Chapter V: Recent Phases of Scientific Atheism (3)

Of other features of Comtist philosophy it would be out of place to speak here,[48] where, indeed, that philosophy would not have been mentioned at all but for its having been transformed by its author into a religion, and that, too, an atheistical religion--the 'Religion of Humanity.' To myself, as to most people, a religion without a God is a contradiction in terms. To constitute what is almost universally understood by religion it does not suffice that there be a 'creed or conviction claiming authority over the whole of human life: a belief or set of beliefs deliberately adopted respecting human destiny and duty, to which the believer inwardly acknowledges that all his actions ought to be subordinate:' nor that there be in addition 'a sentiment connected with this creed or capable of being invoked by it, sufficiently powerful to give it, in fact, the authority over human conduct to which it lays claim in theory:' nor yet that there be, moreover, 'an ideal object, the believer's attachment and sense of duty towards which are able to control and discipline all his other sentiments and propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life.'[49] That such an object is fully capable of gathering round it feelings sufficiently strong to enforce the most rigid rule of life, will certainly not be denied by me, privileged as I am to count among my friends more than one whose whole life is little else than a life of devotion to an object, 'the general interest of the human race,' plainly incapable of affording them in exchange that 'eternity of personal enjoyment' to which ordinary devotees look forward as their reward, and whose virtue I honour as approaching the sublime, on account of its independence of all the props and stimulants which ordinary virtue finds indispensable. But the sublimest virtue does not of itself constitute religion. For, besides the 'creed,' 'conviction,' and 'sentiment' indicated above, there is needed some suitable object of worship to which the soul may alternately bow down in humble reverence, and look up in fervent love--some being to whom its prayer, praise, and thanksgiving may be fittingly addressed. This want, recognised--as one of the few who do not recognise it admits--by nine out of every ten persons, was distinctly recognised by Comte, who, however, attempted to supply it by pointing, not to God, but to Man. His reason for this was not a conviction that there is no God. On the contrary, he habitually disclaimed, not without acrimony, dogmatic atheism; and once even condescended so far as to declare that 'the hypothesis of design has much greater verisimilitude than that of a blind mechanism.' But in the 'mature state of intelligence' at which his mind had arrived, 'conjecture founded on analogy did not seem to him a basis to rest a theory upon.' He preferred a religious theory without a basis, and therefore adopted one as destitute of support as the tortoise on which stands the earth-upholding elephant of Hindoo mythology; selecting, as the 'Grand Etre' to be worshipped, 'the entire Human Race, conceived as a continuous whole, past, present, and future.' For this great collective _non_-existence, this compound of that which is, that which has been but has ceased to be, and that which is not yet, he elaborated a minute ritual of devotional observances, and would, if he had had the chance, have consecrated a complete sacerdotal hierarchy, subordinated to himself as supreme pontiff. Having, for fear of recognising what possibly might not be, begun by, wilfully and with his eyes open, recognising what could not possibly be, he proceeded to invest this sanctified non-existence with precisely those attributes best calculated to render it unfit to receive the admiration he prescribed for it. That feeble Humanity--the actually living portion thereof, that is--may need and be the better for our services, which Divine Omnipotence of course cannot be, was distinctly urged by him as a reason why _prayers_, or at least those outpourings of feeling which he so designated, should be addressed to the former and not to the latter. That Humanity is in a constant state of progress, so that both the collective mass and choice specimens of each successive generation of men must always be superior to the corresponding masses and specimens of all previous generations, is a prime article of the Comtist creed; but not the less is it an imperative injunction of the Comtist rubrick that religious homage shall be paid, not only to the collective 'Grand Etre' of Humanity, but also to individual worthies of past ages--that superiors shall consequently fall down before, and worship, and take as models, their intellectual and moral inferiors. The fact of a religion made up of tenets like these having been thought out by one of the profoundest of reasoners does not prevent its being the very perfection of unreason. Even though on the one side there were nothing more than some doubt whether Deity might not exist, still with complete certainty on the other of the non-existence of 'Humanity,' Deity ought in fairness to have at least the benefit of the doubt. In selection for adoration, that which only perhaps may be, at any rate deserves to be, preferred to that which positively is not. The excess of superstition with which St. Paul reproached the Athenians, for raising an altar to the 'Unknown God,' looks like excessive circumspection, beside the solemn dedication of temples to a chimera known not to be. Nay, even Isaiah's maker of graven images is at length outdone. Even he who, having hewn down a tree, 'burneth part thereof in the fire, with part thereof eateth flesh, roasteth roast, and is satisfied, warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire; and with the residue maketh a god, yea, his graven image, and falleth down unto it and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me, for thou art my god'--even he has at last found more than his match in irrationality. For he has at least before him a visible tangible block of wood, not the mere memory of one that has long ago rotted, nor the dream of one that is yet to grow, whereas that mental figment, Consecrated Humanity, is not even a real shadow, but only a fancied one, a shadow cast by no substance. And it is to Comtists of all people--intellectual salt of the earth as they are--that this figment is recommended for adoration--yes, to those who, pharisaically standing aloof from the common herd, thank their imaginary substitute for God, or whatever else it is they deem thankworthy, that they are not blind as other men are, and least of all as those dazed metaphysicians who actually personify their own mental abstractions. No wonder that such extreme provocation should try the patience of all but the stanchest disciples. No wonder that Mr. Lewes himself should seem half inclined to apostrophise his quondam master in words resembling those once addressed to Robespierre, 'Avec ton Grand Etre, tu commences a m'embeter.'

