Chapter VI: Part 6

But now to touch upon the radical and permanent error of Rationalism. It regards all things as accessible to the researches and to the methods of human science. When Spiritualism has recognized and proclaimed the essential and necessary facts which constitute the intellectual and moral being by it styled man, it halts abruptly; it hesitates also to recognize and proclaim the mysterious facts in that sanctuary the very door of which it has reached; it does not resign itself to adore what lies behind the vail; it is inconsequent and timid, although respectful and modest. {266} Rationalism, on the contrary, is presumptuous and audacious; its ambition is to see clearly, to touch what is in the center of the sanctuary, as it sees and touches what is on its outside. Its pretension is that it may study and know, by its ordinary processes, as well the invisible world, its Sovereign and its laws, as the visible world in which man is now placed; and it wars upon Christianity because Christianity admits no such pretension. But Christianity here encounters another adversary, Positivism. Positivism arrests its progress, saying: "I do not know, nobody knows, if an invisible world be or be not a really existing thing. It is a mere loss of time to think of it, for nothing can be known about it with certainty. All religion, all metaphysics, are chimerical and vain sciences; there is no science but the science of the physical world, of its facts and of its laws!"

---------------------------------------

{267}

Fourth Meditation.

Positivism.

I seek no quarrel with words, even when they provoke it. Positivism is a word, in language a barbarism, in philosophy a presumption. Unlike Geology, Ideology, Theology, Physics, it qualifies a doctrine, not by its object, but by its supposed merit. All science pretends to positiveness--that is, to be founded upon fact and truth. But "Positivism" alone arrogates to itself this quality. It is an arrogance, in my opinion, radically unjustifiable.

I knew its founder, M. Auguste Comte, personally. I had some communication with him in the period from 1824 to 1830. I then was struck by the elevation of his sentiments and by the vigor of his mind. {268} In October, 1832, at the moment when I was entering upon my functions as Minister of Public Instruction, he came to me and formally demanded that I should create for him in the "College of France" a professorship of general history for the physical and mathematical sciences. I see no cause to express myself here otherwise than I have already done in my "Memoirs" as to the impression produced upon me by his conversation and his personal bearing. "He explained to me drearily and confusedly his views upon man, society, civilization, religion, philosophy, history. He was a man single-minded, honest, of profound convictions, devoted to his own ideas, in appearance modest, although at heart prodigiously vain; he sincerely believed that it was his calling to open a new era for the mind of man and for human society. While listening to him, I could hardly refrain from expressing my astonishment that a mind so vigorous should at the same time be so narrow as not even to perceive the nature and bearing of the facts with which he was dealing, and the questions which he was authoritatively deciding; that a character so disinterested should not be warned by his own proper sentiments--which were moral in spite of his system--of its falsity and its negation of morality. {269} I did not even make any attempt at discussion with M. Comte: his sincerity, his enthusiasm, and the delusion that blinded him, inspired me with that sad esteem that takes refuge in silence. Had I even judged it fitting to create the chair which he demanded, I should not for a moment have dreamed of assigning it to him." [Footnote 44]

[Footnote 44: "Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire de mon
temps," t. iii, pp. 125-7. In the sixth volume of these
Mémoires I have rectified an error inadvertently committed by
me as to the epoch of my first relations with M. Auguste
Comte.]

{270}

I should have been as silent and still more sad if I had then known the trials through which M. Auguste Comte had already passed. He had been, in 1823, a prey to a violent attack of mental alienation, and in 1827, during a paroxysm of gloomy melancholy, he had thrown himself from the Pont des Arts into the Seine, but had been rescued by one of the king's guard. More than once, in the course of his subsequent life, this mental trouble seemed upon the point of recurring.

Many will be tempted to demand how a man so little master of himself, and whose mind was under so little government, could ever have succeeded in producing a doctrine so considerable, and in exercising such real influence upon the philosophical world. The fact is nevertheless beyond question. Whether the cause is to be referred to the merit of M. Comte and of his doctrine, or to the state of men's minds at the time, it is certain that not only in France but in Europe, and particularly in England, numerous and honorable disciples came over to his ideas, and that Positivism became a school wanting neither in sincerity nor credit. When such men as M. Littré, at Paris, and Mr. J. Stuart Mill, in London, declare themselves his adherents, the doctrine has claims to a serious examination.

{271}

M. Auguste Comte lived constantly, as far as he was individually concerned, under the empire of a fixed idea, which occasioned him many a painful disappointment; and he lived, as far as his system was concerned, under the empire of a false idea, which associated with views just in themselves and sometimes grand, one pervading and permanent error.

