intrusion of doubt. Such appeals, however, cannot be regarded as
otherwise than provisional and self-defensive. "The heart knoweth its
own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with its joy;" but
just for that reason it has no general content or independent authority
of its own. Whether the "I feel it" mean little or much, depends upon
the individual who utters it. It may be the concentrated expression of a
long life of culture and discipline, or it may be the loud but empty
voice of untrained passion and prejudice. The "unproved assertions of
the wise and experienced," as Aristotle tells us, have great value,
especially in ethical matters; but it is not because they are unproved
assertions, but because we otherwise know that the speakers are wise and
experienced. To appeal to the heart in general, without saying "whose
heart," either means nothing, or it means an appeal to the natural
man--_i.e._, man as he is before he has been sophisticated by culture
and experience; but of the natural man, in this sense, nothing can be
said. The further we go back in the history of the individual or the
race the more imperfect does their utterance or manifestation become;
and when we reach the beginning, we find that there is no manifestation
or utterance at all. The natural man of Rousseau was simply an ideal
creation, inspired with that intense and even morbid consciousness of
self, and that fixed resolve to submit to no external law, which were
characteristic of Rousseau himself, and which in him were the last
product and quintessence of the individualism of the eighteenth century.
The simplicity of this ideal figure was not the first simplicity of
nature, but the simplicity of a spirit which has returned upon itself
and asserted itself against the world; a kind of simplicity which never
existed, at least in the same form, before the great Protestant revolt.
The unhistorical character of this idea becomes doubly evident when we
find that, as time goes on, and the spirit of the age alters, the
qualities of the natural man are also changed. To St. Simon and Fourier,
as to Rousseau, man is good by nature, and it is bad institutions or bad
external influences which are the source of all the ills that flesh is
heir to. But while with the latter the natural man is a solitary, whose
chief good lies in the preservation of his independence, with the former
he is essentially social, and what is wanted for his perfection and
happiness is only to contrive an outward organization in which his
social sympathies shall have free play. Comte, as we might expect, rises
above these imperfect theories, in so far as he refuses to attribute all
the evils of humanity to its external circumstances; but he does not get
rid of the essential error which was common to them all, the error of
seeking for the explanation of the higher life of humanity in the
feelings of the natural man--feelings which are prior to, and
independent of, the exercise of his reason, and which supply all the
possible motives for that exercise. There are, in his view, two sets of
"innate" feelings or desires, between which man's life is divided--the
egoistic and the altruistic tendencies, each separate from the others as
well as from the intelligence, and having its "organ" in a separate part
of the brain. The egoistic feelings at first exist in man in far greater
strength than the altruistic; but by the reaction of circumstances, and
the influence of men upon each other, the latter have in the past
gradually attained to greater power; and it is the ideal of the future
to make their victory complete. Meanwhile, the intelligence is
necessarily the instrument of desire, and its highest good is to be the
instrument of altruistic as opposed to egoistic desire. For it has at
best only a choice of masters, and the emancipation of the intelligence
from the heart could mean only its becoming a slave of personal vanity.
Comte's appeal, therefore, is still to the natural man, or rather to one
element in him, which, however, as he acknowledges, is never so weak as
it is in man's earliest or most natural state.
The psychology implied in this theory is substantially that which found
its fullest expression in Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. Hume, with
that tendency to bring things to a distinct issue which is his best
characteristic, declares boldly that "reason is, and ought to be, the
slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to
serve and obey them." The passions or desires are tendencies of a
definite character which exist in man from the first; the awaking
intelligence cannot add to their number, or essentially change their
nature. It can only take account of what they are, and calculate how
best to satisfy them. "We speak not strictly and philosophically when we
talk of the combat of reason and passion," for reason in itself
determines the true and false, but it sets nothing before us as an end
to be pursued and avoided. It does not constitute or transform the
desires, which are given altogether apart from it, and the will is but
the strongest desire. When we say that reason controls the passions what
we mean is simply that a strong but calm tendency of our nature, which
has reference to some remote object, overcomes some violent impulse
towards a present delight; but for intelligence, in the strict sense of
the word, to war with passion is a simple impossibility.
The modifications which Comte makes in this view of motive are
comparatively trifling. He does not, indeed, like Hume, call reason the
slave of the passions; rather he says that "_l'esprit doit être le
ministre du coeur, mais jamais son esclave_;" but this change of
language does not involve any important modification of Hume's theory.
