The Idea of Progress Part 18

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

1.

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.

The critical doctrine has performed its historical function, and the time has come for man to enter upon the Positive stage of his career. To enable him to take this step forward, it is necessary that the study of social phenomena should become a positive science. As social science is the highest in the hierarchy of sciences, it could not develop until the two branches of knowledge which come next in the scale, biology and chemistry, a.s.sumed a scientific form. This has recently been achieved, and it is now possible to found a scientific sociology.

This science, like mechanics and biology, has its statics and its dynamics. The first studies the laws of co-existence, the second those of succession; the first contains the theory of order, the second that of progress. The law of consensus or cohesion is the fundamental principle of social statics; the law of the three stages is that of social dynamics. Comte's survey of history, of which I have briefly indicated the general character, exhibits the application of these sociological laws.

The capital feature of the third period, which we are now approaching, will be the organisation of society by means of scientific sociology.

The world will be guided by a general theory, and this means that it must be controlled by those who understand the theory and will know how to apply it. Therefore society will revive the principle which was realised in the great period of Monotheism, the distinction of a spiritual and a temporal order. But the spiritual order will consist of savants who will direct social life not by theological fictions but by the positive truths of science. They will administer a system of universal education and will draw up the final code of ethics. They will be able, more effectively than the Church, to protect the interests of the lower cla.s.ses.

Comte's conviction that the world is prepared for a transformation of this kind is based princ.i.p.ally on signs of the decline of the theological spirit and of the military spirit, which he regarded as the two main obstacles to the reign of reason. Catholicism, he says, is now no more than "an imposing historical ruin." As for militarism, the epoch has arrived in which serious and lasting warfare among the ELITE nations will totally cease. The last general cause of warfare has been the compet.i.tion for colonies. But the colonial policy is now in its decadence (with the temporary exception of England), so that we need not look for future trouble from this source. The very sophism, sometimes put forward to justify war, that it is an instrument of civilisation, is a homage to the pacific nature of modern society.

We need not follow further the details of Comte's forecast of the Positive period, except to mention that he did not contemplate a political federation. The great European nations will develop each in its own way, with their separate "temporal" organisations. But he contemplated the intervention of a common "spiritual" power, so that all nationalities "under the direction of a h.o.m.ogeneous speculative cla.s.s will contribute to an identical work, in a spirit of active European patriotism, not of sterile cosmopolitanism."

Comte claimed, like Saint-Simon, that the data of history, scientifically interpreted, afford the means of prevision. It is interesting to observe how he failed himself as a diviner; how utterly he misapprehended the vitality of Catholicism, how completely his prophecy as to the cessation of wars was belied by the event. He lived to see the Crimean war. [Footnote: He died in 1857.] As a diviner he failed as completely as Saint-Simon and Fourier, whose dream that the nineteenth century would see the beginning of an epoch of harmony and happiness was to be fulfilled by a deadly struggle between capitalism and labour, the civil war in America, the war of 1870, the Commune, Russian pogroms, Armenian ma.s.sacres, and finally the universal catastrophe of 1914.

5.

For the comprehension of history we have perhaps gained as little from Comte's positive laws as from Hegel's metaphysical categories. Both thinkers had studied the facts of history only slightly and partially, a rather serious drawback which enabled them to impose their own constructions with the greater ease. Hegel's method of a PRIORI synthesis was enjoined by his philosophical theory; but in Comte we also find a tendency to a PRIORI treatment. He expressly remarks that the chief social features of the Monotheistic period might almost be constructed a PRIORI.