His fixed personal idea consisted in his thinking himself called to regenerate human science and human society by the single virtue of his doctrine. Besides their share in the presumptuousness which is the common character of mankind, minds that are inventive and fond of systematizing are particularly prone to extend beyond their legitimate bearings--nay, beyond all bounds--the pretensions and the hopes which their ideas suggest. M. Auguste Comte was one of the most striking instances, as well as one of the most honest victims, of this intellectual intoxication--the noblest although not the least fantastic form of human pride. {272} The Christian religion has its apostles and it has its missionaries, speaking in the name of a Master other than themselves, and preaching a faith they did not themselves originate. M. Auguste Comte was his own proper apostle--the inventor and missionary of his own proper faith. Of profound convictions, with no selfish, worldly views, he aspired to the entire empire of the intellect, believing both the interests of social order and the honor of the human mind involved in the triumph of his doctrine; he ardently desired not only its propagation, but its organization as a permanent and potent institution, to insure and perpetuate his triumph. The real and practical government of nations, according to him, was only, as it ought to be only, a sort of stewardship, charged with the duty of realizing and carrying into effect the ideas of thinking men. "The systematic separation of the two elementary forces, the Spiritual and the Temporal," so he wrote to Mr. J. Stuart Mill, "constitutes certainly the principal condition for a _denouement_ of the actual situation. {273} I admit that the special requirements of a situation where those two forces are confounded may authorize, and sometimes oblige, philosophers, in the interest of a final regeneration, to participate, by way of exception, in actual political life, although an inclination for such a life exposes them to the danger of many a quicksand, and demands that their principles should be firmly settled, to avoid the risk of a real deviation. To embody my thought upon this subject in a palpable example relative to a great occurrence, I blame the philosopher Condorcet for having suffered himself to be returned as member to our glorious Convention, in which men of action were leaders, and properly so, whereas Condorcet could never be so placed as to regard things from the same point of view; hence that false position for which in the sequel he had so cruelly to suffer. {274} But on the contrary, I should have regarded it as very natural for him to develop a great activity in the club of the Jacobins; for, placed beyond the sphere of the government, properly so called, that club constituted at that time a sort of spiritual power, in that remarkable and so little comprehended combination of things which characterized the revolutionary régime. ... I have learned with much satisfaction," he added, still addressing Mr. Mill, "that the wise energy of your resistance has succeeded in triumphing over the blind persistence of your friends who urge you toward a parliamentary career. I shall propose in my last volume, and in direct terms, the institution, by individual efforts, of an European committee, charged permanently with the direction of a common movement of philosophical regeneration, when once Positivism shall have planted its standard--that is, its lighthouse, I should term it--in the midst of the disorder and confusion that reigns; and I hope that this will be the result of the publication of my work in its complete state." [Footnote 45]

[Footnote 45: Letters of the 20th November, 1841, and 4th
March, 1842, published in the work of M. Littré, entitled,
"Auguste Comte and the Positive Philosophy," pp. 424, 425,
427, 429.]

{275}

One can scarcely refrain from a smile when he contemplates these dreams reduced to the form of system, ignoring every sentiment of reality, and expounded with the confidence of fanaticism in the name of a science called Positive. Here it is that we find the fixed and dominant idea that pervaded and compromised the whole life of M. Auguste Comte. Whoever did not accept his doctrine and his system, was for him either a retrogradist full of prejudice, or an ignoramus without scientific education, or an interested and jealous enemy. Whoever, on the other hand, lent himself to his views on any point, or for any time, however short, became in the eyes of M. Comte his conquest and his property, his philosophical serf, as it were, bound to his master by the tenure of duty, and the render of services from which he could never hope to enfranchise himself, without the risk of being treated upon the instant as a deserter or a rebel, and of seeing at once broken the closest and most approved bonds of intimacy and friendship. {276} He had so entire a confidence in his own intellectual superiority, and in the rights which it conferred, that he expressed it sometimes with a _näiveté_ amounting almost to idolatry. One day, believing that he had won over to his ideas M. Armand Marrast, then the editor of the _National_, he wrote thus to his wife: "Marrast no longer feels any repugnance in admitting the indispensable fact of my intellectual superiority; he is in this respect, in my opinion, especially influenced by Mill, whom he holds, and with reason, in high account. To speak plainly and in general terms, I believe that, at the point at which I have now arrived, I have no occasion to do more than to continue to exist; the kind of preponderance which I covet cannot, henceforth, fail to devolve upon me." [Footnote 46]

[Footnote 46: Letter of the 3d December, 1842: "Auguste Comte
et la philosophic positive;" p. 324.]

{277}

Shortly after the date of this letter, M. Comte was separated from his wife and embroiled with Mr. Mill himself, who had not, as the former fancied, fulfilled toward him all the duties of an accepted and loyal disciple.

I pass from the fixed idea of the man to the false idea of his system; it appears over and over again at each step in the "Cours de philosophie positive" of M. Auguste Comte, [Footnote 47] and in the imposing biography consecrated to his memory by his most accomplished disciple, M. Littré. [Footnote 48]

[Footnote 47: Six volumes 8vo., published in the interval
from 1830 to 1842 inclusive.]

[Footnote 48: Auguste Comte et la philosophic positive. 8vo.
1863.]

I extract from different parts of these volumes the passages in which the fundamental doctrine is most clearly expressed:

"Positive philosophy is the whole body of human knowledge.
Human knowledge is the result of the study of the forces
belonging to matter, and of the conditions or laws governing
those forces." [Footnote 49]

[Footnote 49: Ibid., p. 42.]

"The fundamental character of positive philosophy is, that it
regards all phenomena as subjected to invariable natural laws,
and considers as absolutely inaccessible to us, and as having
no sense for us, every inquiry into what is termed either
primary or final causes." [Footnote 50]

[Footnote 50: Cours de philosophic positive, by M. Auguste
Comte, vol. i, p. 14.]

