III.
Perhaps it would have been easy to pass from this conception of positive science to a theory of knowledge, and to a metaphysical view of nature, both idealistic. But Comte neither could nor would push his theory in this direction. In this respect nothing is more significant than his way of understanding the relativity of science.
This relativity is usually presented as the conclusion of a criticism of our understanding, of its nature, of its bearings, and of its relations to its objects. But, according to Comte, an inquiry pursued on these lines, has no chance of reaching a conclusion. The only theory of knowledge which is positive and “real,” is drawn from the history of the human mind. The laws of the mind are only revealed in the examination of the successive products of its activity, that is to say in its beliefs and in its science. The relativity of science can therefore only be stated at first, as a fact, leaving it for subsequent inquiry to determine the reason of that fact. The law of the three States suffices for this, for it shows that man began by seeking for absolute knowledge. The philosophy to which he first turns is, at the same time, the most naïve and the most ambitious. But a necessary evolution causes him to abandon the pursuit of the absolute, first in its theological form and then in the metaphysical form. Having reached the positive state, man knows that his science, necessarily relative, is limited to “the systematic co-ordination of phenomena,” and the knowledge of their laws.
The condemnation which thus strikes researches bearing on the absolute is itself, moreover, only relative in character. It prejudges nothing respecting the ultimate solution of questions. Positive philosophy in no way takes sides in respect to these problems. It simply states that science has more and more cut them off from the number of those which it studies. Indeed it is impossible to apply the positive method to questions which concern the absolute. Now, this method being the only one which our mind can henceforth follow, at least if it wishes to maintain the logical unity which is its supreme requirement, it follows that these problems are in fact abandoned. Nothing more and nothing less. “Sound philosophy,” says Comte, “sets aside, it is true, insoluble questions”; but “in stating the motive of their rejection, it avoids denying anything respecting them, which would be contradictory to that systematic disuse by which alone uncontrovertible opinions must die out.” (Comte means: opinions which do not come within the range of positive discussion.) The problems relating to the essence of the soul or to the “substantia prima” will melt away, as the majority of the metaphysical problems which the scholastics put to themselves have already disappeared.
Even to positive science, we must be careful not to attribute an absolute character—that is to say, in a sense slightly different from the preceding one, but very frequently with Comte—a definite and immutable character. The laws which we can determine are never true except under certain conditions. We have no right to consider them as true absolutely. Newton’s law is demonstrated for our solar system: but do we know that it is verified in all the systems throughout space? Do not let us confound the world, which we can study with the united resources of observation and calculation with the universe, of which we know scarcely anything, and which outranges all our powers. In spite of the famous principle of the sufficient reason the absence of motives for negation does not constitute the right of affirmation, without any direct proof. Absolute notions, says Comte, seem to me so impossible that I would not even dare, whatever probability I may see in it, to warrant the necessary and unalterable perpetuity of the theory of gravitation restricted to the interior of our world, if one day, (which is moreover very difficult to admit) the precision of our present observations came to be perfected as much as we have done in comparison to Hipparchus.[40]
In the same way, must not attraction have seemed to be an absolute quality (that is to say an immutable one) of bodies, since neither change of shape, nor the passage from one physical constitution to another, nor any chemical metamorphosis, nor even the difference between the state of life and death could modify this quality, so long as the integrity of the substance was maintained? The Newtonian conception came and destroyed entirely at a signal stroke this character which must have appeared so indestructible, by showing that the weight of a body is a phenomenon purely relative to the position of this body in the world, or, more precisely, to its distance from the centre of the earth.[41]
In order that our positive science of any part of nature should be absolute, that is to say, final, it would have to be complete. But, as all things are caused or causing, helped or helping, according to Pascal’s expression, all the phenomena in a reciprocal universal action, all the laws relative one to another, our science will never be complete on any point. It only furnishes more or less imperfect approximations.[42] The discovery of new facts and new laws is always possible.
