This negation discovers another immense error of the school and of its chief. Convinced, and with reason, that the observation of facts is the natural and constant process of the human understanding in its labor after knowledge, M. Auguste Comte has ill understood, and incompletely understood, the results of this labor. He failed to perceive that it was observation itself, carried on and accomplished by the process, no less natural and no less legitimate, of induction, which was revealing to the mind its peculiar facts and its peculiar laws, as well as the facts and the laws of the external world, within which that mind is placed. M. Comte ended by ignoring or denying the elements à priori of human knowledge; that is to say, the universal and necessary principles by which man raises himself to God, and has relations with God. Thus M. Comte mutilates the human mind, because he fails to observe it and to recognize it in its entirety.
He is impelled by his system to another and still more serious mutilation of human nature. After having declared matter, its forces and its laws, to be the single object of human knowledge, and these laws to be inherent in matter, eternal and invariable, what is to be said of human liberty? What place is to be assigned to human liberty in this world, in which it is powerless to create anything or to change anything, and in which there exists no power from which it can demand anything or obtain anything? Evidently, in such a system human liberty is a chimera, an idle luxury of human nature; man, with all his faculties, has nothing to do but to study matter carefully, its forces and its laws, to adapt himself to them, and to make the best use he can of them, with a view to his welfare and to the satisfaction of his desires. Fatalism is the law of man as of the world within which he lives!
The moral instincts, and the naturally lofty mind of M. Comte revolted at this consequence, although it flowed imperiously from his system. The respect which he felt for the method of observation, and for the facts which it attains to, did not permit him absolutely to ignore or expressly to deny the psychological fact of man's liberty. Sometimes he attempts to find it a place in that sum of external facts and fixed laws which is, in his opinion, the sole field for man's activity and for man's science. But such is the want of coherence of idea, that M. Comte is visibly embarrassed; consequently, in his works—more especially in his "Cours de philosophie positive,"—the most solid and consistent of all his writings in its fundamental principles—he sets almost completely aside the essential fact of human liberty, and of free will in the individual man; and in those books in which he treats of social organization, when he finds himself face to face with the wants and the rights of political liberty, that natural consequence of individual free will and of the responsibility attaching to it, he struggles to elude questions of this kind, feeling the impossibility of reconciling the principle of moral order with the despotism and the fatalism of the material world; and when he explains his views as to the government of human societies, it is easy to see that, although writing "I am, head and heart Republican," [Footnote 60] he is, in his dreams, rather substituting a scientific domination for a theocratic domination than instituting any liberal régime.
[Footnote 60: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré, p. 251.]
After metaphysics comes history. M. Comte appeals to the annals of all nations and all ages in confirmation of his system of the world and of humanity. This history is to be divided, according to him, into three successive states, the theological state, the metaphysical state, and the scientific state. In the theological state and epoch, the human mind and social institutions are under the empire of pretended supernatural powers, of several such or of only one such, invented by man for the solution of the natural problems which lay siege to man, and for the determination of the laws, with which the social order cannot dispense. In the metaphysical epoch and state, vain abstractions essay to replace the supernatural powers of the theological state, and only end in an anarchy, both of opinions and society. The third epoch is destined to be the reign of positive science, founded solely upon observation and respect for the facts, the forces, and the laws of that external world which is the theater of man's existence. The first two states are, according to him, essentially irrational and transitory. They are the first steps of that which M. Comte styles the grand evolution of humanity, of which the régime of science is the end and the summit.
It would be difficult more entirely to deform, difficult to show greater ignorance of man's general history. That which M. Comte regards as three successive states in the history of the human race is only the complex and permanent condition of humanity, agitated by movements swaying in different directions, according as it meets with the successes or encounters the reverses, the hopes, or the fears to which different nations and generations are subject. That theological conceptions and metaphysical meditations are only transitory facts, "which," according to the expression of M. Comte, "will have henceforth only an historical existence," is an assertion no more true of such facts than of those that the study of physics supplies. These different yearnings of the mind, and their different labors, are the very essence—the indestructible and indivisible essence—of human nature. At no time and in no country have men more ceased, or will they more cease, to pray to God, and to strive to comprehend him, than they will cease to study the physical world, and to make it subserve their interests. Nations and generations of individuals, in different ages, have advanced more or less in one or other of these careers of intellectual activity; and so they will continue to advance. Religious faith, metaphysical meditation, and scientific inquiry have their alternations of enthusiasm and of languor, of glory and of sterility; they appear and they prosper, sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously. If India plunged herself deep among the symbols of mythology and amid the void of Pantheism, Greece cultivated with like success the metaphysical and the natural sciences—Aristotle was the contemporary of Plato. Where other nations fluctuated variously between theological conceptions, metaphysical abstractions, and scientific studies, the Hebrew people continued, in the theological state, Monotheists. In the sixteenth century, when the spirit of free inquiry and of independence was awakened, and made its influence felt far and wide, Christian faith, at the same time, was resuscitated and confirmed; and the eighteenth century founded at once the political liberty of Protestant England and the philosophical and literary glory of Catholic France. The human mind has, according to time and place, its favorite labors and its favorite impulses; but it subsists always one and entire; it never renounces any one of its grand hopes or of its grand operations; and those men strangely mutilate and debase it who represent the mind as having, during ages, lost itself in the vain effort to attain a knowledge of God and of its own nature, and who condemn it henceforth to take up its quarters in the science of matter—of its forces—of its laws.
Why need I appeal to history for a proof of the simultaneous and indestructible co-existence of these different conditions of humanity, among which M. Auguste Comte refuses to admit more than one as rational and definitive? M. Comte has himself undertaken—he alone—to furnish me with this proof. This intractable adversary of all religious belief and tendency could not, even for the short space of this life, himself remain indifferent to such belief and tendency; during this brief period he traversed, and in the inverse order of his own theories, each of the different intellectual states which he had assigned as the successive stages of the human race. He had placed the theological state at the beginning and the scientific state at the close of the career of humanity; after having made his own début by the scientific state, it was as impossible for him, as it is for the human race, to content himself with that, and he himself ended there, where, according to him, mankind had commenced, namely, with the theological state. He had declared his positive philosophy to be "in radical and absolute contradiction to every kind of religious or metaphysical tendency." He had separated with éclat from the Saint-Simonians, "for they will soon," he said, "sink themselves in ridicule and contempt. Only imagine, their heads are turned to such a degree, that they propose nothing less than the establishment of a real, new religion, a sort of incarnation of the divinity in the person of Saint-Simon." [Footnote 61]