{278}

"The scientific path, in which I have, ever since I began to
think, continued to walk, the labors that I obstinately pursue
to elevate social theories to the rank of physical science are
evidently, radically, and absolutely opposed to everything that
has a religious or metaphysical tendency." [Footnote 51]

[Footnote 51: Auguste Comte et la philosophic positive, by M.
Littré, p. 194.]

"My positive philosophy is incompatible with every theological
or metaphysical philosophy, and consequently equally so with
every corresponding system of policy." [Footnote 52]

[Footnote 52: Ibid., p. 210.]

"M. Comte," says M. Littré, "made it a duty to speak in public
without any reticence, to deduce his positive truths, and to
confront them with the conceptions of Theology and of
Metaphysics. . . . 'Religiosity' is in his eyes not only a
weakness, but an avowal of want of power." [Footnote 53]

[Footnote 53: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré,
pp. 198-255.]

{279}

"The 'positive state' is that state of the mind in which it
conceives that phenomena are governed by constant laws, from
which prayer and adoration can demand nothing, but to which
intelligence and science may address their demands; so that, by
familiarizing himself with those laws more and more, and by
conforming to them more and more, man acquires an ever-growing
empire over nature and over himself, which empire is the sum of
all civilization. The 'theological state,' on the contrary, is
that state of the mind which conceives that phenomena are the
results of volition, or, if the social development has arrived
at Monotheism, that they are the results of a single, all-wise,
and all-powerful will. This providence, essentially collective
where Polytheism is supposed, essentially single in the case of
Monotheism, governs the world, dispenses its good and its evil,
lays its finger upon human events, and regards the destiny of
each individual man.
{280}
Such is the contrast between the two doctrines. ... Profiting
by the instruction of the illustrious De Maistre, our French
priests at last comprehended that ultramontanism was the only
logical consequence deducible from their essential principles.
The more the positive school defines the real character of its
progress, the more must we see this retrograde concentration
also develop itself; which will involve at some later epoch
Deists themselves, as Positivism proceeds to gain complete
ascendancy; an ascendancy, in other respects, far more likely
to be furthered than retarded by such coordination of its
adversaries, for this will tend to give at last to the
struggles of philosophy a decisive character; but the
Positivists will alone succeed in prevailing (at least as far
as speculative doctrines are concerned) over the coalition of
all the philosophical forces of the ancient school, whether
metaphysical or theological." [Footnote 54]

[Footnote 54: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré,
pp. 370, 434. ]

{281}

M. Comte had even more aversion for Metaphysics than for Theology. He took particular offense at the contemporary spiritualistic school, and the scientific psychology of MM. Royer, Collard, Maine de Biran, Cousin, and Jouffroy.

"In no view," said he, "is there any room for this illusory
psychology; this final transformation of a theology, which men
strive, nowadays, so idly to reanimate; for--without troubling
itself either with the physiological study of our intellectual
organs, or with the observation of those rational processes,
which in effect direct our different scientific
researches--Psychology pretends to arrive at the discovery of
the fundamental laws of the human mind by contemplating that
very mind--that is to say, by making complete abstraction both
of causes and of effects." [Footnote 55]

[Footnote 55: Cours de philosophic positive, by M. Auguste
Comte, vol. i, p. 34.]

{282}

Even while absolutely rejecting Theology, M. Comte treated it with more esteem than Metaphysics.

"We are," he said, "too disposed, nowadays, to ignore the
immense benefits due to religious influence. The positive
philosophy, however paradoxical it may be to claim for it such
a peculiarity, is virtually the only philosophy capable of
worthily appreciating all the participation of the spirit of
religion in the whole grand development of humanity. Is it not
directly evident that, as by an invincible organic necessity,
moral efforts have almost always to combat to some degree or
other the most energetic impulses of our nature; the
theological spirit was imperatively called upon to furnish to
social discipline that general basis which was quite
indispensable at a time when human foresight, whether of men in
masses or of men as individuals, was certainly far too limited
to offer any sufficient _point d'appui_ to influences
purely rational?"

{283}

... "When the positive philosophy shall have acquired that
character of universality which it is still without, it will be
capable of replacing entirely, with all its native superiority,
that theological philosophy and that metaphysical philosophy of
which this universality is in these days the sole real
peculiarity, and which, deprived of this motive for preference,
will have for our successors nothing but an historical
existence." [Footnote 56]

[Footnote 56: Cours de philosophic positive, by M. Comte,
vol. v, p. 73; vol. i, p. 23.]

I do not pause to notice in how many respects this language is superficial, confused, and incoherent. I only draw attention to the fundamental idea which it manifests--matter, the forces of matter, and its laws; these are the sole objects of human knowledge, the sole domain of the human mind. Aware of, and embarrassed by the objections which the idea has from the beginning of time excited, M. Littré has striven to rid himself of them by an admission, sincere no doubt, like everything that he thinks, and everything that he says, but full in its turn of confusion and incoherence.

