II.
Sociology being an abstract and speculative science in the same way as the other fundamental sciences, progress in it is not understood in a utilitarian or moral sense. From 1826 Comte exerted himself to prevent any equivocation on this point. The insufficiency of language, he says, obliges him to make use of the words “improvement” and “development,” of which the former and even the latter, although clearer, recalls ideas of absolute good and of indefinite amelioration, which Comte has no intention of expressing. These words for him have the simple scientific object of indicating, in social physics, a certain succession of states of the human species, “being effected according to determined laws: a usage exactly analogous to the one which physiologists make of them in the study of the individual organism, to indicate a succession of transformations with which no idea of continuous amelioration or deterioration is connected.”[270] It would be easy to treat of the whole of social physics without once using the word improvement, and always replacing it by the scientific term development. For the question is not to appreciate the respective value of successive states referred to an ideal state, but simply to establish the laws of their succession. “The present is full of the past and big with the future.” Liebnitz’s formula thus expresses the general idea of progress. Comte only makes it positive by discovering the general laws of this progress, and by showing that they are correlated to the laws of social statics.
As a matter of fact, does the development of humanity lead to improvement or progress, in the moral and practical sense of the word? Social science has not to answer this question. However, Comte thinks that this improvement takes place, and that progress, so understood, can be shown at once in our condition and in our nature.[271] As proofs of this, in the first place, he gives the increase in the population, at least in that portion of humanity which he nearly always considers alone, the white race; then he mentions the law—according to which exercise perfects the organs. This progress is fixed by heredity. Comte thus admits this principle laid down by Lamarck, with this reservation, that evolution never transforms “natural dispositions.”
As to our condition, it is improved according to the measure in which we can act upon natural phenomena, and this power in turn depends upon the knowledge we have acquired of the laws of phenomena. “Vision brings prevision and thus facilitates provision.” Progress is here manifested by the extension of our scientific knowledge and by the improvement of the arts founded upon this knowledge. If scientific knowledge, which is necessarily abstract, has to be separated from practice in order to seek for the general laws which regulate phenomena, science, once constituted, makes possible a system of reasoned applications which reaches immeasurably farther than empirical art. Like Descartes, Comte founds the most ambitious hopes upon the positive science of nature.
Now, the most “modifiable” phenomena, those in which our intervention is most efficacious, are the human phenomena, be they individual or collective. On the other hand, our action upon the external world especially depends upon the dispositions of the agent. In every way then we must improve these dispositions. The most important improvement will be that of our internal nature. It will consist in bringing about the greater and greater prevalence of the attributes which distinguish man from the animals, that is to say, intelligence and sociability, correlated faculties, which are at once as a means and as an end to one another. We know, moreover, that there are limits to this progress. The perfect preponderance within ourselves of humanity over animality is a limit, nearer to which our efforts must ever bring us, without ever actually reaching it.[272]
Whether it be a question of our condition or of our nature the improvement, in both cases, can only be very slow. It is never easy to substitute to natural order an artificial order resting upon the scientific knowledge of the former. Of those different forms of progress, the first, which Comte calls the material progress, because it is the easiest, is the most advanced. The great attraction which it has for the men of to-day is thus explained, but the importance given to it is quite exaggerated. If our nature could be brought to a higher degree of perfection it would assuredly be preferable. But it is perhaps necessary that our material conditions of existence should first have been ameliorated?
The improvement in our nature may be physical, intellectual, or moral. The first would consist in an addition to the average duration of human life; it depends upon the progress of biology, and, consequently, of medicine and hygiene. Intellectual (scientific and æsthetic) improvement, would be still more desirable. It “means a greater soaring upwards” than is represented by all physical improvements or a fortiori by any material improvements: for the intellect is a “universal tool” whose uses have a universal application. But human happiness depends far more upon moral progress “over which we have, also more command, although it is more difficult.” No intellectual improvement could be equal in value to an increase in goodness or in courage. If we were wise our whole endeavour therefore would be in this direction. At any rate we ought always to remember that other forms of progress are desirable simply as means, and moral progress alone as an end.[273]