return to the original purity of the Christian faith; to the Catholic,
it seemed to be a fatal revolt against the only organization by which
Christianity could be realized. Really it partook of both characters. It
involved at once a dangerous misconception of the social conditions,
under which alone the religious life can be realized and developed, and
a deeper and truer apprehension of that religion, which first recognized
the latent divinity or universal capacity of every spiritual being as
such, and which, therefore, seemed to impose upon every individual man
the right or rather the duty of living by the witness of his own spirit.
Comte saw only the former of these aspects of it. Hence he regarded the
French Revolution as a practical refutation of the individualism which
grew out of the Protestant movement, and not, as it was in truth, a
critical event, which should force men to distinguish and separate its
true and its false elements. And he drew from it the lesson that the
individual has no moral or religious life of his own, but that it is
only in proportion as he transcends his own individuality and lives the
life of humanity, that his own spiritual life can have any depth or
riches in it. Like Burke he could say, "We are afraid to put men to live
and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect
that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do
better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations
and of ages." But because he discerned this, he regarded the effort of
Protestantism to throw individuals back upon themselves as merely
tending to empty their minds of all valuable contents, and to deliver
them over to their own individual caprice. Private judgment and popular
government are to him only other forms of expression for intellectual
and political anarchy; and his remedy for the moral diseases of modern
times is the restoration of that division of the spiritual and temporal
authorities, which existed in the Middle Ages. But there is another
aspect of the Protestant movement and of these apparently anarchical
doctrines, to which Comte pays no attention. Catholicism, as we have
seen, had developed one aspect of Christianity, until, by its exclusive
prominence, the principle of Christianity itself was on the point of
being lost. It had changed the opposition of laity and clergy, world and
Church, from a relative into an absolute one; it had presented its
doctrine, not as something which the spirit of the individual may
ultimately verify for itself, but as something to which it must
permanently submit without any verification. It had made the worship
into an _opus operatum_ instead of a means through which the feelings of
the worshipper could be at once drawn out and expressed. Now, it is as
opposed to these tendencies that the Protestant movement had its highest
importance. It would, no doubt, be intellectual anarchy, for every
individual to claim to judge for himself, on subjects for which he has
not the requisite training or discipline; but it is a slavery scarcely
less corrupting in its effect than anarchy, when he is made to regard
the difference between himself and his teachers as a permanent and
absolute one. In the former case, he has no sufficient feeling of his
want to make him duly submissive to teaching; in the latter, he has no
sufficient consciousness of his capacity to awake a due reaction of his
thought upon the matter received from his teachers. Again, the decline
of the sovereignty of the people would be the negation of all rule, if
it meant that the uninstructed many should govern themselves by their
own insight, and that the instructed few should simply be their servants
and their instruments. But where the people are not recognized as the
ultimate source of power, where their consent is not in any regular way
made necessary to the proceedings of their governors, they are by that
very fact kept in a perpetual tutelage, and cannot possibly feel that
the life of the State is their own life. Now, the most important effect
of the Protestant movement was just this, that it awakened in each
individual the consciousness of his universal nature, in other words the
consciousness that there is no external power or sovereignty, divine or
human, to which he has absolutely and permanently to submit, but that
every outward claim of authority must ultimately be justified by the
inner witness of the spirit. The freedom of man is that his obedience to
the State, to the Church, even to God, is the obedience of his natural
to his spiritual self. The essential truth of the Reformation lay in its
republication of the doctrine that the voice of God speaks within and
not only without us, and indeed that "it is only by the God within that
we can comprehend the God without." And the nations, which had learned
that lesson in religion, soon hastened to apply it to the social and
political order of life. It is undoubtedly a dangerous lesson, as may be
seen, not only in the tendency of many Protestant sects to put the inner
life in opposition to the outer, and so to deprive the former of all
wider contents and interests; but also in the ultimate substitution, by
Rousseau and others, of the assertion of the natural, for the assertion
of the spiritual, man. In such extreme cases we find the mere _capacity_
of man for a higher life treated as if it were the higher life itself;