{284}

"The positive philosophy," says he, "is at once a system which
comprehends all that is known of the world of man and of
society, and also a general method, containing in itself all
the ways by which men have come to learn all these things. What
is beyond, whether, materially speaking, that space without
limit, or intellectually that concatenation of never-ending
causes, all this is absolutely inaccessible to the human mind.
By inaccessible is not meant null or non-existent. Immensity in
matter, as in intellect, is connected by a close band with what
we know, and it is only by such an alliance that it becomes an
idea positive in itself, and of the same order; what I mean is,
that by so touching and bordering what we know, immensity
appears under the double character of reality and of
inaccessibility. It is an ocean which dashes upon our shores,
and for which we have nor bark nor sail, but the clear vision
of which is as salutary as it is formidable." [Footnote 57]

[Footnote 57: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré,
p. 519.]

{285}

The vision so admitted by M. Littré is not clear, and neither is it salutary; but vague, and without result. The imagery does not destroy the system which it seeks to vail from us. Every religious belief, every spiritual doctrine, God and the human soul, are discarded by Positivism, and treated as arbitrary and transitory hypotheses, which, however they may have conduced to the development of humanity, ought now to be rejected by human reason, just as the foot may throw down the ladder which has enabled it to mount to the summit. To call things by their proper names, Positivism is Materialism and Atheism, with more or less explicitness, confidently or hesitatingly, accepted as the last term of human science, and when hard pressed, taking refuge in the darkness of skepticism.

What are the foundations upon which Positivism rests? What facts, what proofs, does M. Auguste Comte adduce in support of his principles, that matter, its forces, and its laws, constitute the sole object of human knowledge, the sole domain of the human mind?

{286}

He appeals to two arguments--the one metaphysical, the other historical; the one derived from the mind of man itself, the other from the history of humanity.

I cannot here follow M. Comte in his long and complex explanation of the two orders of proofs to which he appeals in support of his system; what I shall say will, I think, suffice to demonstrate that neither can stand any serious examination.

As a metaphysician--for metaphysician he must permit himself to be called, since he makes use of metaphysics, whatever his antipathy for philosophers who bear that name;--as metaphysician, I repeat, M. Auguste Comte belongs to the sensualistic school, He thinks with Locke and Condillac, that man deduces all his ideas and all his knowledge from impressions received by him from the outer world, and from the reflections which he makes upon those impressions. {287} He takes, therefore, as his starting point, the maxim of that school which proclaims that "there is nothing in the intelligence which has not first been in the sense." Nevertheless, whether by an act of proper and remarkable sagacity, or struck by the reply of Leibnitz, "unless the intelligence itself," he admits that sensation does not account for all that passes and develops itself in the mind of the observer of the external world. "If," he says, "on the one side every positive theory must necessarily be founded upon observation, it is, on the other side, equally plain that to apply itself to the task of observation, our mind has need of some 'theory.' If, in contemplating the phenomena, we do not immediately attach them to certain principles, not only would it be impossible for us to combine these isolated observations, so as to draw any fruit therefrom; but we should be entirely incapable of retaining them, and in most cases the facts would remain before our eyes unnoticed. {288} The need at all times of some 'theory' whereby to associate facts, combined with the evident impossibility of the human mind at its origin forming 'theories' out of observations, is a fact which it is impossible to ignore." [Footnote 58]

[Footnote 58: Cours de philosophic positive, par M. Auguste
Comte, vol. i. p. 8.]

This fact, thus proved by M. Comte himself; this necessary part of the human mind, indispensable to enable it to acquire knowledge of the external world; this "theory," anterior to all observation, which man requires for the purpose himself of observing, what are they else than those universal and necessary principles proclaimed by the spiritualistic school, and to which I recently referred?--principles inherent in the human mind, which it applies as from its own stores in taking cognizance of the external world, and by virtue of which, just as one mounts a river up to its source, man mounts and mounts up to God, and up to the relations of man with God.

{289}

But, admitting the same fact, M. Comte does not explain it in this way. This "theory;" these principles anterior to external observation, and which the mind absolutely requires in order to be able to observe, are, according to him, pure inventions of the human mind itself, temporary instruments which the mind creates and employs in its labors until it can obtain better. "Between," says he, "two difficulties, pressed on the one hand by the necessity of observing in order to form 'theories,' and on the other by the no less imperious necessity of creating 'theories' in order to be able to deliver itself up to a series of coherent observations, the human mind at its birth would find itself shut in by a vicious circle from which it would never have had any means of escaping, had it not succeeded in opening a natural issue by the spontaneous development of theological conceptions, which presented a point to which his efforts might be concentrated, and which might furnish aliment for his activity. {290} It is, in effect, very remarkable, that questions the most radically inaccessible to our capacities, the intimate nature of being, the origin and the end of all phenomena, should be precisely those which the intelligence propounds to itself, as of paramount importance in that primitive condition, all the other problems really admitting of solution being almost regarded as unworthy of serious meditation. The reason of this it is not difficult to discover, for experience alone could have given us the measure of our strength; and if man had not begun by entertaining an exaggerated opinion of that strength, it would never have been capable of acquiring all the development of which it is susceptible. So much does our organization exact." [Footnote 59]

[Footnote 59: Cours de philosophie positive, par M. Auguste
Comte, vol. i, pp. 9, 10.]

{291}

Strange error of a man, whose supreme pretension it is to found all human knowledge upon the observation of facts! At his very first step, at the first difficulty which he encounters, M. Comte observes inexactly and incompletely, does not see in the facts all that the facts contain, and only explains them by assigning to the human mind, in its primitive and spontaneous operations, a hypothesis, the hypothesis of "theological conceptions." God, and man's relations with God, is a human invention, destined to support man at the commencement of his career as an intelligent being, and to occupy provisionally the place of science!

