But, admitting the same fact, M. Comte does not explain it in this way. This "theory;" these principles anterior to external observation, and which the mind absolutely requires in order to be able to observe, are, according to him, pure inventions of the human mind itself, temporary instruments which the mind creates and employs in its labors until it can obtain better. "Between," says he, "two difficulties, pressed on the one hand by the necessity of observing in order to form 'theories,' and on the other by the no less imperious necessity of creating 'theories' in order to be able to deliver itself up to a series of coherent observations, the human mind at its birth would find itself shut in by a vicious circle from which it would never have had any means of escaping, had it not succeeded in opening a natural issue by the spontaneous development of theological conceptions, which presented a point to which his efforts might be concentrated, and which might furnish aliment for his activity. It is, in effect, very remarkable, that questions the most radically inaccessible to our capacities, the intimate nature of being, the origin and the end of all phenomena, should be precisely those which the intelligence propounds to itself, as of paramount importance in that primitive condition, all the other problems really admitting of solution being almost regarded as unworthy of serious meditation. The reason of this it is not difficult to discover, for experience alone could have given us the measure of our strength; and if man had not begun by entertaining an exaggerated opinion of that strength, it would never have been capable of acquiring all the development of which it is susceptible. So much does our organization exact." [Footnote 59]
[Footnote 59: Cours de philosophie positive, par M. Auguste Comte, vol. i, pp. 9, 10.]
Strange error of a man, whose supreme pretension it is to found all human knowledge upon the observation of facts! At his very first step, at the first difficulty which he encounters, M. Comte observes inexactly and incompletely, does not see in the facts all that the facts contain, and only explains them by assigning to the human mind, in its primitive and spontaneous operations, a hypothesis, the hypothesis of "theological conceptions." God, and man's relations with God, is a human invention, destined to support man at the commencement of his career as an intelligent being, and to occupy provisionally the place of science!
The source of this misapprehension, the capital error of Positivism in its metaphysical argument, is, that it ignores the nature and the limits of science.
The famous "enthymême" of Descartes, "I think, therefore I am," is a pleonasm. As soon as the human being says to itself "I," the human being affirms its own existence, and distinguishes itself from that external world whence it derives impressions of which it is not the author. In this primary fact are revealed the two primary objects of human knowledge: on the one side the human being himself, the individual person that feels and perceives, that feels himself and perceives himself; on the other side, the external world that is felt and perceived: the subject and the object, (the moi and the non-moi.) Such is the twofold field, at the beginning of his intellectual existence, opened to the knowing faculty of man.
In each of these fields, whether the human being makes himself or whether he makes the external world the object of his contemplation, he proceeds by the same method; he considers particular facts, classes these under more general facts which serve as their summary, and recognizes laws that govern them, these laws being themselves facts. When this method of observation and of generalization is applied to the outer world, understanding by that world the human body also, it gives birth to the sciences of physics and of physiology. When such method is applied to the human being, regarded as distinct from the body in which he lives and by which he acts, it gives birth to the science of psychology, logic, and morals. It is not here my intention to propose a classification of the sciences, but only to determine the domain of science properly so called—that is to say, the field in which the human mind by observation gets directly at facts and at the laws of facts.
Philosophers, in their study of man and of the world, do not sufficiently consult language, the general language, the common language, that instinctive expression of the activity of the human mind. I interrogate our native language upon the question which now occupies me, and I find it reflecting the greatest light. It has, to express the results of the intellectual process which takes place in man, when regarded as the spectator of the universe and of himself, many different words: "connaître," "savoir," "croire," "connaissance," "science," "croyance," "foi." These are not mere different names to express the same idea and the same fact, they are signs of different facts and of diverse states of the human soul. If we interrogate the languages of civilized nations, ancient or modern, we find in all of them, with more or less abundance, precision or subtlety, a similar variety of terms corresponding to a similar diversity of facts.
Talleyrand said once in the chamber of Peers, "There is somebody who has more intellect than Napoleon, more intellect than Voltaire; that somebody is the Public." I also say, there is a more profound observer than Bacon, a greater philosopher than Kant; it is mankind. Mankind is right when it distinguishes in its languages knowledge from science and from belief, science from belief and from faith. Bossuet wrote a book entitled "De la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même;" the idea would never have occurred to him of entitling it "De la science de Dieu et de soi-même;" it would have shocked his good sense as much as his piety. The child believes the smile and the speech of its mother; in its belief there is certainly no scientific appreciation (no science) of the relations which unite it to its mother, and of the reasons which make it believe in her. Knowledge, science, belief, and faith, are facts essentially distinct, although all equally natural to the human soul; and it is impossible to confound them, to take one for the other, to annul one in favor of the other, or to attempt to reduce them to one term, without ignoring realities, and falling into enormous errors.
Such has been the constant error of M. Auguste Comte, and such is the radical vice of Positivism. M. Comte ignores the natural and permanent diversity in the intellectual states through which a man may pass in his ardent pursuit of truth. He refuses here to recognize any state as legitimate and definitive except the scientific state. He regards intuitive knowledge and instinctive belief as preparatory and transitory states, states without any rational authority; as, in short, simple steps on the way to that scientific state which alone sets man in possession of the truth. Positivism is thus led to extend the pretensions of science beyond its proper domain, that is, beyond the finite world, its facts and its laws; and as science finds itself incapable of observing and of defining infinity, Positivism is, perforce, reduced either to deny infinity, or to declare infinity absolutely inaccessible to the human mind, and so to pass it over in silence.