How many times does not positive science find itself obliged to modify and to readjust a system of long acquired notions, in order to make a place for new elements? This is a work often very laborious, but from which science never dreams of shrinking, knowing that it is made liable to it, so to speak, by definition, that is to say, that it is relative. Examples of this abound, not only in the history of physical and natural science, but even in that of so-called exact sciences. Do we not hear M. Poincaré declaring in accordance with Hertz, that given the system of Galileo and of Newton in mechanics it is impossible to give a satisfactory idea of mass and of force?[43]
Thus the definitions, and even the laws, established by the positive sciences, are at every period approximations corresponding to the knowledge we have of facts. And as this knowledge can always be enriched the approximation may also become stricter, without ever reaching its confines. Leibnitz already said that the analysis of anything real reaches to infinity. This thought is with him, closely allied to the whole of his metaphysics. We find in Comte an expression in some way equivalent, although positive. He says, although the progress of the science of nature consists in substituting as much as possible the rational method to the experimental method, the limit can never be attained, we can never affirm that experience will not bring new elements which will oblige us to modify the edifice of science. The relativity of science thus serves to maintain an equal balance between the need of unity which comes from the understanding, and the inexhaustible diversity of the world of reality which this understanding studies.
As a fact, then, positive science is always relative. Rightly, it cannot be otherwise, and this for two essential reasons. It depends necessarily upon “our organisation” and “our situation”[44] or, in other words, it is relative “both to the individual and to the species in its advance.”
It is relative in the first place to our organisation. Here Comte takes up again an idea which was dear to the philosophers of the XVIII. century and in particular to Diderot. If our organisation were different, the data which our science elaborates would be other that they are. With more organs we might perhaps grasp kinds of problems of which we have no idea. If we suppose our species to be blind, astronomy would not exist for it. And further, a natural law requires that the more complex and the higher phenomena in regard to their conditions of existence, should be subordinated to the more general and the more common phenomena. The intellectual phenomena thus depend, first, upon the biological phenomena, and then upon all those to which the biological phenomena are subordinated. In this sense, therefore, science is relative to our organisation, which is itself relative in respect to the milieu in which we live. But, reciprocally, the representation of this milieu and of this organisation rests upon intellectual laws which impart to science a need of unity and harmony special to the mind.
Comte concludes, therefore, that to endeavour to apportion what belongs to the object and what to the subject in scientific knowledge is a hopeless attempt. We simply know that science is not the exclusive product either of the subject or the object. Giving too much to the object leads us to “empiricism.” Falling to the opposite extreme leads to “mysticism.” The efforts of philosophers to construct an abstract theory of knowledge have only ended in miserable results. We have not gone beyond Aristotle’s “axiom as corrected by Leibnitz.” Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus. We are only certain of one thing: our science, necessarily conditioned by our organisation, is also necessarily relative.
But this is not the most decisive consideration for it only makes us see that our science would be different, if our organisation were to change. Now, as a matter of fact, our organisation does not change. Human nature, according to Comte, remains similar to itself in the whole course of its evolution. It is this evolution which itself becomes a cause, and a decisive one, of relativity for science. For, if our organisation does not vary, the system of our conceptions and of our science necessarily varies, according to our “situation,” that is to say, according to the position which we occupy in this evolution, which accomplishes itself according to laws.
Our conceptions, our religions, our philosophies, are not only individual phenomena; they are also and chiefly social phenomena, moments in a collective and continuous life, of which all the phases are interdependent. We only know in a given order of knowledge, what is compatible at that moment with the generally admitted philosophy, with the knowledge already acquired in this and in the other orders of phenomena, with the great hypotheses considered as true, with the methods in force, etc. As soon as the human mind has become conscious of the evolution to which it is subject, as soon as it has grasped its most general law (the law of the three states), in a word, as soon as sociology is founded, science can no longer be conceived as other than relative. For from that moment the various sciences appear as so many great social facts, which vary as so many functions of the rest of civilisation.
Our speculations, “depending on the totality of social progression,” can therefore never admit of that absolute fixity which metaphysicians have supposed. The continuous movement of history modifies, in the long run, the beliefs which appear to be the most immutable. Our theories tend to represent more and more faithfully the objects of our investigations, that is to say the laws of phenomena. We are thus brought back to the idea of limit, which is never attained, towards which we are advancing by means of approximations ever more exact.