The source of this misapprehension, the capital error of Positivism in its metaphysical argument, is, that it ignores the nature and the limits of science.

The famous "enthymême" of Descartes, "I think, therefore I am," is a pleonasm. As soon as the human being says to itself "I," the human being affirms its own existence, and distinguishes itself from that external world whence it derives impressions of which it is not the author. {292} In this primary fact are revealed the two primary objects of human knowledge: on the one side the human being himself, the individual person that feels and perceives, that feels himself and perceives himself; on the other side, the external world that is felt and perceived: the subject and the object, (the _moi_ and the _non-moi_.) Such is the twofold field, at the beginning of his intellectual existence, opened to the knowing faculty of man.

In each of these fields, whether the human being makes himself or whether he makes the external world the object of his contemplation, he proceeds by the same method; he considers particular facts, classes these under more general facts which serve as their summary, and recognizes laws that govern them, these laws being themselves facts. When this method of observation and of generalization is applied to the outer world, understanding by that world the human body also, it gives birth to the sciences of physics and of physiology. {293} When such method is applied to the human being, regarded as distinct from the body in which he lives and by which he acts, it gives birth to the science of psychology, logic, and morals. It is not here my intention to propose a classification of the sciences, but only to determine the domain of science properly so called--that is to say, the field in which the human mind by observation gets directly at facts and at the laws of facts.

Philosophers, in their study of man and of the world, do not sufficiently consult language, the general language, the common language, that instinctive expression of the activity of the human mind. I interrogate our native language upon the question which now occupies me, and I find it reflecting the greatest light. It has, to express the results of the intellectual process which takes place in man, when regarded as the spectator of the universe and of himself, many different words: "connaître," "savoir," "croire," "connaissance," "science," "croyance," "foi." {294} These are not mere different names to express the same idea and the same fact, they are signs of different facts and of diverse states of the human soul. If we interrogate the languages of civilized nations, ancient or modern, we find in all of them, with more or less abundance, precision or subtlety, a similar variety of terms corresponding to a similar diversity of facts.

Talleyrand said once in the chamber of Peers, "There is somebody who has more intellect than Napoleon, more intellect than Voltaire; that somebody is the Public." I also say, there is a more profound observer than Bacon, a greater philosopher than Kant; it is mankind. Mankind is right when it distinguishes in its languages knowledge from science and from belief, science from belief and from faith. Bossuet wrote a book entitled "De la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même;" the idea would never have occurred to him of entitling it "De la science de Dieu et de soi-même;" it would have shocked his good sense as much as his piety. {295} The child believes the smile and the speech of its mother; in its belief there is certainly no scientific appreciation (no science) of the relations which unite it to its mother, and of the reasons which make it believe in her. Knowledge, science, belief, and faith, are facts essentially distinct, although all equally natural to the human soul; and it is impossible to confound them, to take one for the other, to annul one in favor of the other, or to attempt to reduce them to one term, without ignoring realities, and falling into enormous errors.

Such has been the constant error of M. Auguste Comte, and such is the radical vice of Positivism. M. Comte ignores the natural and permanent diversity in the intellectual states through which a man may pass in his ardent pursuit of truth. He refuses here to recognize any state as legitimate and definitive except the scientific state. He regards intuitive knowledge and instinctive belief as preparatory and transitory states, states without any rational authority; as, in short, simple steps on the way to that scientific state which alone sets man in possession of the truth. {296} Positivism is thus led to extend the pretensions of science beyond its proper domain, that is, beyond the finite world, its facts and its laws; and as science finds itself incapable of observing and of defining infinity, Positivism is, perforce, reduced either to deny infinity, or to declare infinity absolutely inaccessible to the human mind, and so to pass it over in silence.

This negation discovers another immense error of the school and of its chief. Convinced, and with reason, that the observation of facts is the natural and constant process of the human understanding in its labor after knowledge, M. Auguste Comte has ill understood, and incompletely understood, the results of this labor. He failed to perceive that it was observation itself, carried on and accomplished by the process, no less natural and no less legitimate, of induction, which was revealing to the mind its peculiar facts and its peculiar laws, as well as the facts and the laws of the external world, within which that mind is placed. {297} M. Comte ended by ignoring or denying the elements _à priori_ of human knowledge; that is to say, the universal and necessary principles by which man raises himself to God, and has relations with God. Thus M. Comte mutilates the human mind, because he fails to observe it and to recognize it in its entirety.

He is impelled by his system to another and still more serious mutilation of human nature. After having declared matter, its forces and its laws, to be the single object of human knowledge, and these laws to be inherent in matter, eternal and invariable, what is to be said of human liberty? What place is to be assigned to human liberty in this world, in which it is powerless to create anything or to change anything, and in which there exists no power from which it can demand anything or obtain anything? {298} Evidently, in such a system human liberty is a chimera, an idle luxury of human nature; man, with all his faculties, has nothing to do but to study matter carefully, its forces and its laws, to adapt himself to them, and to make the best use he can of them, with a view to his welfare and to the satisfaction of his desires. Fatalism is the law of man as of the world within which he lives!

