III.
Mr. Herbert Spencer has made several objections to Auguste Comte’s classification of the sciences; Littré has lengthily refuted them. It is not in our design to reopen this discussion. But it results from the preceding explanations that the greater number of Mr. Spencer’s criticisms miss the mark, perhaps because he has not read Comte properly. On his own admission, he only knows the two first lessons in the Cours de philosophie positive in the text, further the inorganic Physics and the first chapter of the Biology in Miss Martineau’s condensation, and finally the remainder in Lewes’s summing up in his History of Philosophy.[26] If Mr. Spencer had been able to obtain a knowledge of the Cours de philosophie positive in its entirety, and especially of the three last lessons, or at least of the Discours sur l’Esprit positif or of the Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme he would probably have appreciated differently the positive classification of the sciences. His own classification, in which he includes the concrete and concrete-abstract sciences, is not really opposed to that of Auguste Comte who only wished to classify the fundamental abstract sciences. Comte never sought to do what Mr. Spencer reproaches him with not having done.
Among Mr. Spencer’s objections, there is one which, bearing upon the very conception of the classification of the sciences, shows very clearly the misunderstanding which we are pointing out.
Mr. Spencer insists upon the “anthropocentric” character of Comte’s classification, which is indeed remarkable; and he is surprised at what appears to him to be a glaring contradiction. Is not the conception of things from man’s point of view, one of the essential forms of the theological mode of thought, according to Comte himself? Does not positive philosophy teach that man must not consider himself as a sort of “imperium in imperio,” but as a being subordinate to the whole of nature? If therefore we must substitute the objective to the subjective point of view in which man at first spontaneously places himself, how can the classification of the sciences be at the same time “anthropocentric” and positive?
This objection would perhaps be a strong one against positive philosophy as Littré understood it. Against Auguste Comte it has no force, for he accepts it. He admits that his classification presents these two characters at the same time, and he does not think that in so doing he is contradicting himself. We must only distinguish with him two successive and different periods. So long as positive philosophy is in process of formation, (that is to say so long as the positive spirit remains special) it is quite true that it is orientated from the objective point of view, in other words, that it goes from the world to man. During this period, it is indeed opposed to the naïve belief which makes man the centre and the end of the universe. But, when from special the positive spirit has become universal, when it has risen from science to philosophy, when sociology is at length founded, and when the understanding realises, from the positive point of view the logical unity which is indispensable to it, this unity is only completed when, in its turn, it takes man for its centre.
Considered as an exact reproduction of the real world, says Comte, our science is not capable of being completely systematised; and in this sense we must not seek for any unity save that of method, aspiring only to homogeneity and to the convergence of the different doctrines. It is otherwise in regard to the inner source of human theories contemplated as the results of our individual and collective mental evolution. “Thus referred, not to the universe, but to man, or rather to humanity, our real knowledge tends on the contrary towards an entire systematization. We must then conceive a single science, the human science, more precisely social, of which our existence constitutes at once the principle and the end. Into this human science the rational study of the external world becomes fused, at once as a necessary element and a fundamental preamble.”[27]
Comte would therefore not have repudiated, for his classification of the sciences, the qualification of “anthropocentric” on condition that it were understood. It is no longer the spontaneous subjectivism from which the theological philosophy starts; it is the conscious subjectivism to which the positive philosophy attains. It has the merit of uniting in itself the two methods called objective and subjective. The former has been in the ascendant during the long evolution of the sciences, which were by degrees and successively reaching the positive state. The latter allows us to concentrate the aim of the distinct sciences thus constituted into a supreme science, which subordinates all the others to itself, without absorbing them.