Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 329, March, 1843
His hierarchy being erected, he next enters on a review of the several received sciences, marking throughout the successful, or erroneous, application of the positive method. This occupies three volumes. It is a portion of the work which we are restricted from entering on; nor shall we deviate from the line we have prescribed to ourselves. But before opening the fourth volume, in which he treats of social physics, it will not be beside our object to take a glance at the method itself, as applied in the usual field of scientific investigation, to nature, as it is called—to inorganic matter, to vegetable and animal life.
We are not here determining the merits of M. Comte in his exposition of the scientific method; we take it as we find it; and, in unsophisticated mood, we glance at the nature of this mental discipline—to make room for which, it will be remembered, so wide a territory is to be laid waste.
Facts, or phenomena, classed according to their similitude or the law of their succession—such is the material of science. All enquiry into causes, into substance, into being, pronounced impertinent and nugatory; the very language in which such enquiries are couched not allowed, perhaps, to have a meaning—such is the supreme dictate of the method, and all men yield to it at least a nominal submission. Very different is the aspect which science presents to us in these severe generalities, than when she lectures fluently before gorgeous orreries; or is heard from behind a glittering apparatus, electrical or chemical; or is seen, gay and sportive as a child, at her endless game of unwearying experiment. Here she is the harsh and strict disciplinarian. The museful, meditative spirit passes from one object of its wonder to another, and finds, at every pause it makes, that science is as strenuous in forbidding as in satisfying enquiry. The planet rolls through space—ask not how!—the mathematician will tell you at what rate it flies—let his figures suffice. A thousand subtle combinations are taking place around you, producing the most marvellous transformations—the chemist has a table of substances, and a table of proportions—names and figures both—why these transmutations take place, is a question you should be ashamed to ask. Plants spring up from the earth, and grow, and blossom at your feet, and you look on with delight, and an unsubduable wonder, and in a heedless moment you ask what is life? Science will generalize the fact to you—give you its formula for the expression of growth, decomposition, and recomposition, under circumstances not as yet very accurately collected. Still you stand gazing at the plant which a short while since stole through a crevice of the earth, and taking to itself, with such subtle power of choice, from the soil or the air, the matter that it needed, fashioned it to the green leaf and the hanging blossom. In vain! Your scientific monitor calls you from futile reveries, and repeats his formula of decomposition and recomposition. As attraction in the planet is known only as a movement admitting of a stated numerical expression, so life in the plant is to be known only as decomposition and recomposition taking place under certain circumstances. Think of it as such—no more. But, O learned philosopher! you exclaim, you shall tell me that you know not what manner of thing life is, and I will believe you; and if you add that I shall never discover it, I will believe you; but you cannot prevent me from knowing that it is something I do not know. Permit me, for I cannot help it, still to wonder what life is. Upon the dial of a watch the hands are moving, and a child asks why? Child! I respond, that the hands do move is an ultimate fact—so, represent it to yourself—and here, moreover, is the law of their movement—the longer index revolves twelve times while the shorter revolves once. This is knowledge, and will be of use to you—more you cannot understand. And the child is silent, but still it keeps its eye upon the dial, and knows there is something that it does not know.
But while you are looking, in spite of your scientific monitor, at this beautiful creature that grows fixed and rooted in the earth—what is this that glides forth from beneath its leaves, with self-determined motion, not to be expressed by a numerical law, pausing, progressing, seeking, this way and that, its pasture?—what have we here? Irritability and a tissue. Lo! it shrinks back as the heel of the philosopher has touched it, coiling and writhing itself—what is this? Sensation and a nerve. Does the nerve feel? you inconsiderately ask, or is there some sentient being, other than the nerve, in which sensation resides? A smile of derision plays on the lip of the philosopher. There is sensation—you cannot express the fact in simpler or more general terms. Turn your enquiries, or your microscope, on the organization with which it is, in order of time, connected. Ask not me, in phrases without meaning, of the unintelligible mysteries of ontology. And you, O philosopher! who think and reason thus, is not the thought within thee, in every way, a most perplexing matter? Not more perplexing, he replies, than the pain of yonder worm, which seems now to have subsided, since it glides on with apparent pleasure over the surface of the earth. Does the organization of the man, or something else within him, think?—does the organization of that worm, or something else within it, feel?—they are virtually the same questions, and equally idle. Phenomena are the sole subjects of science. Like attraction in the planet, like life in the vegetable, like sensation in the animal, so thought in man is an ultimate fact, which we can merely recognize, and place in its order in the universe. Come with me to the dissecting-room, and examine that cerebral apparatus with which it is, or was, connected.
