The doctrine of this school is that all knowledge is limited to material phenomena--that is, to appearances perceptible to sense. We do not know the essence of any object, nor the real mode of procedure of any event, but simply its relations to other events, as similar or dissimilar, co-existent or successive. These relations are constant; under the same conditions, they are always the same. The constant resemblances which link phenomena together, and the constant sequences which unite them, as antecedent and consequent, are termed laws. The laws of phenomena are all we know respecting them. Their essential nature and their ultimate causes, efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable to us. [247]
[Footnote 246: ][ (return) ] Masson, "Recent British Philos.," p. 62.
[Footnote 247: ][ (return) ] See art. "Positive Philos. of A. Comte," Westminster Review, April, 1865, p. 162, Am. ed.
It is not our intention to review the system of philosophy propounded by Aug. Comte; we are now chiefly concerned with his denial of all causation.
1. As to Efficient Causes.--Had Comte contented himself with the assertion that causes lie beyond the field of sensible observation, and that inductive science can not carry us beyond the relations of co-existence and succession among phenomena, he would have stated an important truth, but certainly not a new truth. It had already been announced by distinguished mental philosophers, as, for example, M. de Biran and Victor Cousin. [248] The senses give us only the succession of one phenomenon to another. I hold a piece of wax to the fire and it melts. Here my senses inform me of two successive phenomena--the proximity of fire and the melting of wax. It is now agreed among all schools of philosophy that this is all the knowledge the senses can possibly supply. The observation of a great number of like cases assures us that this relation is uniform. The highest scientific generalization does not carry us one step beyond this fact. Induction, therefore, gives us no access to causes beyond phenomena. Still, this does not justify Comte in the assertion that causes are to us absolutely unknown. The question would still arise whether we have not some faculty of knowledge, distinct from sensation, which is adequate to furnish a valid cognition of cause. It does not by any means follow that, because the idea of causation is not given as a "physical quæsitum" at the end of a process of scientific generalization, it should not be a "metaphysical datum" posited at the very beginning of scientific inquiry, as the indispensable condition of our being able to cognize phenomena at all, and as the law under which all thought, and all conception of the system of nature, is alone possible.
[Footnote 248: ][ (return) ] "It is now universally admitted that we have no perception of the causal nexus in the material world."--Hamilton, "Discussions," p. 522.
Now we affirm that the human mind has just as direct, immediate, and positive knowledge of cause as it has of effect. The idea of cause, the intuition power, is given in the immediate consciousness of mind as determining its own operations. Our first, and, in fact, our only presentation of power or cause, is that of self as willing. In every act of volition I am fully conscious that it is in my power to form a resolution or to refrain from it, to determine on this course of action or that; and this constitutes the immediate presentative knowledge of power. [249] The will is a power, a power in action, a productive power, and, consequently, a cause. This doctrine is stated with remarkable clearness and accuracy by Cousin: "If we seek the notion of cause in the action of one ball upon another, as was previously done by Hume, or in the action of the hand upon the ball, or the primary muscles upon the extremities, or even in the action of the will upon the muscles, as was done by M. Maine de Biran, we shall find it in none of these cases, not even in the last; for it is possible there should be a paralysis of the muscles which deprives the will of power over them, makes it unproductive, incapable of being a cause, and, consequently, of suggesting the notion of one. But what no paralysis can prevent is the action of the will upon itself, the production of a resolution; that is to say, the act of causation entirely mental, the primitive type of all causality, of which all external movements are only symbols more or less imperfect. The first cause for us, is, therefore, the will, of which the first effect is volition. This is at once the highest and the purest source of the notion of cause, which thus becomes identical with that of personality. And it is the taking possession, so to speak, of the cause, as revealed in will and personality, which is the condition for us of the ulterior or simultaneous conception of external, impersonal causes." [250]
[Footnote 249: ][ (return) ] "It is our immediate consciousness of effort, when we exert force to put matter in motion, or to oppose and neutralize force, which gives us this internal conviction of power and causation, so far as it refers to the material world, and compels us to believe that whenever we see material objects put in motion from a state of rest, or deflected from their rectilinear paths and changed in their velocities if already in motion, it is in consequence of such an effort somehow exerted."--Herschel's "Outlines of Astronomy," p. 234; see Mansel's "Prolegomena," p. 133.
[Footnote 250: ][ (return) ] "Philosophical Fragments," Preface to first edition.