The intelligence has to give to the heart all kinds of information about
the objects through which it may find satisfaction, but after all the
end itself has to be determined solely by feeling and desire. In Comte's
language the intellect is a "slave," when theology makes it acknowledge
the existence of supernatural beings who are agreeable to our desires,
but who have no reality as objects of experience; it is a "master," when
it pursues its inquiries into the phenomena of the objective world, at
the bidding of an errant curiosity, without reference to the well-being
of man; it is in its true place as a "servant" when it studies the
objective world freely, but only with reference to the end fixed for it
by the affections. "_L'univers doit être étudié non pour lui-même, mais
pour l'homme, ou plutôt pour l'humanité_;" and this, Comte thinks, will
not be done if the intelligence be left to itself, but only if it be
made subordinate to the heart. To say, therefore, that the intelligence
is not to be a slave but a servant, implies merely that it is to be left
free to collect information about the means of satisfying the desires,
without having its judgment anticipated by the imagination or the heart;
but that, on the other hand, it must keep strictly to its position as an
instrument to an end out of itself. For if it once emancipates itself
from the yoke of feeling, it soon becomes altogether lawless, and
disperses its efforts in every direction in the satisfaction of a vain
curiosity. The intelligence, as the scholastic theologians said, is in
itself, or when left to itself, a source of anarchy and confusion; it
must be, not indeed the _serva_, but the _ancilla fidei_, or it defeats
its own ends. The intellectual life, as such, is an unsocial, even a
selfish existence; for, as reason is guided by no definite objective aim
derived from itself, it must find its real motive in the satisfaction of
personal vanity and self-conceit, whenever it is not subjected to the
yoke of the altruistic affections.
This theory (which, as we shall see, underlies Comte's whole conception
of history) suggests two questions. It leads us to ask, in the first
place, whether the tendencies of the intellectual life are thus
dispersive and opposed to the social tendencies? and, secondly, whether
the social tendencies in the form which they take with man, are not
necessarily determined to be what they are by his intelligence? The
former question really resolves itself into another: Is the intelligence
of man a mere formal power of apprehending what is presented to it from
without, so that when it is left to itself it must lose itself in the
infinite multiplicity of individual objects in the external world? or
does it carry with it any synthetic principle, any idea of the whole, to
which it necessarily and inevitably seeks to bring back the difference
of things? Against Comte's assertion that the natural tendency of the
intelligence is to lose itself in difference without end, we might quote
the well-known saying of Bacon, that the tendency of the "_intellectus
sibi permissus_" is rather towards a premature synthesis. "_Intellectus
humanus ex proprietate sua facile supponit majorem ordinem et
æqualitatem in rebus quam invenit_." Surely, if we may speak of
tendencies of the intellectual life as separated from the life of
feeling, the tendency to unity and the universal belongs to it quite as
much as the tendency to difference and the particular; just as in the
life of feeling the tendency to isolation and self-assertion against
others is combined with the tendency to society and union with others.
From the first moment of intellectual life the world is to us a unity;
_subjectively_ a unity, as all its varied phenomena are gathered up in
the consciousness of one self, and _objectively_ a unity, as every
object and event is definitely placed in relation to the other objects
and events in one space and one time. The development of knowledge is,
no doubt, the continual detection of new differences and distinctions in
things, but the phenomena which are distinguished from other phenomena
are at the same time put in relation to them. Nor can the intelligence
find complete satisfaction until this relation is discovered to be
necessary, and thus difference passes into unity again. Individual
minds, indeed, may be more of the Aristotelian, or more of the
Platonist, order, may tend more to divide what at first is presented as
unity, or to unite what at first is presented as difference. But it is
absurd to talk of either tendency as belonging to the intelligence in
itself, since it is utterly beyond, or rather beneath, the powers of
thought to conceive either of an undifferentiated unity, or of a chaos
of differences without some kind of relation. Descending to particulars,
we may bring Comte as a witness against himself; for while he declares
that the sciences which deal with the inorganic world are mainly
analytic in their tendencies, he at the same time maintains that the
sciences of Biology and, still more, of Sociology and Morals, are
synthetic, since they deal with objects in which the whole is not a mere
aggregation or resultant of the parts, but in which rather the parts can
be understood only in and through the whole. Hence it would seem that
the dispersive tendencies of science are confined to lower steps of the
scientific scale; and that the final science (as was shown more
particularly in a previous article) admits and necessitates a synthesis,
which is not merely subjective, but also objective. For Comte does not
hold that we are to regard other men merely as means, or to seek to
understand them only so far as is necessary for the gratification of
some desire in ourselves as individuals. We are, on the contrary, to
seek to know man in and for himself; and when we do so know him, we find
that he is essentially social, and that the individual, as such, is a
mere "fiction of the metaphysicians." Here, again, therefore, we find
that Comte's system ends in a compromise between opposite tendencies of
thought. His subjective synthesis proved after all to be objective, at
least so far as mankind were concerned; and in like manner his
opposition of the intellect to the heart turns out to be only partial;
for when the intelligence is directed to psychology and sociology, it
gives us an idea of humanity, according to which all men are "members
one of another." The warfare of the heart and the intelligence thus
resolves itself into another expression of that dualism between the
world and man, which we found to be an essential characteristic of
Comte's system.