All this "craves wary walking." It is a trying course, this method, for the uninitiated. How it strains the mind by the very limitations it imposes on its outlook! How mysterious is this very sharp, and well-defined separation from all mystery! How giddy is this path that leads always so close over the unknowable! Giddy as that bridge of steel, framed like a scimitar, and as fine, which the faithful Moslem, by the aid of his Prophet, will pass with triumph on his way to Paradise. But of our bridge, it cannot be said that it has one foot on earth and one in heaven. Apparently, it has no foundation whatever; it rises from cloud, it is lost in cloud, and it spans an inpenetrable abyss. A mist, which no wind disperses, involves both extremities of our intellectual career, and we are seen to pass like shadows across the fantastic, inexplicable interval.
We now open the fourth volume, which is emblazoned with the title of Physique Social. And here we will at once extract a passage, which, if our own remarks have been hitherto of an unattractive character, shall reward the reader for his patience. It is taken from that portion of the work—perhaps the most lucid and powerful of the whole—where, in order to demonstrate the necessity of his new science of Sociology, M. Comte enters into a review of the two great political parties which, with more or less distinctness, divide every nation of Europe; his intention being to show that both of them are equally incompetent to the task of organizing society. We shall render our quotation as brief as the purpose of exposition will allow:—
"It is impossible to deny that the political world is intellectually in a deplorable condition. All our ideas of order are hitherto solely borrowed from the ancient system of religious and military power, regarded especially in its constitution, catholic and feudal; a doctrine which, from the philosophic point of view of this treatise, represents incontestably the theologic state of the social science. All our ideas of progress continue to be exclusively deduced from a philosophy purely negative, which, issuing from Protestantism, has taken in the last age its final form and complete development; the doctrines of which constitute, in reality, the metaphysic state of politics. Different classes of society adopt the one or the other of these, just as they are disposed to feel chiefly the want of conservation or that of amelioration. Rarely, it is true, do these antagonist doctrines present themselves in all their plenitude, and with their primitive homogeneity; they are found less and less in this form, except in minds purely speculative. But the monstrous medley which men attempt in our days of their incompatible principles, cannot evidently be endowed with any virtue foreign to the elements which compose it, and tends only, in fact, to their mutual neutralization.