The moral instincts, and the naturally lofty mind of M. Comte revolted at this consequence, although it flowed imperiously from his system. The respect which he felt for the method of observation, and for the facts which it attains to, did not permit him absolutely to ignore or expressly to deny the psychological fact of man's liberty. Sometimes he attempts to find it a place in that sum of external facts and fixed laws which is, in his opinion, the sole field for man's activity and for man's science. {299} But such is the want of coherence of idea, that M. Comte is visibly embarrassed; consequently, in his works--more especially in his "Cours de philosophie positive,"--the most solid and consistent of all his writings in its fundamental principles--he sets almost completely aside the essential fact of human liberty, and of free will in the individual man; and in those books in which he treats of social organization, when he finds himself face to face with the wants and the rights of political liberty, that natural consequence of individual free will and of the responsibility attaching to it, he struggles to elude questions of this kind, feeling the impossibility of reconciling the principle of moral order with the despotism and the fatalism of the material world; and when he explains his views as to the government of human societies, it is easy to see that, although writing "I am, head and heart Republican," [Footnote 60] he is, in his dreams, rather substituting a scientific domination for a theocratic domination than instituting any liberal _régime_.

[Footnote 60: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré,
p. 251.]

{300}

After metaphysics comes history. M. Comte appeals to the annals of all nations and all ages in confirmation of his system of the world and of humanity. This history is to be divided, according to him, into three successive states, the theological state, the metaphysical state, and the scientific state. In the theological state and epoch, the human mind and social institutions are under the empire of pretended supernatural powers, of several such or of only one such, invented by man for the solution of the natural problems which lay siege to man, and for the determination of the laws, with which the social order cannot dispense. In the metaphysical epoch and state, vain abstractions essay to replace the supernatural powers of the theological state, and only end in an anarchy, both of opinions and society. The third epoch is destined to be the reign of positive science, founded solely upon observation and respect for the facts, the forces, and the laws of that external world which is the theater of man's existence. The first two states are, according to him, essentially irrational and transitory. They are the first steps of that which M. Comte styles the grand evolution of humanity, of which the _régime_ of science is the end and the summit.

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It would be difficult more entirely to deform, difficult to show greater ignorance of man's general history. That which M. Comte regards as three successive states in the history of the human race is only the complex and permanent condition of humanity, agitated by movements swaying in different directions, according as it meets with the successes or encounters the reverses, the hopes, or the fears to which different nations and generations are subject. That theological conceptions and metaphysical meditations are only transitory facts, "which," according to the expression of M. Comte, "will have henceforth only an historical existence," is an assertion no more true of such facts than of those that the study of physics supplies. These different yearnings of the mind, and their different labors, are the very essence--the indestructible and indivisible essence--of human nature. {302} At no time and in no country have men more ceased, or will they more cease, to pray to God, and to strive to comprehend him, than they will cease to study the physical world, and to make it subserve their interests. Nations and generations of individuals, in different ages, have advanced more or less in one or other of these careers of intellectual activity; and so they will continue to advance. Religious faith, metaphysical meditation, and scientific inquiry have their alternations of enthusiasm and of languor, of glory and of sterility; they appear and they prosper, sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously. If India plunged herself deep among the symbols of mythology and amid the void of Pantheism, Greece cultivated with like success the metaphysical and the natural sciences--Aristotle was the contemporary of Plato. Where other nations fluctuated variously between theological conceptions, metaphysical abstractions, and scientific studies, the Hebrew people continued, in the theological state, Monotheists. {303} In the sixteenth century, when the spirit of free inquiry and of independence was awakened, and made its influence felt far and wide, Christian faith, at the same time, was resuscitated and confirmed; and the eighteenth century founded at once the political liberty of Protestant England and the philosophical and literary glory of Catholic France. The human mind has, according to time and place, its favorite labors and its favorite impulses; but it subsists always one and entire; it never renounces any one of its grand hopes or of its grand operations; and those men strangely mutilate and debase it who represent the mind as having, during ages, lost itself in the vain effort to attain a knowledge of God and of its own nature, and who condemn it henceforth to take up its quarters in the science of matter--of its forces--of its laws.

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Why need I appeal to history for a proof of the simultaneous and indestructible co-existence of these different conditions of humanity, among which M. Auguste Comte refuses to admit more than one as rational and definitive? M. Comte has himself undertaken--he alone--to furnish me with this proof. This intractable adversary of all religious belief and tendency could not, even for the short space of this life, himself remain indifferent to such belief and tendency; during this brief period he traversed, and in the inverse order of his own theories, each of the different intellectual states which he had assigned as the successive stages of the human race. He had placed the theological state at the beginning and the scientific state at the close of the career of humanity; after having made his own _début_ by the scientific state, it was as impossible for him, as it is for the human race, to content himself with that, and he himself ended there, where, according to him, mankind had commenced, namely, with the theological state. He had declared his positive philosophy to be "in radical and absolute contradiction to every kind of religious or metaphysical tendency." {305} He had separated with _éclat_ from the Saint-Simonians, "for they will soon," he said, "sink themselves in ridicule and contempt. Only imagine, their heads are turned to such a degree, that they propose nothing less than the establishment of a real, new religion, a sort of incarnation of the divinity in the person of Saint-Simon." [Footnote 61]

[Footnote 61: Letter of the 9th December, 1828, to M. Gustave
d'Eichthal. Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, by M.
Littré, p. 173.]

