III.
The theory of progress is the “principle” of social dynamics, itself the essential part of sociology, while sociology lies at the heart of positive philosophy. It was therefore to be expected that the adversaries of this philosophy would especially seek to ruin the theory of progress, which supports everything else. Indeed the objections have been numerous and pressing. Of these objections Comte had foreseen the two most important, and he had endeavoured to answer them beforehand. According to him, the theory of progress implies neither fatalism nor optimism, nor the quietism which has been represented as a consequence of it.[274]
On the first point, Comte draws our attention to the fact that the necessary consequence of his principle of laws is not the absolute determinism of phenomena, whether it be a question of social or other phenomena. Positive philosophy admits nothing absolute. Determinism, like free-will, is a metaphysical thesis, Comte is not compelled to take sides either with one or the other: he leaves them to mutually refute each other. The positive conception of the moral and intellectual faculties of man, as Gall clearly established, does not imply that human actions might not be otherwise than they are. Similarly, if in general natural phenomena are subject to laws, this does not prevent us from conceiving these phenomena as modifiable by man’s intervention. Now, of all natural phenomena, social phenomena are precisely the most modifiable; so much so that for a long time it was possible to ignore that they were governed by laws.
There is then no contradiction in affirming the reality of these laws, and in considering at the same time the intervention of human activity in social phenomena as efficacious. As early as 1824 Comte wrote to his friend Valat: “It would be misunderstanding my thought to conclude from it that I forbid all improvement, since, on the contrary, I formally establish that every government must change in consequence of the progress of civilisation, and that it is in no way a matter of indifference that these changes should take place by the mere force of circumstances, or by calculated planes based upon observation. I do not deny the power of political measures, I limit it.”[275]
It belongs to social science to determine the limits of the useful action of man upon social phenomena. These limits are narrow enough. Man can only modify, from the static point of view, the intensity, and from the dynamic point of view, the speed of social phenomena. Indeed, here as elsewhere, modifications can only be produced in conformity with laws. To suppose the contrary would be to deny the very existence of these laws. Now, the fundamental law of statics is the intimate solidarity and the mutual dependence of all social elements, at all the moments of their common evolution. There is, therefore, no disturbing influence, whatever its origin may be, which can “cause unsympathetic opposing elements to coexist in a given society.”[276] Rather would it destroy this society. All that is possible is to modify the respective tendencies which indeed coexist in this society, but without causing the appearance or disappearance of any of them. In the same way, from the dynamic point of view, the order of the successive phases of progress is determined by laws. No external influence (nor in particular that of man), could overturn or disturb this order, or “skip” one of the stages. The evolution could only be made more rapid, that is to say, easier. The statesman, infatuated with his power, will perhaps find this a very humble part to play. But, even within these limits, human intervention could still be of capital importance provided that it were directed by science.
History confirms these views. In it we never see social phenomena modified by man otherwise than in their intensity, or in their speed. Where we best know their evolution, that is to say, in the social series, which includes the history of the sciences, of the arts, of morals and institutions, the verification of this law is constant. For instance, among the scientific men at Alexandria astronomy stopped at a certain point, because the further development of this science was not compatible with the general conditions of society at that time. And if Montesquieu’s attempt to subject social facts to laws failed, it is because, before sociology, positive biology had first to be founded. Analogous examples abound, and a contrary case has never presented itself.
Three secondary factors, race, climate, and man’s political action especially modify progress, in the measure which has just been indicated. In the present state of science it is impossible to arrange them in the order of their importance. Montesquieu, made too much of climates: others have made too much of races.[277] Those elements of social evolution have not yet been studied by the positive method. Until the foundation of social dynamics their part was, of necessity, wrongly conceived. It was not known that the essential law, the law of the three states, is independent of these secondary factors, whilst on the contrary the secondary factors can only act in conformity with this law, without ever suspending it. In order that the modifications which they produce should become intelligible, it was necessary that the normal type of evolution should first be known. To study the influence of climates and of races before first possessing the general laws of social dynamics, was, almost, to pretend to establish pathology without having first constituted physiology.