"However pernicious may be at present the theologic doctrine, no true philosophy can forget that the formation and first development of modern societies were accomplished under its benevolent tutelage; which I hope sufficiently to demonstrate in the historical portion of this work. But it is not the less incontestably true that, for about three centuries, its influence has been, amongst the nations most advanced, essentially retrograde, notwithstanding the partial services it has throughout that period rendered. It would be superfluous to enter here into a special discussion of this doctrine, in order to show its extreme insufficiency at the present day. The deplorable absence of all sound views of social organization can alone account for the absurd project of giving, in these times, for the support of social order, a political system which has already been found unable to sustain itself before the spontaneous progress of intelligence and of society. The historical analysis which we shall subsequently institute of the successive changes which have gradually brought about the entire dissolution of the catholic and feudal system, will demonstrate, better than any direct argument, its radical and irrevocable decay. The theologic school has generally no other method of explaining this decomposition of the old system than by causes merely accidental or personal, out of all reasonable proportion with the magnitude of the results; or else, when hard driven, it has recourse to its ordinary artifice, and attempts to explain all by an appeal to the will of Providence, to whom is ascribed the intention of raising a time of trial for the social order, of which the commencement, the duration, and the character, are all left equally obscure."...—P.14
"In a point of view strictly logical, the social problem might be stated thus:—construct a doctrine that shall be so rationally conceived that it shall be found, as it develops itself, to be still always consistent with its own principles. Neither of the existing doctrines satisfies this condition, even by the rudest approximation. Both display numerous and direct contradictions, and on important points. By this alone their utter insufficiency is clearly exhibited. The doctrine which shall fulfil this condition, will, from this test, be recognized as the one capable of reorganizing society; for it is an intellectual reorganization that is first wanted—a re-establishment of a real and durable harmony amongst our social ideas, disturbed and shaken to the very foundation. Should this regeneration be accomplished in one intelligence only, (and such must necessarily be its manner of commencement,) its extension would be certain; for the number of intelligences to be convinced can have no influence except as a question of time. I shall not fail to point out, when the proper opportunity arrives, the eminent superiority, in this respect, of the positive philosophy, which, once extended to social phenomena, will necessarily combine the ideas of men in a strict and complete manner, which in no other way can be attained."—P. 20.
M. Comte then mentions some of the inconsistencies of the theologic school.
"Analyze, for example, the vain attempts, so frequently renewed during two centuries by so many distinguished minds, to subordinate, according to the theologic formula, reason to faith; it is easy to recognize the radical contradiction this attempt involves, which establishes reason herself as supreme judge of this very submission, the extent and the permanence of which is to depend upon her variable and not very rigid decisions. The most eminent thinker of the present catholic school, the illustrious De Maistre, himself affords a proof, as convincing as involuntary, of this inevitable contradiction in his philosophy, when, renouncing all theologic weapons, he labours in his principal work to re-establish the Papal supremacy on purely historical and political reasonings, instead of limiting himself to command it by right divine—the only mode in true harmony with such a doctrine, and which a mind, at another epoch, would not certainly have hesitated to adopt."—P. 25.
After some further observations on the theologic or retrograde school, he turns to the metaphysic, sometimes called the anarchical, sometimes doctrine critique, for M. Comte is rich in names.
"In submitting, in their turn, the metaphysic doctrine to a like appreciation, it must never be overlooked that, though exclusively critical, and therefore purely revolutionary, it has not the less merited, for a long time, the title of progressive, as having in fact presided over the principal political improvements accomplished in the course of the three last centuries, and which have necessarily been of a negative description. If, when conceived in an absolute sense, its dogmas manifest, in fact, a character directly anarchical, when viewed in an historical position, and in their antagonism to the ancient system, they constitute a provisional state, necessary to the introduction of a new political organization.
"By a necessity as evident as it is deplorable, a necessity inherent in our feeble nature, the transition from one social system to another can never be direct and continuous; it supposes always, during some generations at least, a sort of interregnum, more or less anarchical, whose character and duration depend on the importance and extent of the renovation to be effected. (While the old system remains standing, though undermined, the public reason cannot become familiarized with a class of ideas entirely opposed to it.) In this necessity we see the legitimate source of the present doctrine critique—a source which at once explains the indispensable services it has hitherto rendered, and also the essential obstacles it now opposes to the final reorganization of modern societies....
"Under whatever aspect we regard it, the general spirit of the metaphysic revolutionary system consists in erecting into a normal and permanent state a necessarily exceptional and transitory condition. By a direct and total subversion of political notions, the most fundamental, it represents government as being, by its nature, the necessary enemy of society, against which it sedulously places itself in a constant state of suspicion and watchfulness; it is disposed incessantly to restrain more and more its sphere of activity, in order to prevent its encroachments, and tends finally to leave it no other than the simple functions of general police, without any essential participation in the supreme direction of the action of the collective body or of its social development.