forgetting that the capacity is nothing unless it be realized, and that
its realization requires the surrender of individual liberty and private
judgment to the guidance and teaching of those, in whom that realization
has already taken place. But it is not the less true that the
consciousness of the capacity, and the consequent sense of the duty of
becoming, not merely a slave or instrument, but an organ, of the
intellectual and moral life of mankind, is the essential basis of modern
life. "Henceforth, I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not
what his lord doeth; but I have called you friends," is a word of Christ
which scarcely began to be verified till the Reformation. And while its
verification cannot mean the negation of that division of labour upon
which society rests,--cannot mean that each one should _know_ and
_judge_, any more than that each one should _do_, everything for
himself,--it at least means that every power and authority should
henceforth be, in the true sense of the word, spiritual, and rest for
its main support upon the opinion of those who obey it. It is because he
has not appreciated this truth that Comte so decidedly breaks with the
democratic spirit of modern times, and seeks to set up an aristocracy in
the State and a monarchy in the Church. Yet the spirit of the age is,
after all, too strong for him, and while he refuses to the governed any
regular and legitimate way of reacting upon the powers that govern them,
he recognizes that the _ultima ratio_, the final remedy for
misgovernment, lies in their irregular and illegitimate action. As
regards the State, he declares that "the right of insurrection is the
ultimate resource with which no society should allow itself to
dispense."[40] And as regards the Church he says that if "the High
Priest of Humanity, supported by the body of the clergy, should go
wrong, then the only remedy left would be the refusal of co-operation, a
remedy which can never fail, as the priesthood rests solely on
conscience and opinion, and succumbs, therefore, to their adverse
sentence." The civil government, in fact, can bring the spiritual power
to a dead-lock, by "suspending its stipend, for in cases of serious
error, popular subscriptions would not replace it, unless on the
supposition of a fanaticism scarcely compatible with the Positive faith,
where there is enthusiasm for the doctrines, rather than for the
teachers."[41] Comte also desiderates among the proletariate a strong
reactive influence of public opinion, by which the officers, both of
Church and State, are to be kept to their work. But if this is
desirable, why should the proletariate have no regular means of making
their will felt? An "organic" theory of the constitution of society must
surely provide every real force with a legitimate form of expression; if
a social theory embodies the idea of revolution in it, it is
self-condemned.
Comte's social ideal is in many respects a close reproduction of the
mediæval system, with its _régime dispersif_ of feudalism in secular
politics, and its concentration of Papal authority in the Church. For
him, the growth of national States to their present dimensions, and, on
the other hand, the increasing division of labour in the realm of
thought, are equally steps in the wrong direction. Still more strongly,
if possible, does he reprobate that interference of the State with
spiritual matters, such as the education of the people and its religious
life, which has been the natural consequence of the failure of the
mediæval Church to maintain its old authority. Notwithstanding his
worship of humanity, the idea of a "parliament of man, a federation of
the world," by which all the powers of mankind should be united for the
attainment of the highest material and spiritual good, has no attraction
for him. To reduce the State to the dimensions of a commune, and to
confine it to the care of purely material interests, is his first
political proposal. France, England, and Spain (and we may now add
Germany and Italy) are, in his view, "factitious aggregates without
solid justification," and they will only become "free and durable
States," when they are broken up into fragments, each with a population
of two or three millions, and a territory not exceeding that of Belgium
or Tuscany. The "West" will thus be divided into seventy republics, and
the earth into five hundred, and the main work of the patriciate will be
to direct and regulate the industrial life of the community; each member
of the banker triumvirate, who are to be at the head of the State,
having one of the great industrial departments under his special
superintendence. On the other hand the unity of humanity is to be
represented solely by the spiritual power, in whose hands is to be left
the whole work of extending science, teaching the people, and exercising
a moral censorship over all Governments and individuals. And while this
spiritual power is, for practical purposes, to be strictly organized on
the model of the mediæval Church, it is also, like that Church, to
remain, for scientific purposes, inorganic. In other words, it is to
admit no scientific division of labour, but every one, like a mediæval
doctor, is to profess all science, adding to this the priestly office,
which, with Comte, includes both the cure of souls and of bodies.
