“Saint-Simon voulut successivement organiser la société à l’aide de la science (prétention d’où sortit le positivisme) puis à l’aide de l’industrie, et enfin à l’aide d’une religion nouvelle, capable de ‘forcer chacun de ses membres à suivre le précepte de l’amour du prochain.’”—p. 428.
“Les doctrines sociales de Saint-Simon, jointes au naturalisme de Cabanis et de Broussais, donnèrent naissance au ‘positivisme’ d’Auguste Comte. {144} Ce dernier, comme Saint-Simon, voit dans la science sociale ou ‘sociologie’ le terme et le but de toutes les recherches scientifiques.”—p. 422.
“A cette méthode Auguste Comte ajouta des vues historiques, qu’il croyait entièrement originales, sur les trois états par où passe nécessairement selon lui la connaissance humaine: état théologique, état métaphysique, et état scientifique. Le germe de cette théorie était déjà dans Turgot.”—p. 424.
“En somme, Auguste Comte a eu le mérite d’insister sur les méthodes qui conviennent aux sciences de la nature; mais il faut avouer que ces méthodes étaient connues bien avant lui.”—p. 425.
ENDNOTES TO REASONS FOR DISSENTING FROM COMTE.
[14] A clear illustration of this process, is furnished by the recent mental integration of Heat, Light, Electricity, etc., as modes of molecular motion. If we go a step back, we see that the modern conception of Electricity, resulted from the integration in consciousness, of the two forms of it involved in the galvanic battery and in the electric-machine. And going back to a still earlier stage, we see how the conception of statical electricity, arose by the coalescence in thought, of the previously-separate forces manifested in rubbed amber, in rubbed glass, and in lightning. With such illustrations before him, no one can, I think, doubt that the process has been the same from the beginning.
[15] Possibly it will be said that M. Comte himself admits that what he calls the perfection of the positive system, will probably never be reached; and that what he condemns is the inquiry into the natures of causes and not the general recognition of cause. To the first of these allegations I reply that, as I understand M. Comte, the obstacle to the perfect realization of the positive philosophy is the impossibility of carrying generalization so far as to reduce all particular facts to cases of one general fact—not the impossibility of excluding the consciousness of cause. And to the second allegation I reply that the essential principle of his philosophy is an avowed ignoring of cause altogether. For if it is not, what becomes of his alleged distinction between the perfection of the positive system and the perfection of the metaphysical system? And here let me point out that, by affirming exactly the opposite to that which M. Comte thus affirms, I am excluded from the positive school. If his own definition of positivism is to be taken, then, as I hold that what he defines as positivism is an absolute impossibility, it is clear that I cannot be what he calls a positivist.
[16] A friendly critic alleges that M. Comte is not fairly represented by this quotation, and that he is blamed by his biographer, M. Littré, for his too-great insistance on feeling as a motor of humanity. If in his “Positive Politics,” which I presume is here referred to, M. Comte abandons his original position, so much the better. But I am here dealing with what is known as “the Positive Philosophy;” and that the passage above quoted does not misrepresent it, is proved by the fact that this doctrine is re-asserted at the commencement of the Sociology.
[17] In 1885, during a controversy with one of M. Comte’s English disciples, I was blamed for speaking “of Comte as making six sciences,” and was told that “in all Comte’s works, except the first, he makes seven sciences.” As I was dealing with The Positive Philosophy, I thought I could not do better than give the foregoing extract from the Cours de Philosophie Positive; and it did not occur to me that I was called upon to see whether, in any of his later voluminous works, M. Comte had made a different statement. My opponent, however, enlarged on this “blunder,” as he politely called it: apparently oblivious of the fact that if it was a blunder on my part to speak of Comte as recognizing six sciences when in his later days he recognized seven, it was a much more serious blunder on the part of Comte himself to have long overlooked the seventh.
[18] M. Comte’s “Exposition” I read in the original in 1852; and in two or three other places have referred to the original to get his exact words. The Inorganic Physics, and the first chapter of the Biology, I read in Miss Martineau’s condensed translation, when it appeared. The rest of M. Comte’s views I know only through Mr. Lewes’s outline, and through incidental references.
[19] In his work, Auguste Comte et la Philosophie Positive (1863), M. Littré defending the Comtean classification of the sciences from the criticism I made upon it in the “Genesis of Science,” deals with me wholly as an antagonist. The chapter he devotes to his reply, opens by placing me in direct opposition to the English adherents of Comte, named in the preceding chapter.
[20] I believed at the time, and have never doubted until now, that the choice of this title was absolutely independent of its previous use by M. Comte. While writing these pages, I have found reason to think the contrary. On referring to Social Statics, to see what were my views of social evolution in 1850, when M. Comte was to me but a name, I met with the following sentence:—“Social philosophy may be aptly divided (as political economy has been) into statics and dynamics” (ch. xxx. § 1). This I remembered to be a reference to a division which I had seen in the Political Economy of Mr. Mill. But why had I not mentioned Mr. Mill’s name? On referring to the first edition of his work, I found, at the opening of Book iv., this sentence:—“The three preceding parts include as detailed a view as the limits of this treatise permit, of what, by a happy generalization of a mathematical phrase, has been called the Statics of the subject.” Here was the solution of the question. The division had not been made by Mr. Mill, but by some writer (on Political Economy I supposed) who was not named by him; and whom I did not know. It is now manifest, however, that while I supposed I was giving a more extended use to this division, I was but returning to the original use which Mr. Mill had limited to his special topic. Another thing is, I think, tolerably manifest. As I evidently wished to point out my obligation to some unknown political economist, whose division I thought I was extending, I should have named him had I known who he was. And in that case should not have put this extension of the division as though it were new.
[21] Let me add that the conception developed in Social Statics, dates back to a series of letters on the “Proper Sphere of Government,” published in the Nonconformist newspaper in the latter half of 1842, and republished as a pamphlet in 1843. In these letters will be found, along with many crude ideas, the same belief in the conformity of social phenomena to unvariable laws; the same belief in human progression as determined by such laws; the same belief in the moral modification of men as caused by social discipline; the same belief in the tendency of social arrangements “of themselves to assume a condition of stable equilibrium;” the same repudiation of state-control over various departments of social life; the same limitation of state-action to the maintenance of equitable relations among citizens. The writing of Social Statics arose from a dissatisfaction with the basis on which the doctrines set forth in those letters were placed: the second half of that work is an elaboration of these doctrines; and the first half a statement of the principles from which they are deducible.