Part 18 (1/2)

CHAPTER XVI. THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS: II. COMTE

1.

Auguste Comte did more than any preceding thinker to establish the idea of Progress as a luminary which could not escape men's vision.

The brilliant suggestions of Saint-Simon, the writings of Bazard and Enfantin, the vagaries of Fourier, might be dismissed as curious rather than serious propositions, but the ma.s.sive system wrought out by Comte's speculative genius--his organic scheme of human knowledge, his elaborate a.n.a.lysis of history, his new science of sociology--was a great fact with which European thought was forced to reckon. The soul of this system was Progress, and the most important problem he set out to solve was the determination of its laws.

His originality is not dimmed by the fact that he owed to Saint-Simon more than he afterwards admitted or than his disciples have been willing to allow. He collaborated with him for several years, and at this time enthusiastically acknowledged the intellectual stimulus he received from the elder savant. [Footnote: Comte collaborated with Saint-Simon from 1818-1822. The final rupture came in 1824. The question of their relations is cleared up by Weill (Saint-Simon, chap. xi.). On the quarrel see also Ostwald, Auguste Comte (1914), 13 sqq.] But he derived from Saint-Simon much more than the stimulation of his thoughts in a certain direction. He was indebted to him for some of the characteristic ideas of his own system. He was indebted to him for the principle which lay at the very basis of his system, that the social phenomena of a given period and the intellectual state of the society cohere and correspond. The conception that the coming age was to be a period of organisation like the Middle Ages, and the idea of the government of savants, are pure Saint-Simonian doctrine. And the fundamental idea of a POSITIVE philosophy had been apprehended by Saint-Simon long before he was acquainted with his youthful a.s.sociate.

But Comte had a more methodical and scientific mind, and he thought that Saint-Simon was premature in drawing conclusions as to the reformation of societies and industries before the positive philosophy had been constructed. He published--he was then only twenty-two--in 1822 a ”Plan of the scientific operations necessary for the re-organisation of society,” which was published under another t.i.tle two years later by Saint-Simon, and it was over this that the friends quarrelled. This work contains the principles of the positive philosophy which he was soon to begin to work out; it announces already the ”law of the Three Stages.”

The first volume of the ”Cours de philisophie positive” appeared in 1830; it took him twelve years more to complete the exposition of his system. [Footnote: With vol. vi., 1842.]

2.

The ”law of Three Stages” is familiar to many who have never read a line of his writings. That men first attempted to explain natural phenomena by the operation of imaginary deities, then sought to interpret them by abstractions, and finally came to see that they could only be understood by scientific methods, observation, and experiment--this was a generalisation which had already been thrown out by Turgot. Comte adopted it as a fundamental psychological law, which has governed every domain of mental activity and explains the whole story of human development. Each of our princ.i.p.al conceptions, every branch of knowledge, pa.s.ses successively through these three states which he names the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive or scientific. In the first, the mind invents; in the second, it abstracts; in the third, it submits itself to positive facts; and the proof that any branch of knowledge has reached the third stage is the recognition of invariable natural laws.

But, granting that this may be the key to the history of the sciences, of physics, say, or botany, how can it explain the history of man, the sequence of actual historical events? Comte replies that history has been governed by ideas; ”the whole social mechanism is ultimately based on opinions.” Thus man's history is essentially a history of his opinions; and these are subject to the fundamental psychological law.

It must, however, be observed that all branches of knowledge are not in the same stage simultaneously. Some may have reached the metaphysical, while others are still lagging behind in the theological; some may have become scientific, while others have not pa.s.sed from the metaphysical.

Thus the study of physical phenomena has already reached the positive stage; but the study of social phenomena has not. The central aim of Comte, and his great achievement in his own opinion, was to raise the study of social phenomena from the second to the third stage.

When we proceed to apply the law of the three stages to the general course of historical development, we are met at the outset by the difficulty that the advance in all the domains of activity is not simultaneous. If at a given period thought and opinions are partly in the theological, partly in the metaphysical, and partly in the scientific state, how is the law to be applied to general development?

One cla.s.s of ideas, Comte says, must be selected as the criterion, and this cla.s.s must be that of social and moral ideas, for two reasons.

In the first place, social science occupies the highest rank in the hierarchy of sciences, on which he laid great stress. [Footnote: Cours de phil. pos. v. 267. Law of consensus: op. cit. iv. 347 sqq., 364, 505, 721, 735.] In the second, those ideas play the princ.i.p.al part for the majority of men, and the most ordinary phenomena are the most important to consider. When, in other cla.s.ses of ideas, the advance is at any time more rapid, this only means an indispensable preparation for the ensuing period.

The movement of history is due to the deeply rooted though complex instinct which pushes man to ameliorate his condition incessantly, to develop in all ways the sum of his physical, moral, and intellectual life. And all the phenomena of his social life are closely cohesive, as Saint-Simon had pointed out. By virtue of this cohesion, political, moral, and intellectual progress are inseparable from material progress, and so we find that the phases of his material development correspond to intellectual changes. The principle of consensus or ”solidarity,” which secures harmony and order in the development, is as important as the principle of the three stages which governs the onward movement. This movement, however, is not in a right line, but displays a series of oscillations, unequal and variable, round a mean motion which tends to prevail. The three general causes of variation, according to Comte, are race, climate, and deliberate political action (such as the retrograde policies of Julian the Apostate or Napoleon). But while they cause deflections and oscillation, their power is strictly limited; they may accelerate or r.e.t.a.r.d the movement, but they cannot invert its order; they may affect the intensity of the tendencies in a given situation, but cannot change their nature.

3.