The law of the Three Stages is discredited. It may be contended that general Progress depends on intellectual progress, and that theology, metaphysics, and science have common roots, and are ultimately identical, being merely phases in the movement of the intelligence. But the law of this movement, if it is to rank as a scientific hypothesis, must be properly deduced from known causes, and must then be verified by a comparison with historical facts. Comte thought that he fulfilled these requirements, but in both respects his demonstration was defective. [Footnote: Criticism of Comte's a.s.sumption that civilisation begins with animism: Weber's criticisms from this point of view are telling (Le Rythme du progres, 73-95). He observes that if Comte had not left the practical and active side of intelligence in the shade and considered only its speculative side, he could not have formulated the law of the Three Stages. He would have seen that "the positive explanation of phenomena has played in every period a preponderant role, though latent, in the march of the human mind." Weber himself suggests a scheme of two states (corresponding to the two-sidedness of the intellect), technical and speculative, practical and theoretical, through the alternation of which intellectual progress has been effected. The first stage was probably practical (he calls it proto-technic). It is to be remembered that when Comte was constructing his system palaeontology was in its infancy.]

The gravest weakness perhaps in his historical sketch is the gratuitous a.s.sumption that man in the earliest stage of his existence had animistic beliefs and that the first phase of his progress was controlled by fetishism. There is no valid evidence that fetishism is not a relatively late development, or that in the myriads of years stretching back beyond our earliest records, during which men decided the future of the human species by their technical inventions and the discovery of fire, they had any views which could be called religious or theological. The psychology of modern savages is no clew to the minds of the people who wrought tools of stone in the world of the mammoth and the RHINOCEROS TICHIRHINUS. If the first stage of man's development, which was of such critical importance for his destinies, was pre-animistic, Comte's law of progress fails, for it does not cover the ground.

In another way, Comte's system may be criticised for failing to cover the ground, if it is regarded as a philosophy of history. In accordance with "the happy artifice of Condorcet," he a.s.sumes that the growth of European civilisation is the only history that matters, and discards entirely the civilisations, for instance, of India and China. This a.s.sumption is much more than an artifice, and he has not scientifically justified it. [Footnote: A propos of the view that only European civilisation matters it has been well observed that "human history is not unitary but pluralistic": F. J. Teggart, The Processes of History, p. 24 (1918).]

The reader of the PHILOSOPHIE POSITIVE will also observe that Comte has not grappled with a fundamental question which has to be faced in unravelling the woof of history or seeking a law of events. I mean the question of contingency. It must be remembered that contingency does not in the least affect the doctrine of determinism; it is compatible with the strictest interpretation of the principle of causation. A particular example may be taken to show what it implies. [Footnote: On contingency and the "chapter of accidents" see Cournot, Considerations sur la marche des idees et des evenements dans les temps modernes (1872), i. 16 sqq.

I have discussed the subject and given some ill.u.s.trations in a short paper, ent.i.tled "Cleopatra's Nose," in the Annual of the Rationalist Press a.s.sociation for 1916.]

It may plausibly be argued that a military dictatorship was an inevitable sequence of the French Revolution. This may not be true, but let us a.s.sume it. Let us further a.s.sume that, given Napoleon, it was inevitable that he should be the dictator. But Napoleon's existence was due to an independent causal chain which had nothing whatever to do with the course of political events. He might have died in his boyhood by disease or by an accident, and the fact that he survived was due to causes which were similarly independent of the causal chain which, as we are a.s.suming, led necessarily to an epoch of monarchical government. The existence of a man of his genius and character at the given moment was a contingency which profoundly affected the course of history. If he had not been there another dictator would have grasped the helm, but obviously would not have done what Napoleon did.

It is clear that the whole history of man has been modified at every stage by such contingencies, which may be defined as the collisions of two independent causal chains. Voltaire was perfectly right when he emphasised the role of chance in history, though he did not realise what it meant. This factor would explain the oscillations and deflections which Comte admits in the movement of historical progression. But the question arises whether it may not also have once and again definitely altered the direction of the movement. Can the factor be regarded as virtually negligible by those who, like Comte, are concerned with the large perspective of human development and not with the details of an episode? Or was Renouvier right in principle when he maintained "the real possibility that the sequence of events from the Emperor Nerva to the Emperor Charlemagne might have been radically different from what it actually was"? [Footnote: He ill.u.s.trated this proposition by a fanciful reconstruction of European history from 100 to 800 A.D. in his UCHRONIE, 1876. He contended that there is no definite law of progress: "The true law lies in the equal possibility of progress or regress for societies as for individuals."]