The time is not yet far distant, when a doctrine of this kind could not have been advanced without at once being rejected as sceptical. The human mind is scarcely beginning to understand that truth cannot be immutable.[45] Men believed that truth must always be identical with itself, always identical for all minds at all times and at all places. It seems that in losing this character, it must cease to be truth. That is why philosophy has been so persistent in the pursuit of the absolute. It was believed that no truth could be certain, unless it rested, ultimately, upon an immutable foundation.
Science was therefore made to hang on metaphysics. And the defeats, a thousand times repeated, of metaphysics would not have discouraged the human mind had not positive philosophy at last shown that the truth of which we are capable, because it is relative does not cease to be truth. We are not condemned to choose between the pursuit of an inaccessible absolute and the crumbling down of all science. It suffices to understand that human science evolves and that this evolution is subject to laws. It is never ended: it always “becomes.” It is not a “state:” it is a “progress.”
There are therefore provisional, and, if one may so speak, temporary truths. Does science ever establish any others? The ideas which Hipparchus and the Greek astronomers had of the heavens was not false in all respects. It was the astronomical truth compatible with the conditions of the society in which they lived. After the labours of the observers of the Middle Ages, utilised by Copernicus, this idea faded before another one which became more perfect with Newton and Laplace. Perhaps this one will be modified in its turn, in consequence of new discoveries! Similarly it was thought that the earth was a flat surface, then a round disc. Then it was represented as a sphere and finally as an ellipsoid. To-day we know that this ellipsoid is irregular.
Truth is then at each period “the perfect logical coherence,” or the correspondence between our conceptions and our observations. The history of human thought is composed of a progressive series of alternating periods. At a certain moment the mind has placed what it conceives in accordance with what it knows. But, by degrees, new facts are observed, known facts are better interpreted, discoveries burst forth. The harmony between the conceptions and the observations then becomes precarious. Minds find a greater and greater difficulty in fitting all the acquired knowledge into the traditional frame. At last the frame gives way. Then the harmony is re-established in a more comprehensive form, which in its turn is destined to become insufficient. Here positive philosophy recognises a sociological law. It gives up the vain dream of immutable truth. It no longer regards the truth of to-day as absolutely true, nor the truth of yesterday as absolutely false. It ceases to be critical in regard to the past.”
To conclude, the theory of science can therefore only be accomplished from the sociological point of view. It remains imperfect so long as “we” has not been substituted to “I,” the universal subject which is humanity to the individual subject, and a philosophical history of the sciences to mere reflective analysis. To the logical conditions of science, to define it completely, its biological and social conditions must be joined. Then, but then only, it will be understood, that, at each period, science is at the same time true and relative, without its relativity placing its truth in danger.
[CHAPTER V]
SCIENCE (CONTINUED)
PHENOMENA AND LAWS
The perfection of the positive system, towards which it unceasingly tends, although very probably it may never reach it, would be to represent all observable phenomena as particular cases of a single general fact, such as, for example, that of gravitation. The fundamental identity of phenomena, the reduction of particular laws to a supreme law; this is an ideal which we are free to entertain. Comte, after d’Alembert and Saint-Simon, has formulated it himself at the beginning of the Cours de philosophie positive.[46]
Unfortunately this ideal is not realisable. We apply a very weak intellect to a very complicated world.[47] The unity which, scorning experience, we might establish, would naturally be valueless. For the several categories of phenomena proposed to us seem irreducible. If this[48] be the case, the pursuit after scientific unity is “irrational.” Comte ended by treating it as an “absurd utopia.”[49]
However, this utopia is forever reappearing; for the human mind is secretly attached to it. It is because, on the one hand, unity pleases it above all things, and on the other hand because there is here an illusion produced and maintained by a philosophy born of mathematical inspiration. Descartes’ discovery which allowed questions of geometry to be dealt with by algebra has been the occasion of a grave error. It gave rise to the thought that differences of quality could be reduced to differences of quantity. Hence the idea of “reducing” the various categories of phenomena to one another. But this was a wrong interpretation of the principle of analytical geometry. Even there, we have a translation, not reduction, “The geometrical ideas of form and of situation,” says Comte—and Mr. Renouvier will repeat it after him—“are not naturally more like numerical notions than the other real conceptions. Every phenomenon, even social, would certainly have its equation, as a figure or a motion if its law were known to us with sufficient precision.