"Approaching to a more detailed examination of this doctrine, it is evident that the absolute right of free examination (which, connected as it is with the liberty of the press and the freedom of education, is manifestly its principal and fundamental dogma) is nothing else, in reality, but the consecration, under the vicious abstract form common to all metaphysic conceptions, of that transitional state of unlimited liberty in which the human mind has been spontaneously placed, in consequence of the irrevocable decay of the theologic philosophy, and which must naturally remain till the establishment in the social domain of the positive method.49 ... However salutary and indispensable in its historical position, this principle opposes a grave obstacle to the reorganization of society, by being erected into an absolute and permanent dogma. To examine always without deciding ever, would be deemed great folly in any individual. How can the dogmatic consecration of a like disposition amongst all individuals, constitute the definitive perfection of the social order, in regard, too, to ideas whose finity it is so peculiarly important, and so difficult, to establish? Is it not evident, on the contrary, that such a disposition is, from its nature, radically anarchical, inasmuch as, if it could be indefinitely prolonged, it must hinder every true mental organization?
"No association whatever, though destined for a special and temporary purpose, and though limited to a small number of individuals, can subsist without a certain degree of reciprocal confidence, both intellectual and moral, between its members, each one of whom finds a continual necessity for a crowd of notions, to the formation of which he must remain a stranger, and which he cannot admit but on the faith of others. By what monstrous exception can this elementary condition of all society be banished from that total association of mankind, where the point of view which the individual takes, is most widely separated from that point of view which the collective interest requires, and where each member is the least capable, whether by nature or position, to form a just appreciation of these general rules, indispensable to the good direction of his personal activity. Whatever intellectual development we may suppose possible, in the mass of men it is evident, that social order will remain always necessarily incompatible with the permanent liberty left to each, to throw back every day into endless discussion the first principles even of society....
"The dogma of equality is the most essential and the most influential after that which I have just examined, and is, besides, in necessary relation to the principle of the unrestricted liberty of judgment; for this last indirectly leads to the conclusion of an equality of the most fundamental character—an equality of intelligence. In its bearing on the ancient system, it has happily promoted the development of modern civilization, by presiding over the final dissolution of the old social classification. But this function constitutes the sole progressive destination of this energetic dogma, which tends in its turn to prevent every just reorganization, since its destructive activity is blindly directed against the basis of every new classification. For, whatever that basis may be, it cannot be reconciled with a pretended equality, which, to all intelligent men, can now only signify the triumph of the inequalities developed by modern civilization, over those which had predominated in the infancy of society....
"The same philosophical appreciation is applicable with equal ease to the dogma of the sovereignty of the people. Whilst estimating, as is fit, the indispensable transitional office of this revolutionary dogma, no true philosopher can now misunderstand the fatal anarchical tendency of this metaphysical conception, since in its absolute application it opposes itself to all regular institution, condemning indefinitely all superiors to an arbitrary dependence on the multitude of their inferiors, by a sort of transference to the people of the much-reprobated right of kings."
As our author had shown how the theologic philosophy was inconsistent often with itself, so, in criticising the metaphysics, he exposes here also certain self-contradictions. He reproaches it with having, in its contests with the old system, endeavoured, at each stage, to uphold and adopt some of the elementary principles of that very system it was engaged in destroying.
"Thus," he says, "there arose a Christianity more and more simplified, and reduced at length to a vague and powerless theism, which, by a strange medley of terms, the metaphysicians distinguished by the title of natural religion, as if all religion was not inevitably supernatural. In pretending to direct the social reorganization after this vain conception, the metaphysic school, notwithstanding its destination purely revolutionary, has always implicitly adhered, and does so, especially and distinctly, at the present day, to the most fundamental principle of the ancient political doctrine—that which represents the social order as necessarily reposing on a theological basis. This is now the most evident, and the most pernicious inconsistency of the metaphysic doctrine. Armed with this concession, the school of Bossuet and De Maistre will always maintain an incontestable logical superiority over the irrational detractors of Catholicism, who, while they proclaim the want of a religious organization, reject, nevertheless, the elements indispensable to its realization. By such a concession the revolutionary school concur in effect, at the present day, with the retrograde, in preventing a right organization of modern societies, whose intellectual condition more and more interdicts a system of politics founded on theology."
