IV.
In spite of whatever may have been said, Comte then has a psychology. And, what is more, this psychology is in a sense not far removed from that of the Scottish school and of the Eclectics although he so much fought against their methods. The points of contact are numerous and important. In both doctrines the psychical phenomena are referred to faculties and these are represented as “dispositions,” innate “properties.” In both, the essential psychological problem appears to be the determination of the number and the relations of these faculties, whose action variously combined produces psychical phenomena: before everything, it is a question of not considering as an elementary faculty that which as a matter of fact results from the combination of several faculties, or inversely. Finally in both, it is claimed to establish this doctrine of the innate faculties upon the observation of human nature.
Comte himself had seen that, at any rate in the case of Condillac’s criticism, he was in accordance with the eclectics. On this point he only refused to grant them originality. According to him they merely popularised, in obscure and emphatic declamations, what physiologists like Charles Bonnet, Cabanis, and chiefly Gall and Spurzheim had long before stated on this subject in a far clearer and especially in a far more exact manner. For his part Garnier, the author of the Traité des Facultés de l’âme had clearly seen the relations of eclecticism to Gall’s doctrine, and had studied them in a work entitled De la Phrénologie et de la Psychologie comparées which appeared in 1839.
Why then does Comte attack the eclectics with such persistence and such violence, if, indeed, the results of his psychology are not very far removed from what they say?—It is because in reality, beneath the apparent resemblance of doctrine, a difference of method as serious as can be conceived is concealed. For Cousin, and especially for the Cousin we know before 1830, psychology is not an end in itself. It is a means which he uses to rise to the study of being in itself and of the Absolute. The “ego” which he analyses is independent of the organism. This is what Comte condemns as a retrogression. “Some men, not recognizing the present and irrevocable direction of the human mind, have endeavoured for ten years to transplant German metaphysics into our midst, and to constitute, under the name of psychology, a so-called science entirely independent of physiology, superior to it, and to which should exclusively belong the study of moral phenomena.”[202] And this attempt at reaction takes place at the very moment when the works of Cabanis and of Gall have brought this study upon the positive path!
It is needless to say that, in Comte’s system, psychical phenomena are subordinated, as far as their conditions of existence are concerned, to all the orders of more general natural phenomena. Comte should then have followed Cabanis and Gall, as a matter of course. But he thought that to establish the science of the “transcendent functions,” the biological point of view was insufficient. In this case anatomical considerations are only a kind of reduplication and transcription of physiological considerations. As Maine de Biran said, in terms curiously like Comte’s, “a distinction of places assigned to the exercise of each faculty must necessarily be itself referred to another pre-established division of the faculties.... Hypothesis thus grafted upon hypothesis of a different order would not much contribute to throw light upon the analysis of our intellectual functions.”[203] Only, instead of appealing, like Maine de Biran, to reflection, Comte rises from the biological to the sociological point of view He recognises that the subjective method alone is suitable for the science of psychical phenomena, but, in place of the metaphysical subjective method, by means of which the “ego” is deluded into the belief that it analyses its operations, and grasps its own activity, he will make use of the positive subjective method. The subject which he will analyse will be the human mind, or better, the human soul considered in its continuous evolution, that is to say in its religions, in its sciences, in its philosophy, in its language and in its art. Here is matter for a psychology which will no longer be chimerical, but real, which will be positive, in a word, like the biology upon which it depends and of which it is the fulfilment.
If we leave aside the conception of the “faculties” which Comte accepted rather hastily at the hands of the Scottish school and of Gall, and the “cerebral table” which he believed to be once for all constructed, his psychology contained more than one important and fertile seed. To the eclectic psychology, which is not positive, Comte substituted two sciences which are such. In the first place, an experimental science of the psychical phenomena studied in their relation to their organic conditions: it is the physiological psychology of which no one to-day questions the legitimacy. Then, by the introduction of the sociological point of view, Comte opened the way to a whole series of studies which begin to be developed, (social psychology, ethnical psychology, psychology of the masses, etc). It is often said that sociological laws have their foundation in psychological laws. But the reverse is no less true. The psychological laws, at least the mental and moral laws, are, at the same time, sociological laws, since they are only revealed in the study of the intellectual history of the human species. “We must not explain humanity by man, but man by humanity.” To the “Τγνῶθι σεαυτόν” of ancient psychology, the positive method substitutes this precept: “To know yourself, know history.” Man only becomes conscious of himself, when he becomes aware of his place in the evolution of Humanity.