The second question--whether the altruistic affections of man do not
imply, or are not necessarily connected with, the development of his
reason or self-consciousness--is even more important. Comte, like Hume,
took all the desires, higher and lower, as tendencies given apart from
the reason, which can only devise the means of satisfying them, and is,
therefore, necessarily their servant. Reason itself on this view does
not essentially affect the character of those tendencies which it obeys.
"_Cupiditas est appetitus cum ejusdem conscientia_," said Spinoza, and
he then went on to speak as if the "_conscientia_" made no change in the
character of the "_appetitus_." But if we think of appetites or
desires--some of them tending to the good of the individual, others to
the good of the species--as existing in an animal which is not conscious
of a self, these appetites will neither be selfish nor unselfish in the
sense in which we apply these terms to man. Where there is no _ego_
there can be no _alter-ego_, and therefore neither egoism nor altruism.
The idea of the self as a permanent unity to which all the different
tendencies are referred, and the rise in consequence of a new desire of
pleasure, distinct from the desires of particular objects, are essential
to egoism. The idea of an _alter-ego_, _i.e._, of a community with
others which makes their interests our own, and hence the rise of a love
for them,--which is not merely disinterested as the animal appetites are
disinterested, because they tend directly to their objects without any
thought of self, but disinterested in the sense that the thought of self
is conquered or absorbed, is essential to altruism. Each of these
tendencies may in its matter, or rather in its first matter, coincide
with the appetites; viewed from the outside, they may seem to be nothing
higher than hunger or thirst, or sexual or parental impulse, but their
form is different. They are changed as by a chemical solvent, which
dissolves and renews them; nay, as by a new principle of life, whose
first transformation of them is nothing but the beginning of a series of
transformations both of their matter and their form; so that, in the
end, the simple direct tendency to an object--the uneasiness which
sought its cure without reflection either upon itself or upon anything
else--becomes changed, on the one side, into a gigantic ambition and
greed, which would make the whole world tributary to the lust of the
individual, and, on the other, into a love of humanity in which
self-love is altogether transcended or absorbed. Neither of these,
however, nor any lower form of either, is in such wise _external_ to
reason, that we can talk of them as determining it to an end which is
not its own. Both are simply the expression in feeling of that essential
opposition of the self to the not self, and at the same time that
essential unity of the self with the not self, which are the two
opposite, but complementary, aspects of the life of reason. And the
progressive triumph of altruism over egoism, which constitutes the moral
significance of history, is only the result of the fact that an
individual, who is also a conscious self, cannot find his happiness in
his own individual life, but only in the life of the whole to which he
belongs. A selfish life is for him a contradiction. It is a life in
which he is at war with himself as well as with others, for it is the
life of a being who, though essentially social, tries to find
satisfaction in a personal or individual good. The "intelligence" and
the "heart" equally condemn such a life; it is not only a crime but a
blunder. For a spiritual being as such is one who can only save his life
by losing it in a wider life, one who must die to himself in order that
he may live. In the progress of man's spirit, therefore, there is no
necessary or possible schism between the two parts of his being; but, on
the contrary, the development of each is implied in the development of
the other. It is the more comprehensive idea, as well as the higher
social purpose, which always triumphs; and if what is called
intellectual culture sometimes seems to have the worse, it is because it
is a superficial or formal culture, and does not really represent the
most comprehensive idea.