In the demonstration of his laws by the actual course of civilisation, Comte adopts what he calls ”the happy artifice of Condorcet,” and treats the successive peoples who pa.s.s on the torch as if they were a single people running the race. This is ”a rational fiction,” for a people's true successors are those who pursue its efforts. And, like Bossuet and Condorcet, he confined his review to European civilisation; he considered only the ELITE or advance guard of humanity. He deprecated the introduction of China or India, for instance, as a confusing complication. He ignored the ROLES of Brahmanism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism. His synthesis, therefore, cannot claim to be a synthesis of universal history; it is only a synthesis of the movement of European history. In accordance with the law of the three stages, the development falls into three great periods. The first or Theological came to an end about A.D. 1400, and the second or Metaphysical is now nearing its close, to make way for the third or Positive, for which Comte was preparing the way.

The Theological period has itself three stages, in which Fetis.h.i.+sm, Polytheism, and Monotheism successively prevail. The chief social characteristics of the Polytheistic period are the inst.i.tution of slavery and the coincidence or ”confusion” of the spiritual and temporal powers. It has two stages: the theocratic, represented by Egypt, and the military, represented by Rome, between which Greece stands in a rather embarra.s.sing and uneasy position.

The initiative for the pa.s.sage to the Monotheistic period came from Judaea, and Comte attempts to show that this could not have been otherwise. His a.n.a.lysis of this period is the most interesting part of his survey. The chief feature of the political system corresponding to monotheism is the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers; the function of the spiritual power being concerned with education, and that of the temporal with action, in the wide senses of those terms. The defects of this dual system were due to the irrational theology. But the theory of papal infallibility was a great step in intellectual and social progress, by providing a final jurisdiction, without which society would have been troubled incessantly by contests arising from the vague formulae of dogmas. Here Comte had learned from Joseph de Maistre. But that thinker would not have been edified when Comte went on to declare that in the pa.s.sage from polytheism to monotheism the religious spirit had really declined, and that one of the merits of Catholicism was that it augmented the domain of human wisdom at the expense of divine inspiration. [Footnote: Cours de philosophic positive, vi. 354.] If it be said that the Catholic system promoted the empire of the clergy rather than the interests of religion, this was all to the good; for it placed the practical use of religion in ”the provisional elevation of a n.o.ble speculative corporation eminently able to direct opinions and morals.”

But Catholic monotheism could not escape dissolution. The metaphysical spirit began to operate powerfully on the notions of moral philosophy, as soon as the Catholic organisation was complete; and Catholicism, because it could not a.s.similate this intellectual movement, lost its progressive character and stagnated.

The decay began in the fourteenth century, where Comte dates the beginning of the Metaphysical period--a period of revolution and disorder. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the movement is spontaneous and unconscious; from the sixteenth till to-day it has proceeded under the direction of a philosophical spirit which is negative and not constructive. This critical philosophy has only accelerated a decomposition which began spontaneously. For as theology progresses it becomes less consistent and less durable, and as its conceptions become less irrational, the intensity of the emotions which they excite decreases. Fetis.h.i.+sm had deeper roots than polytheism and lasted longer; and polytheism surpa.s.sed monotheism in vigour and vitality.

Yet the critical philosophy was necessary to exhibit the growing need of solid reorganisation and to prove that the decaying system was incapable of directing the world any longer. Logically it was very imperfect, but it was justified by its success. The destructive work was mainly done in the seventeenth century by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle, of whom Hobbes was the most effective. In the eighteenth all prominent thinkers partic.i.p.ated in developing this negative movement, and Rousseau gave it the practical stimulus which saved it from degenerating into an unfruitful agitation. Of particular importance was the great fallacy, which Helvetius propagated, that human intellects are equal. This error was required for the full development of the critical doctrine. For it supported the dogmas of popular sovranty and social equality, and justified the principle of the right of private judgement.

These three principles--popular sovranty, equality, and what he calls the right of free examination--are in Comte's eyes vicious and anarchical.[Footnote #1 Op. cit. iv. 36-38.] But it was necessary that they should be promulgated, because the transition from one organised social system to another cannot be direct; it requires an anarchical interregnum. Popular sovranty is opposed to orderly inst.i.tutions and condemns all superior persons to dependence on the mult.i.tude of their inferiors. Equality, obviously anarchical in its tendency, and obviously untrue (for, as men are not equal or even equivalent to one another, their rights cannot be identical), was similarly necessary to break down the old inst.i.tutions. The universal claim to the right of free judgement merely consecrates the transitional state of unlimited liberty in the interim between the decline of theology and the arrival of positive philosophy. Comte further remarks that the fall of the spiritual power had led to anarchy in international relations, and if the spirit of nationality were to prevail too far, the result would be a state of things inferior to that of the Middle Ages.

But Comte says for the metaphysical spirit in France that with all its vices it was more disengaged from the prejudices of the old theological regime, and nearer to a true rational positivism than either the German mysticism or the English empiricism of the same period.

The Revolution was a necessity, to disclose the chronic decomposition of society from which it resulted, and to liberate the modern social elements from the grip of the ancient powers. Comte has praise for the Convention, which he contrasts with the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly with its political fictions and inconsistencies. He pointed out that the great vice in the ”metaphysics” of the crisis--that is, in the principles of the revolutionaries--lay in conceiving society out of relation to the past, in ignoring the Middle Ages, and borrowing from Greek and Roman society retrograde and contradictory ideals.

Napoleon restored order, but he was more injurious to humanity than any other historical person. His moral and intellectual nature was incompatible with the true direction of Progress, which involves the extinction of the theological and military regime of the past. Thus his work, like Julian the Apostate's, exhibits an instance of deflection from the line of Progress. Then came the parliamentary system of the restored Bourbons which Comte designates as a political Utopia, dest.i.tute of social principles, a foolish attempt to combine political retrogression with a state of permanent peace.

4.