[Footnote 61: Letter of the 9th December, 1828, to M. Gustave d'Eichthal. Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, by M. Littré, p. 173.]
And some years after holding this language, and while still in the plenitude of bodily vigor and thought, M. Comte in his turn launched into a theological career; he took it upon him to transform Positivism into a religion. By the most violent of all personified abstractions, he made out of humanity the great being, the real being, sovereign and adorable, and he placed that being in the place of God, declaring himself at the same time to be his chief priest. He had more than once proclaimed that all religion was essentially founded upon the supernatural; and yet a religion all natural—the religion of humanity, the worship of humanity, the church of humanity, were summoned by him to succeed to the Christian religion and to the Church of Christ. On the 19th of October, 1851, when terminating his third philosophical course on the general histories of humanity, M. Comte summed it up in these words: "In the name of the past and of the future, the theoretical servitors and the practical servitors of humanity are about to assume worthily the direction of the general affairs of this world, in order to construct, at last, the true providence, moral, intellectual, and material, at the same time excluding irrevocably from political supremacy all the different slaves of God—Catholics, Protestants, or Deists—as being at once in arrear of the age and its perturbators." The positivist religion thus proclaimed, a positivist catechism and a positivist calendar—these last both composed by M. Comte—reduced his principles to practice. In a series of conversations between "The Priest and the Woman," the catechism first establishes and explains the dogma, then the worship, of the new religion, its internal order and its external order, its private worship and its public worship. And the calendar, by a retrospective chronology, determines for any given year of thirteen months, and for the seven days of the week, the names of the grand servitors in every department of humanity, who are to replace the Christian saints: three hundred and sixty-four names, men and women, with one hundred and sixty-five additional names, are inscribed upon this list, which begins with Moses and ends with Bichat, passing through Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Cæsar, Saint Paul, Charlemagne, Dante, Gutenburg, Shakspeare, Descartes, and Frederic the Second!
A chaos is a sorry sight; a chaos of the soul a still sorrier spectacle than a chaos of worlds! Epochs of moral and social crises, even while they bring on and prepare for mankind eras of mighty progress, throw also great and potent intellects into chaos. Under the seduction of a noble ambition, and the delusion of a partial success, they enthusiastically attach themselves to some special subject, some incomplete idea; vain of their shallow and confused systems, or rather of the brilliant coloring in which they invest them, they pretend to explain and regulate man and the world, and yet are nothing more than their superficial and presumptuous observers. Among these "great lost ones of humanity," (I borrow a phrase of their own,) M. Comte was one of the most disinterested and the most sincere. The sincerity and the courage evinced by him in expressing his convictions led him on from inconsequence to inconsequence; in his benighted course he caught glimpses occasionally of grand ideas, and of these he apprehended neither the scope nor the connection: first it was an idea of a science excluding all idea of religion; and then a certain idea of a religion reconciled with and intimately united with the idea of science; turn by turn he gave himself up to the one and to the other with a blind and a daring devotedness. Had he appeared in Greece at the great era of philosophy, or in France in the seventeenth century, in the midst of the great Christian controversy, he would have been taxed with insanity—at the one epoch, not only by Plato but by Aristotle; at the other, not only by Bossuet but by Spinoza. In our days he has been more fortunate: he attached himself passionately to the method of observation of facts, which is the very character of science, and although his observations were superficial, inexact, and incomplete—although he fell into the strangest inconsistencies—the fundamental principle of his system, and the coincidence of his primary ideas with the method and the tendency of the physical sciences, the darling study of our age, have given him more importance and more influence than were really his due.
Fifth Meditation.
Pantheism.
No two essays at philosophy are more dissimilar—I should indeed say more contradictory—than Pantheism and Positivism. What Positivism declares to be impossible, Pantheism seeks to accomplish; what Positivism forbids man to seek, Pantheism promises to give him. It is the fundamental principle of Positivism to confine the human mind to the finite world, its facts and its laws; Pantheism aspires at a knowledge and a comprehension of Infinity, and of the relations of the finite with Infinity. "I have explained God, God's nature and his attributes," says Spinoza. [Footnote 62]
[Footnote 62: Ethics, 1st part; of God: Appendix, vol. i, p. 39. French translation by M. Saisset.]
I hasten to explain, in order to prevent misconstruction; it is to Pantheism, properly so called—to the sole system that merits the name—that my remarks are here applicable. "We must," says M. Cousin, "it seems, distinguish two kinds of Pantheism. The assertion that this visible universe, indefinite or infinite, suffices to itself, and that there is nothing to be sought for beyond, is the Pantheism of Diderot, Helvetius, de la Mettrie, d'Holbach. This Pantheism is clearly Atheism, and it would not be very easy to comprehend the complacent indulgence that should spare it that name of Atheism—a name, unfortunately, of ancient date, which would then have no longer any object to fit it, and would need to be erased from our dictionary. But is it possible for a similar Pantheism to be imputed to Spinoza? With the French Encyclopedists, things exist in particularity and individuals singly: the universe is an assemblage of individuals—an assemblage without unity, or of which the sole unity is a presumed primary matter, which the philosopher admits or which he does not admit, but with which his thought has no business, to occupy itself. With Spinoza, on the contrary, the single substance is all, and the individuals are nothing. This substance is not the nominal unity of the assemblage of individuals, each of which exists singly, but is the single really existing substance, and in the presence of that substance the world and man are but shadows; so that from the 'Ethics' may be gathered an exaggerated Theism which leaves no individual existing as such. Rigorously, and at bottom, there is here perhaps only one and the same system, but a system, nevertheless, with two very different forms—the one, where God is nothing but the Universe; the other, where the Universe exists only in God." [Footnote 63]