Analysis is therefore but an instrument of incomparable power for the study of phenomena. But, from the fact that we can make use of it, it does not in the least follow that the phenomena may be all brought back to an identical type. Quality is in no way by this means reduced to quantity, which is something entirely abstract, and this no more takes place in the case of geometrical quality than in the case of any other. Neither can the geometrical quality be reduced to pure analysis, nor the physical to the geometrical, nor the living to the inorganic, nor the social to the biological. At every stage something qualitatively new appears. Whether or no we can formulate the relations of phenomena in the form of an equation, their heterogeneity subsists always irreducible.
What is true of phenomena is also true of their laws. Each order of phenomena has its special laws over and above those which result from its relations with the less complicated and more general orders. The idea of a supreme law from which all the others would be deduced must therefore be forsaken. Even within the range of each fundamental science, it is doubtful how far the unity dreamt of could ever be attained. The number of irreducible laws is far more considerable than is imagined by a false appreciation of our mental powers and of scientific difficulties. For instance, in physics, how can optics and acoustics be reduced to one another? Physiological considerations, in default of other reasons, would be opposed to such a confusion of ideas.[50] Likewise in biology, how can the laws of animal life be reduced to those of lower organic life? and in sociology, the laws of human society, implying a course of history, to those of animal societies which do not do so?
Instead, therefore, of conceiving a priori, the phenomena and the laws as capable of a “reduction” which is, in fact, impossible, the positive method requires the determination of the general characters of these phenomena and of these laws by observations. It first establishes the following:
1. The more complex phenomena become, the more also our means of studying them increase in number.
It is a natural but an insufficient compensation. For the difficulty of establishing the science of phenomena grows much more quickly than the number and the power of our methodical processes. However, without this compensation, scarcely any fundamental science would ever reach the positive state. Thus, to the method of pure mathematics observation in astronomy comes to be added. Experimentation appears in physics, the art of nomenclatures in chemistry, the comparative method in biology, the historical method in social science. With this final science, the positive method is henceforth complete.
2. The more complex phenomena become, the more modifiable they are.
We have no power over astronomical phenomena. Even the perfect knowledge of their laws would only allow us to foresee them. But we can, in a great number of cases, bring about or arrest physical and chemical phenomena. Our intervention is still more efficacious if we are concerned with biological phenomena, as is sufficiently proved by the good and the evil wrought by medicine and surgery. And it finally reaches the height of its power in social and political life. So much so that even cultivated men find it difficult to persuade themselves that social phenomena are governed by invariable laws, and that politics can become the object of a science. Experience seems to tell them, on the contrary, that the activity of man, and especially that of the man of genius, is all-powerful in this domain. Nevertheless it is not so, as sociology, by the mere fact of its existence sufficiently proves. But it remains true that, of all the phenomena of nature, the social and moral phenomena are those in which man’s intervention is at once the easiest and the most efficacious.
3. The more complex the phenomena the more imperfect they are.
We shall perhaps be surprised to see Comte appealing to the idea of perfection. It seems that he ought to have excluded it as being something metaphysical. Further on we shall consider his theory of finality. At present let us only say that if he considers natural phenomena as imperfect, it is in the sense in which Helmholtz calls the eye a poor optical instrument. He simply states that certain ends, in fact, being realized by a natural arrangement of a group of phenomena, the same end might be better or more economically reached, by other arrangements that we can easily conceive. In this sense our solar system is imperfect, but less so than many living forms whose organism might present a much higher degree of advantageous adaptation. And yet these living forms are themselves less imperfect than societies subject as they are to all sorts of pathological alterations, as history clearly shows. It is remarkable that the most imperfect phenomena should precisely be the most modifiable, and also those whose study only became positive in the last stage.