Our readers will doubtless agree with us, that this review of political parties (though seen through an extract which we have been compelled to abbreviate in a manner hardly permissible in quoting from an author) displays a singular originality and power of thought; although each one of them will certainly have his own class of objections and exceptions to make. We said that the impression created by the work was decidedly conservative, and this quotation has already borne us out. For without implying that we could conscientiously make use of every argument here put into our hands, we may be allowed to say, as the lawyers do in Westminster Hail, if this be so, then it follows that we of the retrograde, or as we may fairly style ourselves in England—seeing this country has not progressed so rapidly as France—we of the stationary party are fully justified in maintaining our position, unsatisfactory though it may be, till some better and more definite system has been revealed to us, than any which has yet made its advent in the political world. If the revolutionary, metaphysic, or liberal school have no proper office but that of destruction—if its nature be essentially transitional—can we be called upon to forego this position, to quit our present anchorage, until we know whereto we are to be transferred? Shall we relinquish the traditions of our monarchy, and the discipline of our church, before we hear what we are to receive in exchange? M. Comte would not advise so irrational a proceeding.
But M. Comte has himself a constructive doctrine; M. Comte will give us in exchange—what? The Scientific Method!
We have just seen something of this scientific method. M. Comte himself is well aware that it is a style of thought by no means adapted to the multitude. Therefore there will arise with the scientific method an altogether new class, an intellectual aristocracy, (not the present race of savans or their successors, whom he is particularly anxious to exclude from all such advancement,) who will expound to the people the truths to which that method shall give birth. This class will take under its control all that relates to education. It will be the seat of the moral power, not of the administrative. This, together with some arguments to establish what few are disposed to question, the fundamental character of the laws of property and of marriage, is all that we are here presented with towards the definite re-organization of society.
We shall not go back to the question, already touched upon, and which lies at the basis of all this—how far it is possible to construct a science of Sociology. There is only one way in which the question can be resolved in the affirmative—namely, by constructing the science.
Meanwhile we may observe, that the general consent of a cultivated order of minds to a certain class of truths, is not sufficient for the purposes of government. We take, says M. Comte, our chemistry from the chemist, our astronomy from the astronomer; if these were fixed principles, we should take our politics with the same ease from the graduated politician. But it is worth while to consider what it is we do when we take our chemistry from the chemist, and our astronomy from the astronomer. We assume, on the authority of our teacher, certain facts which it is not in our power to verify; but his reasonings upon these facts we must be able to comprehend. We follow him as he explains the facts by which knowledge has been obtained, and yield to his statement a rational conviction. Unless we do this, we cannot be said to have any knowledge whatever of the subject—any chemistry or astronomy at all. Now, presuming there were a science of politics, as fixed and perfect as that of astronomy, the people must, at all events, be capable of understanding its exposition, or they could not possibly be governed by it. We need hardly say that those ideas, feelings, and sentiments, which can be made general, are those only on which government can rest.
In the course of the preceding extract, our author exposes the futility of that attempt which certain churchmen are making, as well on this side of the Channel as the other, to reason men back into a submission of their reason. Yet, if the science of Sociology should be above the apprehension of the vulgar, (as M. Comte seems occasionally to presume it would be,) he would impose on his intellectual priesthood a task of the very same kind, and even still more hopeless. A multitude once taught to argue and decide on politics, must be reasoned back into a submission of their reason to political teachers—teachers who have no sacred writings, and no traditions from which to argue a delegated authority, but whose authority must be founded on the very reasonableness of the entire system of their doctrine. But this is a difficulty we are certainly premature in discussing, as the true Catholic church in politics has still itself to be formed.
