II.
Being founded upon positive science, Comte’s ethics will reproduce its essential characteristics. In the first place it will be “real,” that is to say it will rest upon observation and not upon imagination. It will consider man as he is and not as he fancies himself to be. It will then rest, not upon the abstract analysis which he may make of his own heart, but upon the proofs given by humanity of its inclinations and of the usual motives for its actions, during the centuries made known to us by history. In a word, through the use of an objective and truly scientific method, it will avoid serious causes for mistakes.
Being positive, this morality will be relative. For the immediate and necessary consequence of the relativity of knowledge is the relativity of morality. Kant, whom Comte himself called “the last of his great precursors,” attempted to preserve an absolute character for ethics: it is because, at bottom, he also preserved metaphysics. The moral law, says Kant, is universally valid for every free and reasonable being. But the only species of beings of this kind which we know, the human species, is developed in time according to the laws of a necessary progress. At every stage in this development it was not possessed of an equal aptitude for understanding a moral law. The most we can say is that, with time, the aptitude becomes greater and greater. Then, the existence of our species depends upon a great number of natural conditions—astronomical, physical, biological, sociological. If these conditions were different, which is not an absurd hypothesis, our morality would be different also. It is then relative at once to our situation and to our organisation.”
The idea of a relative morality is still a source of anxiety to many minds, who take it to be a preliminary step towards the negation of all morality. They think that, either good is absolute or the distinction between good and evil vanishes; there is no middle course. However, history shows that there is a way out of such deadlocks. Was not a similar dilemma put on the subject of knowledge? Was it not even said: either truth is absolute, or there is not truth at all? The dilemma was a false one. The human mind has become accustomed to relative truths; and an analogous solution will end by being also accepted for ethics. The acknowledgment of its relativity will not be any more fatal for it than it has been for science.
As the distinction between the true and the false subsists, although good is no longer conceived as absolute and immutable, so the distinction between good and evil subsists, although good is no longer conceived as a supreme theological or metaphysical reality, but as a “progress” towards an end indefinitely approached but never reached. The evolution of morality corresponds to that of knowledge. Both go through successive phases, of which each one implies the preceding ones, and preserves while modifying them. There are then “goods” as there are “truths,” provisional and temporary. Positive philosophy can thus give a reason for moral ideas, sometimes so poor and even so horrible, upon which humanity formerly lived. It does not judge the ethics of the past as compared with the ideals of to-day. It gives full justice to the theological and philosophical ethics which it replaces, and of which it proclaims itself the legitimate heir.
Finally it claims neither to be moral nor original in morality. Already positive science is “a prolongation of public reason.” In its nature it does not differ from simple commonsense, to which it owes its essential ideas: only in science these ideas assume a more systematic definition, and an abstract character which allows us to make the most thorough use of them. In the same way systematic morality is a prolongation of spontaneous morality.[326] It simply disengages the principles which, as a matter of fact, have directed the moral development of humanity. Does it follow from this that it only has, so to speak, an interest for curiosity, and that moral progress takes place of itself as rapidly and as completely as possible, even if philosophical reflection is not applied to it? But Comte has already replied to this form of inept sophism. What is true of the evolution of humanity in general is true of the moral evolution included in it. This evolution allows of crises, of diseases, of stoppages in development, etc. It is then not at all a matter of indifference that systematic morality should bring out strongly the end towards which man’s efforts must tend, according to his nature and to the whole of the conditions in which he is placed. By throwing light upon its advance it helps progress as effectually as it is in man’s power to help it.