6.

It does not concern us here to examine the defects of Comte's view of the course of European history. But it interests us to observe that his synthesis of human Progress is, like Hegel's, what I have called a closed system. Just as his own absolute philosophy marked for Hegel the highest and ultimate term of human development, so for Comte the coming society whose organisation he adumbrated was the final state of humanity beyond which there would be no further movement. It would take time to perfect the organisation, and the period would witness a continuous increase of knowledge, but the main characteristics were definitely fixed. Comte did not conceive that the distant future, could he survive to experience it, could contain any surprises for him. His theory of Progress thus differed from the eighteenth century views which vaguely contemplate an indefinite development and only profess to indicate some general tendencies. He expressly repudiated this notion of INDEFINITE progress; the data, he said, justify only the inference of CONTINUOUS progress, which is a different thing.

A second point in which Comte in his view of Progress differed from the French philosophers of the preceding age is this. Condorcet and his predecessors regarded it exclusively from the eudaemonic point of view.

The goal of Progress for them was the attainment of human felicity. With felicity Comte is hardly more concerned than Hegel. The establishment of a fuller harmony between men and their environment in the third stage will no doubt mean happiness. But this consideration lies outside the theory, and to introduce it would only intrude an unscientific element into the a.n.a.lysis. The course of development is determined by intellectual ideas, and he treats these as independent of, and indifferent to, eudaemonic motives.

A third point to be noted is the authoritarian character of the regime of the future. Comte's ideal state would be as ill to live in for any unfortunate being who values personal liberty as a theocracy or any socialistic Utopia. He had as little sympathy with liberty as Plato or as Bossuet, and less than the eighteenth century philosophers. This feature, common to Comte and the Saint-Simonians, was partly due to the reaction against the Revolution, but it also resulted from the logic of the man of science. If sociological laws are positively established as certainly as the law of gravitation, no room is left for opinion; right social conduct is definitely fixed; the proper functions of every member of society admit of no question; therefore the claim to liberty is perverse and irrational. It is the same argument which some modern exponents of Eugenics use to advocate a state tyranny in the matter of human breeding.

When Comte was writing, the progressive movement in Europe was towards increase of liberty in all its forms, national, civic, political, and economical. On one hand there was the agitation for the release of oppressed nationalities, on the other the growth of liberalism in England and France. The aim of the liberalism of that period was to restrict the functions of government; its spirit was distrust of the state. As a political theory it was defective, as modern Liberals acknowledge, but it was an important expression of the feeling that the interests of society are best furthered by the free interplay of individual actions and aims. It thus implicitly contained or pointed to a theory of Progress sharply opposed to Comte's: that the realisation of the fullest possible measure of individual liberty is the condition of ensuring the maximum of energy and effectiveness in improving our environment, and therefore the condition of attaining public felicity.

Right or wrong, this theory reckons with fundamental facts of human nature which Comte ignored.

7.

Comte spent the later years of his life in composing another huge work, on social reorganisation. It included a new religion, in which Humanity was the object of worship, but made no other important addition to the speculations of his earlier manhood, though he developed them further.

The Course of Positive Philosophy was not a book that took the public by storm. We are told by a competent student of social theories in France that the author's name was little known in his own country till about 1855, when his greatness began to win recognition, and his influence to operate. [Footnote: Weill, Hist. du mouvement social, p. 21.] Even then his work can hardly have been widely read. But through men like Littre and Taine, whose conceptions of history were moulded by his teaching, and men like Mill, whom he stimulated, as well as through the disciples who adopted Positivism as a religion, his leading principles, detached from his system, became current in the world of speculation.