To criticize the details of this scheme seems to be unnecessary after
what has been already said. It is not to be denied that the division of
Church and State in the Middle Age was a most important and even
necessary condition of progress. Christianity could never have been
impressed upon the minds of men, if its concrete application and
development had been too rapid. The essential condition of such
development was that men should not concern themselves too prematurely
with it. For the consequences of a moral and religious principle cannot
be reached by direct logical deductions; it is like a living germ, in
which, by no analysis or dissection, you can discover the lineaments of
the future plant. To know what it really is, or involves, you must plant
it in the minds of men, and let it grow. Hence the mediæval Church was
strong in its weakness, and it was its very victories over the temporal
power that were its greatest danger. It became corrupt and lost its hold
upon the minds of men, just when it seemed to have established its right
to an absolute supremacy. Comte, following De Maistre, attaches great
importance to the position of the Popes as arbiters between the
Sovereigns and nations of mediæval Europe. But he forgets that, in
claiming and maintaining this position the Popes were distinctly ceasing
to be a spiritual power, if it be the function of a spiritual power to
inculcate principles rather than to use them to solve present
difficulties. A power interfering in this way with the immediate
struggle of interests, could not but be invaded by the passions they
excite, and it was the more certain to be corrupted by these passions,
because it conceived them to be evil, and pretended altogether to
renounce them. The mediæval authority of the Church might have its
value, as an anticipation of the peaceful federation of the nations
under one supreme Government, but it was at the same time the first
step towards the erasing of the distinction between the temporal and the
spiritual power.
The truth seems to be that the distinction, of secular and spiritual
powers, except in the sense already indicated, is essentially
irrational, and that the attempt to realise it in practice must involve,
as it did involve in the Middle Ages, a continual internecine struggle.
To set up two regularly constituted powers face to face with each other,
one claiming man's allegiance in the name of his spiritual, and the
other in the name of his temporal, interests, is to organize anarchy. So
long as man's body and soul are inseparable, it will be impossible to
divide the world between Cæsar and God; for in one point of view all is
Cæsar's, and in another all is God's. In the Middle Ages the conflict of
two despotisms was necessary to the growth of freedom; but, when
government ceases to be despotic, the need for such division of power
passes away. The relative separation between the speculative and the
practical classes--between the scientific and moral teachers of mankind,
on the one hand, and the statesmen or administrators who have to
discover what immediate changes in the organization of life have become
necessary, on the other--is a division of labour which can surely be
attained without breaking up the unity of the social body. It is not
desirable that the philosopher, or priest, or man of science, should be
king--and we may even acknowledge that if he were king he would probably
be a very bad one;--on the other hand, it is desirable that he should
have his due influence, as the teacher of those general truths out of
which all practical improvement must ultimately spring. But the natural
difference of the tastes and capacities of men should, in a
well-organized State, be sufficient to secure due influence to those who
are the natural representatives of man's spiritual interests (whether
they be religious, philosophic, or scientific), without tempting them
from their proper task of discovering and teaching the truth, to the
less appropriate work of determining how much of it comes within "the
sphere of practical politics." Comte, indeed, by organizing them as an
independent power apart from, and outside of, the State, would make such
a perversion extremely probable. A hierarchy of priests, under a
despotic Pope, would soon cease to be, in any sense, a spiritual power;
and this would be only the more certain if, by the Comtist denunciation
of specialism, they were prohibited from any division of labour
according to capacity in their own peculiar sphere of scientific
research. For by this prohibition their attention would be drawn more
and more from the truth of their doctrines to their immediate practical
effects, not to mention that, in the case of all but a few comprehensive
minds, the natural result would be an omniscient superficiality, which
would be the enemy of all real culture. For he who knows one thing well
may find the whole in the part; but he who knows the whole
superficially, inevitably reduces it to the level of something partial
and subjective. Deprived of its natural aim, the Comtist Church of the
future would inevitably throw itself, with all its energy, into the task
of directly influencing the practical life of men, and there it would