Here make we one more pause. This chapter's theme is, as was betimes premised, not the strength of theism, but the weakness of atheism. I have in it attempted to execute a design which, according to Boswell, was conceived by Lord Hailes, and approved by Dr. Johnson, that of writing an essay, _Sur la credulite des incredules_, and I think I have succeeded so far as to show that, if any one who can swallow atheism affects to strain at theism, it cannot, at any rate, be for want of a sufficiently capacious gullet.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] The story was thus told by Diderot, to Sir Samuel Romilly, when a young man:--'Je vous dirai un trait de lui, mais il vous sera un peu scandaleux peut-etre, car vous autres Anglais, vous croyez _un peu_ en Dieu; pour nous autres, nous n'y croyons gueres. Hume dina dans une grande compagnie avec le baron D'Holbach. Il etait assis a cote du baron; on parla de la religion naturelle. "Pour les athees," disait Hume, "je ne crois pas qu'il en existe; je n'en ai jamais vu!" "Vous avez ete un peu malheureux," repondit l'autre, "vous voici a table avec dix-sept pour la premiere fois."'--_Edinburgh Review_ for January 1847.

[37] 'Studies in Animal Life,' chap. v.

[38] The reader who, having skipped some of the earlier chapters, may find this language obscure, is requested to turn back to the essay on 'Huxleyism,' pp. 194-6.

[39] See again, pp. 194-6.

[40] 'Mr. Darwin's Hypotheses.' Part II. 'Fortnightly Review' for June 1868.

[41] 'Origin of Species,' p. 226.

[42] Of this treatise, no English or French translation has, I believe, been published. For my own very limited acquaintance with it, I am indebted to the extreme kindness of my friend, Professor Croom Robertson, who has most obligingly favoured me with a manuscript version of the portion referred to in the text.

[43] 'Lay Sermons,' p. 240.

[44] 'Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin,' 1799, pp. 214-6.

[45] 'Auguste Comte and Positivism,' _passim_.

[46] 'History of Philosophy,' 4th edition, vol. ii. pp. 654-735.

[47] Not that so restricted a meaning can, with any propriety, be placed on positivist definitions of law. See, for instance, that of Mr. Lewes ('History of Philosophy,' vol. ii. p. 701), who defines law to be 'the invariable relation between two distinct phenomena, according to which one depends on the other.'

[48] Some few additional random remarks, however, though not permissible in the text may, perhaps, be less inappropriate in a note.

My scientific deficiencies do not prevent my understanding or, at least, fancying I understand, that Comte's famous 'Classification of the Sciences' may be extremely serviceable as indicating in what order the sciences may most profitably be studied. That a student's general progress would be swifter and surer if, before entering on physics or chemistry, he had already made considerable progress in algebra, geometry, and mechanics, than if he commenced all five sciences simultaneously, seems probable enough. If, however, the classification be intended also to indicate historically the order in which the sciences have actually been studied, I cannot but suspect it to be misleading. Certainly, if knowledge of number was the earliest knowledge acquired by man, those savage races which have not even yet learnt how to count beyond four, must have been content with very few lessons in arithmetic when turning off to other branches of learning.

