius, and Hipparchus. Any one who knows Grecian history as it can
now be known, will be amazed at M. Comte's travestie of it, in which the
vulgarest historical prejudices are accepted and exaggerated, to
illustrate the mischiefs of intellectual culture left to its own
guidance.
There is no need to analyze further M. Comte's second view of universal
history. The best chapter is that on the Romans, to whom, because they
were greater in practice than in theory, and for centuries worked
together in obedience to a social sentiment (though only that of their
country's aggrandizement), M. Comte is as favourably affected, as he is
inimical to all but a small selection of eminent thinkers among the
Greeks. The greatest blemish in this chapter is the idolatry of Julius
Caesar, whom M. Comte regards as one of the most illustrious characters
in history, and of the greatest practical benefactors of mankind. Caesar
had many eminent qualities, but what he did to deserve such praise we
are at a loss to discover, except subverting a free government: that
merit, however, with M. Comte, goes a great way. It did not, in his
former days, suffice to rehabilitate Napoleon, whose name and memory he
regarded with a bitterness highly honourable to himself, and whose
career he deemed one of the greatest calamities in modern history. But
in his later writings these sentiments are considerably mitigated: he
regards Napoleon as a more estimable "dictator" than Louis Philippe, and
thinks that his greatest error was re-establishing the Academy of
Sciences! That this should be said by M. Comte, and said of Napoleon,
measures the depth to which his moral standard had fallen.
The last volume which he published, that on the Philosophy of
Mathematics, is in some respects a still sadder picture of intellectual
degeneracy than those which preceded it. After the admirable résumé of
the subject in the first volume of his first great work, we expected
something of the very highest order when he returned to the subject for
a more thorough treatment of it. But, being the commencement of a
Synthèse Subjective, it contains, as might be expected, a great deal
that is much more subjective than mathematical. Nor of this do we
complain: but we little imagined of what nature this subjective matter
was to be. M. Comte here joins together the two ideas, which, of all
that he has put forth, are the most repugnant to the fundamental
principles of Positive Philosophy. One of them is that on which we have
just commented, the assimilation between Positivism and Fetishism. The
other, of which we took notice in a former article, was the "liberté
facultative" of shaping our scientific conceptions to gratify the
demands not solely of objective truth, but of intellectual and aesthetic
suitability. It would be an excellent thing, M. Comte thinks, if science
could be deprived of its _sécheresse_, and directly associated with
sentiment. Now it is impossible to prove that the external world, and
the bodies composing it, are not endowed with feeling, and voluntary
agency. It is therefore highly desirable that we should educate
ourselves into imagining that they are. Intelligence it will not do to
invest them with, for some distinction must be maintained between simple
activity and life. But we may suppose that they feel what is done to
them, and desire and will what they themselves do. Even intelligence,
which we must deny to them in the present, may be attributed to them in
the past. Before man existed, the earth, at that time an intelligent
being, may have exerted "its physico-chemical activity so as to improve
the astronomical order by changing its principal coefficients. Our
planet may be supposed to have rendered its orbit less excentric, and
thereby more habitable, by planning a long series of explosions,
analogous to those from which, according to the best hypotheses, comets
proceed. Judiciously reproduced, similar shocks may have rendered the
inclination of the earth's axis better adapted to the future wants of
the Grand Etre. _A fortiori_ the Earth may have modified its own figure,
which is only beyond our intervention because our spiritual ascendancy
has not at its disposal a sufficient material force." The like may be
conceived as having been done by each of the other planets, in concert,
possibly, with the Earth and with one another. "In proportion as each
planet improved its own condition, its life exhausted itself by excess
of innervation; but with the consolation of rendering its self-devotion
more efficacious, when the extinction of its special functions, first
animal, and finally vegetative, reduced it to the universal attributes
of feeling and activity."[25] This stuff, though he calls it fiction, he
soon after speaks of as belief (croyance), to be greatly recommended, as
at once satisfying our natural curiosity, and "perfecting our unity"
(again unity!) "by supplying the gaps in our scientific notions with
poetic fictions, and developing sympathetic emotions and aesthetic
inspirations: the world being conceived as aspiring to second mankind in
ameliorating the universal order under the impulse of the Grand Etre."
And he obviously intends that we should be trained to make these
fantastical inventions permeate all our associations, until we are
incapable of conceiving the world and Nature apart from them, and they
become equivalent to, and are in fact transformed into, real beliefs.