find itself in the presence of a number of communal States, none of them
large enough to offer any effective resistance. Positivism must indeed
alter human nature, if such a priesthood would not seek to make itself
despotic, especially if it could wield such a formidable weapon as the
Positivist excommunication is supposed to be.[42]
The truth is that Comte commits the same error which misled Montesquieu
and his followers, when they supposed that the great security of a free
State lay in the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial
powers,--_i.e._, in treating the different organs through which the
common life expresses itself as if they were independent organisms. In
doing so, they forgot that, if such a balance of power was realised, the
effect must either be an equilibrium in which all movement must cease,
or a struggle in which the unity of the State would be in danger of
being lost. The true security against the dangers involved, on the one
hand, in the direct application of theory to practice, and, on the other
hand, in the separation of practice from theory, must lie, not in giving
them independent positions as spiritual and temporal powers, but in the
organic unity of the society--communal, national, or, if it may be,
universal--to which the representatives of both belong. And organic
unity, though it does not mean any special form of government, means at
least two things: in the first place, that each great class or interest
should have for itself a definite organ, and should therefore be able to
act on the whole body in a regular and constitutional manner, so as to
show all its force without revolutionary violence; and, in the second
place, that no class or interest should have such an independent
position, that there is no legal or constitutional method of bringing it
into due subordination. But Comte, losing his balance in his jealousy of
the individualistic and democratic movement of modern society, has built
up a social ideal, which fails in both these points of view. And he is
consequently obliged, against his will, to contemplate revolution and
war as necessary resources of the Constitution.
It would not be fair to conclude these articles, which have necessarily
been devoted in great part to criticism and controversy, without
expressing a sense of the power and insight which are shown in the works
of Comte, especially in the _Politique Positive_. Controversy itself, it
must be remembered, is a kind of homage; for, as Hegel says, "It is only
a great man that condemns us to the task of explaining him." But if we
can sometimes look down upon such men, it becomes us to remember that we
stand upon their shoulders. Comte seems to me to occupy, as a writer, a
position in some degree similar to that of Kant. He stands, or rather
moves, between the old world and the new, and is broken into
inconsistency by the effort of transition. Like Kant, he is embarrassed
to the end by the ideas with which he started, and of which he can
never free himself so as to make a new beginning. Comte had only a small
portion of that power of speculative analysis which characterized his
great predecessor, but he had much of his tenacity of thought, his power
of continuous construction; and he had the same conviction of the
all-importance of morals, and the same determination to make all his
theoretic studies subordinate to the solution of the moral problem.
Also, partly because he lived at a later time, and in the midst of a
society which was in the throes of a social revolution, and partly
because of the keenness and strength of his own social sympathies, he
gives us a kind of insight into the diseases and wants of modern
society, which we could not expect from Kant, and which throws new light
upon the ethical speculations of Kant's idealistic successors. To
believe that his system, as a whole, is inconsistent with itself, that
his theory of historical progress is insufficient, and that his social
ideal is imperfect, need not prevent us from recognizing that there are
many valuable elements in his historical and social theories, and that
no one who would study such subjects can afford to neglect them. A mind
of such power cannot treat any subject without throwing much light upon
it, which is independent of his special system of thought, and, above
all, without doing much to show what are the really important
difficulties in it which need to be solved. And, especially in such
subjects, to discover the right question is to be half-way to the
answer. Further, as Comte himself somewhere says, it is an immense
advantage in studying any complex subject to have before us a distinct
and systematic attempt to explain it; for it is only by criticism upon
criticism that we can expect to reach the truth, in which all its varied
sides and aspects are brought to a unity.
EDWARD CAIRD.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] "Comte and Positivism," p. 140.
[27] "The Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrine," p. 28.
[28] Pol. Pos. iii. p. 419. I quote from the translation.
[29] Pol. Pos. iii. p. 71.
[30] Pol. Pos. iii. p. 218.
[31] Ibid. iii. p. 365.
[32] Pol. Pos. iii. p. 348.
[33] Ibid. iii. p. 383.
[34] Ibid. iii. p. 376.