As to man’s political action, it too has been wrongly understood. In the absence of a positive conception of social phenomena, some denied the efficacy of this action, others exaggerated it. When it was used in the direction of progress, it almost necessarily appeared to be the principal cause of the results which social evolution would have brought about in any case. The illusion was all the more inevitable from the fact that social forces are always personified in individuals. On the other hand, how often have the most vigorous political efforts only been successful for a day, because the general evolution of society was proceeding in the contrary direction!
So long as the theological and metaphysical period lasts, man does not hesitate to ascribe to himself an almost boundless action upon natural phenomena. Having reached the positive period, he knows that phenomena are only, modifiable within certain limits, determined by their laws, and that he can only aspire to relative results. Once positive sociology is established it wholly transforms the familiar idea of political art. But because it entertains less great and less gratifying ambitions, this art will only be all the more effective. Compare what medicine and surgery are able to do to-day for the good of the sick with what they could do before chemistry and biology became positive sciences!
But, it is said, admitting that man can modify social phenomena, what reason has he to interfere with them, since progress takes place of itself? Why not allow the natural evolution which most certainly realises it to work itself out?
This objection confuses progress understood as a succession of states which unfold according to a law, with progress understood in the sense of indefinite improvement. On this point again the comparison of society with living organisms is instructive. Do not these develop in conformity with invariable laws? Yet, Comte regards them as extremely imperfect, and in what concerns the human body, the intervention of the doctor or the surgeon is often useful and even indispensable. When we reproach the sociological theory of progress with having optimism as its consequence, we take the scientific notion of spontaneous order for the systematic justification of any existing order.[278] There is, however, a very long distance from one to the other. Spontaneous order may often be a very rough form of order.
Here, as everywhere else, positive philosophy substitutes the scientific principle of the conditions of existence to the metaphysical principle of final causes. It admits that spontaneously, according to natural laws, a certain necessary order is established; but it acknowledges that this order offers serious and numerous disadvantages, modifiable, in certain degrees, by man’s intervention. The more complex these phenomena, the more are the imperfections multiplied and intensified. The biological phenomena are “inferior” in this respect to those of inorganic nature. By reason of their complication, which is maxima, social phenomena must be the most “disorderly” of all. In a word if the idea of a natural law implies that of a certain order, the notion of this order must be completed by the “simultaneous consideration of its inevitable imperfection.”
The theory of progress is then incompatible neither with the ascertainment of social evil, nor with the effort to remedy it. The most complex of all organisms, the social organism, is also the one most subject to diseases and to crises. Thus, Comte foresees in a near future great internal struggles in our society, in consequence of our mental and moral anarchy.[279] To-day, only that is systematised which is destined to disappear, and what is not yet systematised, that is to say all that lives, will not be organised without violent conflicts. It is enough here to think of the relations between masters and workmen.
Revolutions occur which nothing can prevent. It is an inevitable evil, and Comte gives a striking psychological reason for it. Our mind is too weak and our life too short for us ever to form a positive idea of a social system other than the one in which we were born and in which we live. It is from this one that, willingly or unwillingly, we draw the elements of our political and social ideas. Even men of a utopian turn of mind do not escape this necessity. Their dreams always reflect, at bottom, either the past, or a contemporary social state. In order that a new political system should appear, and especially for it to find access to men’s minds, the destruction of the preceeding system must be already very far advanced. Until then “even the most open minds could not perceive the characteristic nature of the new system hidden from all eyes by the spectacle of the old organisation.”[280] Hence, the lengthy processes of decomposition of worn-out régimes, the no less lengthy birth of new institutions, and the cruel periods of transition, full of troubles, of wars, and of revolutions.
With this same cause are connected what we may call the phenomena of survival. Institutions, powers, as also doctrines, have a tendency to subsist beyond the function which the general advance of the human mind had assigned to them.[281] Conflicts then take place which it is beyond anybody’s power to prevent: happy is he who can make them shorter and less acute! The solution only comes with time when the vanquished ideas fall into “disuse.” The combat never ceases except from the lack of combatants.