We are afraid, notwithstanding all his protestations, M. Comte will be simply classed amongst the Destructives, so little applicable to the generality of minds is that mode of thought, to establish which (and it is for this we blame him) he calls, and so prematurely, for so great sacrifices.
The fifth volume—the most remarkable, we think, of the whole—contains that historical survey which has been more than once alluded to in the foregoing extracts. This volume alone would make the fortune of any expert Parisian scribe who knew how to select from its rich store of original materials, who had skill to arrange and expound, and, above all, had the dexterity to adopt somewhat more ingeniously than M. Comte has done, his abstract statements to our reminiscences of historical facts. Full of his own generalities, he is apt to forget the concrete matter of the annalist. Indeed, it is a peculiarity running through the volume, that generalizations, in themselves of a valuable character, are shown to disadvantage by an unskilful alliance with history.
We will make one quotation from this portion of the work, and then we must leave M. Comte. In reviewing the theological progress of mankind, he signalizes three epochs, that of Fetishism, of Polytheism, and of Monotheism. Our extract shall relate to the first of these, to that primitive state of religion, or idolatry, in which things themselves were worshipped; the human being transferring to them immediately a life, or power, somewhat analogous to its own.
"Exclusively habituated, for so long a time, to a theology eminently metaphysic, we must feel at present greatly embarrassed in our attempt to comprehend this gross primitive mode of thought. It is thus that fetishism has often been confounded with polytheism, when to the latter has been applied the common expression of idolatry, which strictly relates to the former only; since the priests of Jupiter or Minerva would, no doubt, have as justly repelled the vulgar reproach of worshipping images, as do the Catholic doctors of the present day a like unjust accusation of the Protestants. But though we are happily sufficiently remote from fetishism to find a difficulty in conceiving it, yet each one of us has but to retrace his own mental history, to detect the essential characters of this initial state. Nay, even eminent thinkers of the present day, when they allow themselves to be involuntarily ensnared (under the influence, but partially rectified, of a vicious education) to attempt to penetrate the mystery of the essential production of any phenomenon whose laws are not familiar to them, they are in a condition personally to exemplify this invariable instinctive tendency to trace the generation of unknown effects to a cause analogous to life, which is no other, strictly speaking, than the principle of fetishism....
"Theologic philosophy, thoroughly investigated, has always necessarily for its base pure fetishism, which deifies instantly each body and each phenomenon capable of exciting the feeble thought of infant humanity. Whatever essential transformations this primitive philosophy may afterwards undergo, a judicious sociological analysis will always expose to view this primordial base, never entirely concealed, even in a religious state the most remote from the original point of departure. Not only, for example, the Egyptian theocracy has presented, at the time of its greatest splendour, the established and prolonged coexistence, in the several castes of the hierarchy, of one of these religious epochs, since the inferior ranks still remained in simple fetishism, whilst the higher orders were in possession of a very remarkable polytheism, and the most exalted of its members had probably raised themselves to some form of monotheism; but we can at all times, by a strict scrutiny, detect in the theologic spirit traces of this original fetishism. It has even assumed, amongst subtle intelligences, the most metaphysical forms. What, in reality, is that celebrated conception of a soul of the world amongst the ancients, or that analogy, more modern, drawn between the earth and an immense living animal, and other similar fancies, but pure fetishism disguised in the pomp of philosophical language? And, in our own days even, what is this cloudy pantheism which so many metaphysicians, especially in Germany, make great boast of, but generalized and systematized fetishism enveloped in a learned garb fit to amaze the vulgar."—Vol. V. p. 38.
He then remarks on the perfect adaptation of this primitive theology to the initial torpor of the human understanding, which it spares even the labour of creating and sustaining the facile fictions of polytheism. The mind yields passively to that natural tendency which leads us to transfer to objects without us, that sentiment of existence which we feel within, and which, appearing at first sufficiently to explain our own personal phenomena, serves directly as an uniform base, an absolute unquestioned interpretation, of all external phenomena. He dwells with quite a touching satisfaction on this child-like and contented condition of the rude intellect.