As to the measure of success that attended Comte's scheme of creating a Philosophy of General Science, I presume not to utter one syllable of my own, preferring to cite what Mr. Mill says of that 'wonderful systematization of the philosophy of all the antecedent sciences from mathematics to physiology, which, if he had done nothing else, would have stamped him on all minds competent to appreciate it as one of the principal thinkers of the age.' In all sincerity, I say that the mere conception of the enterprise, whose vastness is so luminously expounded by Mr. Lewes, in the last edition of his 'History of Philosophy,' seems to me to betoken superior genius. I feel, as it were, simply awe-struck in the presence of an intellectual ambition, that within the brief span of one human life could aspire to a mastery over all the sciences, sufficient, first for co-ordinating the fundamental truths and special methods, and so obtaining the philosophy of each, and then for co-ordinating the manifold philosophies so obtained, and--by condensing them all into one homogeneous doctrine, and blending them into one organic whole, whereof each part would be seen to depend on all that preceded, and to determine all that succeeded--transforming all science into philosophy.

One point however remains on which I shall speak with some confidence, that, namely, of the inclusion among 'Comte's titles to immortal fame' of the creation of a Science of Sociology. 'What the law of gravitation is to astronomy, what the elementary properties of tissues are to physiology,' that, says Mr. Lewes, in the opinion of Comte's disciples, 'is the law of the three stages to sociology.' But if, as I have shown, there are not really three but only two stages, the so-called third stage being simply a return to either the second or the first, the law of the three stages cannot be much of a law, nor the science of which it is the essence much of a science.

Mr. Lewes, nevertheless, maintains that M. Comte created Social Science. Mr. Mill considers that he did not create it, but only proved its creation to be possible. With all possible deference, I submit that what he really did was to prove its creation to be impossible.

In a passage of Mr. Mill's 'Positivism,' quoted with approval in Mr. Lewes's 'History of Philosophy,' and presumably, therefore, expressing the sentiments of both writers, Comte is described as pronouncing inappropriate to the Science of Society, the method universally admitted to be proper to all other sciences--that, namely, of obtaining by induction the laws of the elementary phenomena, then, from these laws thinking out deductively those of the complex phenomena, and, finally, of verifying by specific observation the laws obtained by deduction. Among social phenomena, he is described as arguing, the elementary ones are human feelings and actions, the laws of which are the laws of universal human nature. But the human beings, on the laws of whose nature social facts depend, are not abstract or universal, but historical human beings, already shaped and made what they are, not by the simple tendencies of universal human nature, but by the accumulated influence of past generations of human society. This being the case, the laws of universal human nature evidently cannot serve as materials, whence it would be possible for any powers of deduction, starting from the bare conception of the Being Man, to predict beforehand how successive generations of men would feel and act. Wherefore, in order to get at social laws, we must reverse the ordinary method, seizing upon any generalizations which the facts of history, empirically considered, will supply, and then using the universal laws of human nature for the verification of these generalizations.

I will not linger over the glaring inconsistency involved in the conclusion thus arrived at, of appealing, for the verification of empirical generalizations, to a species of deduction confessed to be impracticable for want of the requisite materials. I prefer to show that from Comte's own premises, as rendered by Mr. Mill, necessarily results a separate conclusion, absolutely fatal to his sociologically creative pretensions. According to him, as we have seen, the laws of elementary social facts, or of human actions and feelings, are the laws of universal human nature, which latter can, of course, be no other than whatever habits of invariably, in given circumstances, feeling and acting in given modes, may be common to all mankind. But it is admitted that the particular generation of human beings at any time existing must, by the accumulated influence of preceding generations, have been rendered very different from every preceding generation: and nothing is more certain than that two generations differing widely from each other in character, would, in many given circumstances, not only not feel and act in precisely the same, but would inevitably feel and act in widely different, manners. Nor is this all. The circumstances by which any generation is surrounded have been partly shaped for it by preceding generations, partly modified by itself--so that it is not possible for any two generations ever to find themselves in the same circumstances. Wherefore, as there never can be a repetition of either men or of circumstances precisely the same, it is manifestly impossible for any habits of feeling and thinking, in given modes in given circumstances, to be common to any two generations of men, still less to universal mankind. In other words, there cannot possibly be any laws of human nature: and if no laws of human nature, then no laws of elementary social facts; and if no laws of elementary social facts, then no laws of complex social facts; and if no laws of social facts, elementary or complex, then no single particle of material wherewith to build up the Science of Society or Sociology.

[49] 'Auguste Comte and Positivism,' pp. 133-4.