All this in no way excludes the possibility for man to exercise a beneficent or a detrimental action. To understand is not always to justify. It is true that a comprehensive view of history disposes us to be indulgent, because it brings out the close solidarity of all the social elements of the same period. The responsibilities being shared, and so to speak diffused, appear to be less serious for each individual. Nevertheless this philosophy allows praise and blame for the past, and active intervention in social phenomena for the present.
But this intervention will only produce the desired results if it rests upon social science. The positive polity does not propose to direct the human race towards an arbitrarily selected end. It knows that humanity is moved by its own impulse, “according to a law no less necessary, although more modifiable than that of gravitation.”[282] It is only a question for politics to facilitate this advance by throwing light upon it. It is a very difficult thing to undergo the action of a law without understanding it, or to submit to it with a full knowledge of the case. It remains in man’s power to soften and to shorten crises, as soon as he grasps their reasons and foresees the issue. He will not pretend to govern the phenomena, but only to modify their spontaneous development. “This demands that he should know their laws.”[283]
Let us also know how to own that in respect to many of these phenomena, and not the least important of them, we are absolutely powerless. Their conditions escape our grasp. For instance, the duration of human life is far from being as favourable to social evolution as might be conceived.[284] On the contrary, after the extreme imperfection of our organism, the brevity of life is one of the causes of the slowness of social development. How many powerful minds have died before their full maturity had yielded all its fruit! What would not have been expected of their genius if they had been in full possession of their faculties during three or four centuries!
The positive theory of progress therefore entails neither optimism nor quietism. The intervention of man being excluded, the social state, which evolves, according to laws, at each period is just as good and as bad as it can be, “according to the whole of the situation.”[285] More than one pessimist would be satisfied with this formula. It is legitimately drawn from the principle of the conditions of existence. But, truly, from the point of view of this principle, that is to say, from the point of view of positive and relative philosophy, there can be no question either of optimism or of pessimism. Metaphysics alone can offer an absolute judgment upon the whole of the social reality. The positive doctrine, here as elsewhere, only seeks the statical and dynamical laws of phenomena. It is true, that it finds that the social evolution is, as a matter of fact, accompanied by improvement. But this improvement is so slow, so laborious, interrupted by so many crises, disturbed by so many conflicts, that if humanity aspires to a better condition, it is mainly from her own efforts that she must expect a slightly more rapid progress.
[CHAPTER V]
THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
If social dynamics is a science, and if the law of the three states, discovered by Comte, is its fundamental law, this law (and those which proceed from it), must explain the successive phases of humanity, from the first dawn of civilisation, to the present condition of the most advanced nations. They must “introduce unity and continuity into this immense spectacle, where in general we see so much confusion and incoherence.”[286] Thus the counterpart of social science is a philosophy of history. In it, social science finds its concrete expression and its verification. In the absence of the prevision of social facts for the future, a prevision which is rendered almost impossible by the extreme complication of these facts, social science at least allows of the “rational co-ordination” of the whole of the past.
In order to establish this philosophy of history, Comte gave himself two postulates. The first is common to him and to all those who endeavoured to set forth the evolution of humanity from its beginnings, especially before the recent progress made by anthropology. Comte “constructs” primitive man and the society in which he lived. The second postulate consists in considering, instead of the history of the whole of humanity, “the most complete and the most characteristic evolution,” that is to say, that of the white race; and in this race, only the populations of western Europe.[287] Comte will almost confine himself to the periods dealt with by Bossuet in the Discours sur l’histoire universelle, which, moreover, he greatly esteems. His philosophy of history only embraces Egyptian civilisation, very little known in his time, then Greece and Rome, and finally after the fall of the Roman Empire, the development of some Latin and Germanic peoples in Europe.