[35] Ibid. iii. p. 283.
[36] Pol. Pos. iii. p. 78.
[37] Ibid. iii. p. 346.
[38] Pol. Pos. iii. p. 346.
[39] Ibid. i. p. 562.
[40] Pol. Pos. i. p. 106. In my first article (CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for
May, p. 211) I inadvertently spoke of the hierarchical arrangement of
society as extending to the proletariate. This is inaccurate, for Comte
rather dwells on their "homogeneity," and seeks to obliterate all
distinctions of rank among them, only allowing to the engineers a kind
of "fraternal ascendancy." Pol. Pos. iv. p. 307.
[41] Pol. Pos. iv. p. 294.
[42] Pol. Pos. iv. p. 292.
THE PROBLEM OF THE GREAT PYRAMID.
A few months ago I endeavoured to trace out, in these pages, the
probable origin of the week, as a measure of time, by a method which has
not hitherto, so far as I know, been followed in such cases. I followed
chiefly a line of _à priori_ reasoning, considering how herdsmen and
tillers of the soil would be apt at a very early period to use the moon
as a means of measuring time, and how in endeavouring so to use her they
would almost of necessity be led to employ special methods of
subdividing the period during which she passes through her various
phases. But while each step of the reasoning was thus based on _à
priori_ considerations, its validity was tested by the evidence which
has reached us respecting the various methods employed by different
nations of antiquity for following the moon's motions. It appears to me
that the conclusions to which this method of reasoning led were more
satisfactory, because more trustworthy, than those which have been
reached respecting the week by the mere study of various traditions
which have reached us respecting the early use of this widespread time
measure.
I now propose to apply a somewhat similar method to a problem which has
always been regarded as at once highly interesting and very difficult,
the question of the purpose for which the pyramids of Egypt, and
especially the pyramids of Ghizeh, were erected. But I do not here take
the full problem under consideration. I have, indeed, elsewhere dealt
with it in a general manner, and have been led to a theory respecting
the pyramids which will be touched on towards the close of the present
paper. Here, however, I intend to deal only with one special part of the
problem, that part to which alone the method I propose to employ is
applicable--the question of the astronomical purpose which the pyramids
were intended to subserve. It will be understood, therefore, why I have
spoken of applying a somewhat similar method, and not a precisely
similar method; to the problem of the pyramids. For whereas in dealing
with the origin of the week, I could from the very beginning of the
inquiry apply the _à priori_ method, I cannot do so in the case of the
pyramids. I do not know of any line of _à priori_ reasoning by which it
could be proved, or even rendered probable, that any race of men, of
whatever proclivities or avocations, would naturally be led to construct
buildings resembling the pyramids. If it could be, of course that line
of reasoning would at the same time indicate what purposes such
buildings were intended to subserve. Failing evidence of this kind, we
must follow at first the _à posteriori_ method; and this method, while
it is clear enough as to the construction of pyramids, for there are the
pyramids themselves to speak unmistakably on this point, is not
altogether so clear as to any one of the purposes for which the pyramids
were built.
Yet I think that if there is one purpose among possibly many which the
builders of the pyramids had in their thoughts, which can be
unmistakably inferred from the pyramids themselves, independently of all
traditions, it is the purpose of constructing edifices which should
enable men to observe the heavenly bodies in some way not otherwise
obtainable. If the orienting of the faces of the pyramids had been
effected in some such way as the orienting of most of our cathedrals and
churches--_i.e._, in a manner quite sufficiently exact as tested by
ordinary observation, but not capable of bearing astronomical tests,--it
might reasonably enough be inferred that having to erect square
buildings for any purpose whatever, men were likely enough to set them
four-square to the cardinal points, and that, therefore, no stress
whatever can be laid on this feature of the pyramids' construction. But
when we find that the orienting of the pyramids has been effected with
extreme care, that in the case of the great pyramid, which is the
typical edifice of this kind, the orienting bears well the closest
astronomical scrutiny, we cannot doubt that this feature indicates an
astronomical purpose as surely as it indicates the use of astronomical
methods.