This leads us to observe that the opposition of the heart to the
intelligence is Comte's key to the whole history of the past, especially
in relation to religion. Theology is to him a system growing out of a
natural, though partially erroneous, hypothesis, a hypothesis which in
its first appearance was well suited to excite the nascent intelligence
and satisfy the primary affections of man, but which, in its further
development, tended to secure moral and social ends at the expense of
truth, and became more and more irrational as it became more and more
useful. Fetichism, the first religion, was the spontaneous result of
man's primitive tendency to exaggerate the likeness of all things to
himself. It is "less distant from Positivity" than any other sort of
theology,[29] for its error is only that it supposes the existence of
life wherever it finds activity--an error which can "easily be brought
to the test of verification" and corrected. "We can show it to be an
error, and so get rid of it." But Polytheism, seeking for greater
generality, refers phenomena to beings who are not identified with them,
to "indirect wills belonging to beings purely imaginary," whose
"existence can no more be decisively disproved than it can be
demonstrated." Further, Polytheism extended to the order of man's life
that kind of explanation which Fetichism necessarily confined to nature,
because the latter sought to explain everything by man, and never
thought of man himself as requiring explanation. But this, while it had
the advantage of bringing human life within the domain of speculation,
at the same time reduced theology into a palpable instance of reasoning
in a circle. For "humanity cannot legitimately be included in the
synthesis of causes, from the very fact that its type is found in
man."[30] Last of all came Monotheism, concentrating still further the
theological explanation of the universe, but rendering it still more
incoherent and irrational, for "the conception of a single God involves
a type of absolute perfection complete in each of the three aspects of
human nature, affection, thought, and action. Now such a conception
unavoidably contradicts itself, for either this all-powerful Being must
be inferior to ourselves, morally or intellectually, or else the world
which he created must be free from those radical imperfections which, in
spite of Monotheistic sophistry, have been always but too evident. And
even were this second alternative admissible, there would remain a yet
deeper inconsistency. Man's moral and mental faculties have for their
object to subserve practical necessities, but an omnipotent Being can
have no occasion either for wisdom or for goodness."[31]
What reconciles mankind, and especially the leaders of mankind, to these
intellectually unsatisfactory conceptions of God, is their practical
value in extending and strengthening the social bond. Polytheism was
superior to Fetichism, because it lent itself to the formation of that
wider community, which we call the State, whereas Fetichism tended
rather to confine the sympathies of men to the narrower limits of the
family. And Monotheism was the necessary basis of that still wider
society which binds men to each other simply as men, and apart from any
special ties of blood or language. This at least was the case so long as
the truth of the unity of humanity had not yet assumed a scientific
form, and therefore still needed an external support. But when the
sciences of sociology and morals arise, this external scaffolding ceases
to be necessary, and must even become injurious, as, indeed, Theology
was from the first imperfectly adapted to the social end it was made to
subserve.
This last point deserves special attention. According to Comte,
Theology, and above all Monotheistic Theology, is a system whose direct
influence is altogether unfavourable to the social tendencies, although
indirectly, by the course of history, and through the wise modifications
to which it has been subjected by the leaders and teachers of mankind,
it has become the main instrument in developing altruism. The increasing
generality of theological belief, indeed, was a necessary condition of
the establishment of social unity; but, by directing the eyes of men not
to themselves, but to supernatural beings, by making the event of life
turn on the favour or disfavour of such beings, rather than on the
social action and reaction of men upon each other, and by reducing this
world into a secondary position, so that its concerns were subordinated
to those of another world, Theology tended to dissolve rather than to
knit closer the bonds of society. The relation of the individual to God
isolated him from his fellows. Especially was this the case with the
Christian form of Monotheism, with its tremendous future rewards and
penalties, and the direct relation which it established between the soul
of the individual and the infinite Being. "The immediate effect of
putting personal salvation in the foremost place was to create an
unparalleled selfishness, a selfishness rendering all social influences
nugatory, and thus tending to dissolve public life."[32] "The Christian
type of life was never fully realized except by the hermits of the
Thebaid," who, "by narrowing their wants to the lowest standard, were
able to concentrate their thoughts without remorse or distraction on the
attainment of salvation."[33] What else, indeed, but egoism could be
awakened by the worship of a God who is himself the supreme type of
egoism? For "the desires of an omnipotent Being, being gratified as soon
as formed, can consist in nothing but pure caprices. There can be no
appreciable motive either from within or from without. And above all,
these pure caprices must of necessity be purely personal; so that the
metaphysical formula, To live in self for self, would be alike
applicable to the two extreme grades of the vital scale. The type of
divinity thus approximates to the lowest stage of animality, the only
shape in which life is purely individual, because it is reduced to the
one function of nutrition."[34] The natural result of such a religion
was, therefore, to discourage the altruistic affections, and, indeed,
Monotheism has systematically denied that such affections form part of
the nature of man.
The alchemy which, according to Comte, turned this poison into an elixir
vitæ, was found in the altruistic affections of the teachers of mankind,
which led them to limit and modify the doctrine they taught, so as to
subserve man's moral improvement. This, however, would not have been
sufficient, if these teachers had not at an early period ceased to be a
theocracy, or, in other words, if the practical government of mankind
had not been wrested from their hand by the military classes. By this
change, which contained in itself the germ of the separation of the
Church from the State, of theory from practice, of counsel from command,
the priests, prophets, or philosophers, who were the intellectual
leaders of men, were reduced to that position of subordination in which
alone they can concentrate their attention upon their proper work. For
the influences of the intellect, like those of the affections, must be
indirect if they are to be pure. "No power, especially if it be
theological, cares to modify the will, unless it finds itself powerless
to control action."[35] But when the theoretic class were subordinated
to the practical class, they became the natural allies of the women,
and, like them, had to substitute counsel for command. At first, indeed,
their subjection was too absolute, for the military aristocracies of
Greece and Rome did not leave to the priesthood sufficient independence,
or at least sufficient authority, to permit even of counsel. But with
the rise of Catholic Monotheism, supported as it was by a new revelation
based upon an incarnation of God, the separation of Church and State
was definitely established, and the intellectual life was put in its
proper relation to the life of action.