We can understand that Bossuet should have so limited universal history as to include in it only a small portion of humanity gathered on the shores of the Mediterranean. He was obliged to do so by the leading idea in his work which makes the appearance of Christianity the culminating point in the human drama. All that precedes it must tend to bring it about, all that comes after it must arise from it. But is Auguste Comte, like Bossuet, justified in leaving out of universal history the great civilisations of the far east, almost the whole of Africa, and the whole of the new world? Since, according to him, there is no chosen people, nor “providential direction,” must he not consider the total evolution of humanity? He has no right to isolate a part of it in an arbitrary manner, and to neglect the rest. He has it all the less in that he considers the species in its entirety as an individual, and that this hypothesis of Condorcet has become a principle of social science with him.
But Comte believes his postulate to be as well justified by his definition of sociology, as Bossuet’s plan could have been by his theological doctrine. Resembling on this point the other positive sciences, sociology is made of laws not of facts. The pure and simple knowledge of facts is only an end from the point of view of scholarship. Science only seeks for this knowledge in the measure in which it is indispensable for the determination of laws. Consequently, if the evolution of human society proceeded simultaneously at different points on the globe, as, this evolution takes place, as we suppose, everywhere according to invariable laws, and as climate and race can only modify it within very narrow limits, the sociologist is not bound to study all the societies of the past and of the present. He will only do so in order to make use of the comparative method, in the measure which is judged useful and within the limitations permitted by this method. In the second place, among those historical evolutions, up to the present time independent of one another, to which will he give the preference to seek in it the verification of abstract social dynamics? Evidently to the most complete and the most characteristic: for there he will have least difficulty in disengaging the laws from the extraordinary complexity of facts. Have we not seen that the idea of progress, without which sociology cannot be constituted, has only been definitely formulated since the French Revolution? Comte then thought himself authorised to “limit his historical study to the sole examination of a homogeneous and continuous series, which was nevertheless justly qualified as universal.” At every moment in history, the people whose evolution is most advanced represent the whole of humanity since the rest of humanity is destined, sooner or later to pass through the same phase. Hence the idea, which is found equally in Hegel and in Renan, of a “mission” of races and of peoples. A temporary mission which, while it lasts, constitutes their might and their right, but which, too often, they have the misfortune to survive.
I.
The positive philosophy of history takes as its guiding principle the idea of unity. In virtue of a postulate which is an audacious anticipation concerning an uncertain future, the human species, in it, is regarded as an immense social unity. Similarly, in it, the evolution of humanity is regarded as ending in the moral and religious unity of all men. Humanity goes from spontaneous religion where it begins, to demonstrated religion where it becomes finally established. Between the two lies the domain of history. The successive states through which humanity passes in evolving are not homogeneous. The theological and the positive spirit are mingled in them at various degrees. They struggle one against the other. These states then contain within themselves the principle of their own destruction. Each one necessarily prepares the appearance of the following one, until the final state in which the positive spirit alone will predominate.
The spring of these concrete views of history is the logical need of unity. It is this which determined the initial movement. For the primitive religions, unity was never perfect. Even at the period when fetichism rules without question, some rudiments of the positive spirit exist. Human nature, being invariable, the germ of its final state was already contained in a primitive state. From that time it was certain that, if humanity emerged from its primitive state, it would evolve until it found unity in the final religion.
If this be so, how is it that Comte did not regard the succession of religious forms as the supreme dynamic law, as the principle of the philosophy of history? Why did he believe rather that he had found this principle in the law of the evolution of philosophies? It is because, according to him, the evolution of religious forms is a function of intellectual evolution. It is even subordinate to intellectual evolution, in this sense, that progress in the knowledge of the laws of nature sooner or later brings about a religious revolution. In the second place, if the philosophy of history had chosen the succession of religious forms as its chief axis, it would only have studied the process of decomposition of beliefs, which, up to the present time, has led them from the period when all thought is religious (fetichism), to that when no thought seems to be so any more (philosophical deism). It would not show at the same time the inverse and simultaneous process of the positive spirit, which not only determines this progressive decomposition, but also prepares the elements of a new faith. It would not show how by degrees, by means of science, this spirit establishes a conception of nature which by becoming social will become universal, and which will be the basis of the final religion. This is why Comte, while making religion the chief element in individual and social human life, was nevertheless to take the evolution of the intellect, that is to say, the sciences and the philosophies, as the “guiding thread” of his philosophy of history.