And some years after holding this language, and while still in the plenitude of bodily vigor and thought, M. Comte in his turn launched into a theological career; he took it upon him to transform Positivism into a religion. By the most violent of all personified abstractions, he made out of humanity the great being, the real being, sovereign and adorable, and he placed that being in the place of God, declaring himself at the same time to be his chief priest. {306} He had more than once proclaimed that all religion was essentially founded upon the supernatural; and yet a religion all natural--the religion of humanity, the worship of humanity, the church of humanity, were summoned by him to succeed to the Christian religion and to the Church of Christ. On the 19th of October, 1851, when terminating his third philosophical course on the general histories of humanity, M. Comte summed it up in these words: "In the name of the past and of the future, the theoretical servitors and the practical servitors of humanity are about to assume worthily the direction of the general affairs of this world, in order to construct, at last, the true providence, moral, intellectual, and material, at the same time excluding irrevocably from political supremacy all the different slaves of God--Catholics, Protestants, or Deists--as being at once in arrear of the age and its perturbators." The positivist religion thus proclaimed, a positivist catechism and a positivist calendar--these last both composed by M. Comte--reduced his principles to practice. {307} In a series of conversations between "The Priest and the Woman," the catechism first establishes and explains the dogma, then the worship, of the new religion, its internal order and its external order, its private worship and its public worship. And the calendar, by a retrospective chronology, determines for any given year of thirteen months, and for the seven days of the week, the names of the grand servitors in every department of humanity, who are to replace the Christian saints: three hundred and sixty-four names, men and women, with one hundred and sixty-five additional names, are inscribed upon this list, which begins with Moses and ends with Bichat, passing through Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Cæsar, Saint Paul, Charlemagne, Dante, Gutenburg, Shakspeare, Descartes, and Frederic the Second!

A chaos is a sorry sight; a chaos of the soul a still sorrier spectacle than a chaos of worlds! Epochs of moral and social crises, even while they bring on and prepare for mankind eras of mighty progress, throw also great and potent intellects into chaos. {308} Under the seduction of a noble ambition, and the delusion of a partial success, they enthusiastically attach themselves to some special subject, some incomplete idea; vain of their shallow and confused systems, or rather of the brilliant coloring in which they invest them, they pretend to explain and regulate man and the world, and yet are nothing more than their superficial and presumptuous observers. Among these "great lost ones of humanity," (I borrow a phrase of their own,) M. Comte was one of the most disinterested and the most sincere. The sincerity and the courage evinced by him in expressing his convictions led him on from inconsequence to inconsequence; in his benighted course he caught glimpses occasionally of grand ideas, and of these he apprehended neither the scope nor the connection: first it was an idea of a science excluding all idea of religion; and then a certain idea of a religion reconciled with and intimately united with the idea of science; turn by turn he gave himself up to the one and to the other with a blind and a daring devotedness. {309} Had he appeared in Greece at the great era of philosophy, or in France in the seventeenth century, in the midst of the great Christian controversy, he would have been taxed with insanity--at the one epoch, not only by Plato but by Aristotle; at the other, not only by Bossuet but by Spinoza. In our days he has been more fortunate: he attached himself passionately to the method of observation of facts, which is the very character of science, and although his observations were superficial, inexact, and incomplete--although he fell into the strangest inconsistencies--the fundamental principle of his system, and the coincidence of his primary ideas with the method and the tendency of the physical sciences, the darling study of our age, have given him more importance and more influence than were really his due.

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Fifth Meditation.

Pantheism.

No two essays at philosophy are more dissimilar--I should indeed say more contradictory--than Pantheism and Positivism. What Positivism declares to be impossible, Pantheism seeks to accomplish; what Positivism forbids man to seek, Pantheism promises to give him. It is the fundamental principle of Positivism to confine the human mind to the finite world, its facts and its laws; Pantheism aspires at a knowledge and a comprehension of Infinity, and of the relations of the finite with Infinity. "I have explained God, God's nature and his attributes," says Spinoza. [Footnote 62]

[Footnote 62: Ethics, 1st part; of God: Appendix, vol. i, p.
39. French translation by M. Saisset.]

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I hasten to explain, in order to prevent misconstruction; it is to Pantheism, properly so called--to the sole system that merits the name--that my remarks are here applicable. "We must," says M. Cousin, "it seems, distinguish two kinds of Pantheism. The assertion that this visible universe, indefinite or infinite, suffices to itself, and that there is nothing to be sought for beyond, is the Pantheism of Diderot, Helvetius, de la Mettrie, d'Holbach. This Pantheism is clearly Atheism, and it would not be very easy to comprehend the complacent indulgence that should spare it that name of Atheism--a name, unfortunately, of ancient date, which would then have no longer any object to fit it, and would need to be erased from our dictionary. But is it possible for a similar Pantheism to be imputed to Spinoza? With the French Encyclopedists, things exist in particularity and individuals singly: the universe is an assemblage of individuals--an assemblage without unity, or of which the sole unity is a presumed primary matter, which the philosopher admits or which he does not admit, but with which his thought has no business, to occupy itself. {312} With Spinoza, on the contrary, the single substance is all, and the individuals are nothing. This substance is not the nominal unity of the assemblage of individuals, each of which exists singly, but is the single really existing substance, and in the presence of that substance the world and man are but shadows; so that from the 'Ethics' may be gathered an exaggerated Theism which leaves no individual existing as such. Rigorously, and at bottom, there is here perhaps only one and the same system, but a system, nevertheless, with two very different forms--the one, where God is nothing but the Universe; the other, where the Universe exists only in God." [Footnote 63]

[Footnote 63: Histoire générale de la philosophie, p. 433,
ed. 1863.]

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I think, with M. Cousin, that, rigorously and at bottom, there is here but one and the same system, but in appearance, and I say besides, in the opinion of its authors, the difference is great, and requires to be noticed. I postpone for the subject "Materialism," all that I have to say upon the subject of the so-called Pantheism, which admits no other existence than either that of the individualities that people the visible universe, or that of the primary matter whence they have issued. I occupy myself, at this moment, solely with the idealistic Pantheism.

Do we wish to behold a spectacle of how weak the human mind really is in the midst of all its grandeur, and of the limits which must finally and abruptly check its progress, however high its flight, we will read Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel, three martyrs to intellectual ambition, differing very much according to the difference of the eras and the nations to which they respectively belong, but similar in this point at least, that they ignore the visible world, and leave it behind them, to enter that world which dazzles their sight, where they plunge into a void in quest of what they call "Being!"

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Two passions have impelled, are impelling, and will, probably, still occasionally impel men of eminent powers of mind to Pantheism: the passionate craving for an universal science, and the passionate longing for universal unity--feelings noble both, but illegitimate and incapable of satisfaction.

"I have resolved," said Spinoza, "to search if there exist a real Good, a Good capable, singly, of filling the entire soul after it shall have rejected all the rest--in a word, a Good that gives the soul, when the soul finds it and possesses it, the eternal and supreme happiness. ... Man is essentially a being that thinks, and the highest degree of human knowledge ought to be the highest degree of human felicity. ... My sources of enjoyment consist in the exercise of the reason." [Footnote 64]

[Footnote 64: Œuvres de Spinoza, French translation of M.
Emile Saisset, vol. i, pp. 15, 16.]

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What obliviousness of man's nature and of man's life! Man is not merely a being that thinks, but a being that feels, wills, and acts, a being moral and responsible for his acts, at the same time that he is a being of intelligence, and a being insatiate of knowledge. It is by his thought that he accounts to himself for his sentiments, and for the motives of his acts, but it is not from his thought that he derives either his sentiments or his liberty, neither does knowledge constitute his sole enjoyment. Spinoza mutilates man strangely when he places "the highest degree of human felicity in the highest degree of human knowledge." Man is more exacting than the philosopher, and it requires infinitely more to satisfy the most modest human soul than to satisfy the proudest mind. Infinitely more in respect of happiness, infinitely less in respect of science! Not that I would make their intellectual ambition a reproach to philosophers, even when it leads them astray. {316} It is an honor to the human mind that it aspires higher than it can attain, that it torments itself in the struggle to carry its science into that invisible world, which it instinctively feels by anticipation, just as it does into that visible world that it sees. God granted to man this privilege; he implanted in his soul the ardent desire to know him and to possess him fully. But at the same time, God granted to men in general certain instincts and spontaneous beliefs which adequately satisfy this desire without the necessity of any profound study. What would have become of the human race if, in order to believe in God, to hope in him, and to pray to him, man had been obliged to wait until philosophers had resolved the problems which still weigh upon _their_ genius? As God, in creating man free, took care that the maintenance of the general order in this world should not be completely abandoned to the disputes of men, so did he provide for the spiritual nourishment of mankind, without denying to the great ambitious ones of the earth either the prospect of a satisfaction more complete, or the right to search for it.

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Let us never tire of repeating, this is the mystery of man's mixed nature--an indication of a destiny in store for him superior to his actual condition. He carries within him the ideas of infinity, of perfection, and yet here below he is nothing but a finite being, imperfect, equally incapable of sufficing to himself and of satisfying himself, either in the domain of thought or of actual life. "There are more things in heaven and upon earth than philosophy--than even the philosophy 'of the absolute'--can explain. ... To comprehend God, it needs to be God. A child might have said as much to Hegel." These words I borrow from M. Edmond Scherer's exposition of the doctrine of Hegel. [Footnote 65]

[Footnote 65: Melanges d'histoire religieuse, pp. 366, 341.
1864.]

Jesus in effect said, eighteen centuries ago: "I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."

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Pantheists are entirely of the opinion of M. Scherer, for to enable man to comprehend God, they have found no other expedient than to make of man himself the God that man is desirous of comprehending. The passion for an universal science has ended by receiving no being as God but man.

The passion for universal unity has led to the same result. That truth is one--that is to say, that all truths, whatever their object, are in harmony with one another--the very word truth implies and proclaims. From the unity of truth the Pantheists passed, with a single bound, to the unity of being. They identified idea and reality, science and existence, confounding all things in order to reduce them to one single thing, and abolishing all beings in order to concentrate them all in one and the same being, which, after all, is nothing more than an impersonal notion and a barren name, falling in its turn into the void.

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