1. Science is the collective work of humanity. It bears upon an object common to all: Reality. It employs the method common to all: the positive method. All intellects work in the same manner on a common ground. It is what Comte calls “the profound mental identity of learned men with the crowd whose destiny fulfils itself in active work.[31]” The progress of the scientific mind is a methodical extension of popular common sense to all subjects accessible to human reason. But here method does almost everything. “The whole superiority of the philosophical mind over the popular common sense results from a special and continuous application to common speculations, in starting prudently from the initial step, after having brought them back to a normal state of judicious abstraction, for the purpose of generalising and coordinating. For, what ordinary intellects chiefly lack, is less the precision and penetration appropriate for discerning partial approximations, than the aptitude for generalising abstract relations, and for establishing a perfect logical coherence among our various notions.”[32]
The germ of the highest scientific conceptions is often to be found in common reason. Comte delights in giving as an example one of the discoveries which he most admires, Descartes’ invention of analytical Geometry. To determine at every moment the position of a point in space by its distance from fixed axes: is not that what geographers have been doing for so long in order to determine the longitude and latitude of a place upon the terrestrial sphere? And has not this proceeding itself been suggested to the geographer by simple common sense? For he instinctively seeks to mark the inaccessible points which interest him, by means of their distance from given points or lines. From this the idea of the Cartesian co-ordinates only differs by a superior degree of abstraction and of generality.
Thus all men must be regarded as collaborating in the discovery of truth as much as in making use of it. Speaking generally, if the great philosophers and scientific men of genius seem to be the intellectual guides of humanity, it is because they are the first to be affected by each mental revolution. They are the first to pass from a traditional to a new attitude and their example is decisive. But, says Comte, “the changes relating to the method of thinking with originality only become manifest when they are almost accomplished.” The great men whose names are justly authors attached to are, however, more the heralds than the of these changes.
2. Science is the work of all: it must therefore be accessible to all. It is a patrimony common to the whole of mankind; and the inheritance must be taken from no one. As a consequence, the State owes scientific instruction to those who are not in a position to procure it for themselves. Not that all men, all the people ought to acquire a deep knowledge of the several fundamental sciences, like those who make it the particular occupation of their lives. The impossibility of such a thing is too evident for several reasons. Neither is it a question of popularising the great scientific theories, for the use of badly prepared minds. Comte condemns severely this way of “simplifying” science. For instance, he will not allow Newton’s laws to be separated from their demonstrations. It will always be the duty of the greater number of men to adopt the majority of scientific truths on the testimony of those who will have discovered, criticised and verified them. But, what it will be the duty of common education to give to every mind, is the habit of conceiving all phenomena, from the most simple to the most complex, as equally governed by invariable laws, and, consequently, of understanding the whole of nature as an order which the positive method alone allows us to discover and to modify. And as this method cannot be studied apart from the sciences in which it is used, it will be necessary for every man to be made acquainted with a summary of each fundamental science, from mathematics to sociology. There is nothing impracticable in this scheme. Comte has drawn out, in the positive Polity, a plan of education conceived on this principle. On this condition alone will philosophy, founded upon positive science, succeed in realising the harmony of minds, and in “reorganising the beliefs.”
II.
Auguste Comte often says that the positive spirit consists in keeping oneself equally distant from two dangers, mysticism and empiricism.[33] By mysticism he understands the recourse to non-verifiable explanations and to transcendent, hypotheses. Men’s imagination finds pleasure in these things, but we must be able to bring all “real” knowledge back to a general or particular fact. Positive science therefore abstains from searching after substances, ends, and even causes. It only bears upon phenomena and their relations.
Empiricism, in its turn, is no less than mysticism contrary to the spirit of science, Empiricism signifies for Comte the knowledge which does not go beyond the pure and simple ascertainment of a fact. Now, an accumulation of even precisely noted facts has no theoretical interest. It may, at most, be erudition, but it is not science. To think that by thus gathering facts together one is labouring at the work of science, is “to take a quarry for an edifice.”[34] In a word, “science is made up of laws, and not of facts.”[35]
Strictly speaking, no scientific observation is even possible without a previous theory, that is to say, without a presupposed law, whose verification is in question. Undoubtedly in science when it has become positive, the imagination no longer constructs “causes” or “essences.” It must submit to reason, that is to say, to the methodical investigation of phenomena. Nevertheless, this investigation cannot take place without guiding hypotheses, and thus the imagination plays a part in science, subordinate it is true, but indispensable. Comte here separates himself from Bacon. According to the English philosopher, in the knowledge of nature, the mind must make itself as receptive as possible. In introducing anything of itself it would falsify science, and its whole effort must be to hold itself up to phenomena as a perfectly plain and unspotted mirror, so as to reflect them as they are. Now this is precisely the idea of science which Comte rejects under the name of empiricism. Without the hypotheses or the theories suggested by the very activity of the mind science would never be constituted, according to him. There would never even be an apprehension of fact, at least an apprehension such that it could be of service to science. In a word “absolute empiricism is impossible.” In the simple observation of a phenomenon by the human mind, the entire mind is interested, and in it the subjective conditions of science are already virtually given.
This being granted, science may be defined as a methodical processus of the connection and extension of our knowledge. It consists, in every department “in the exact relations established between observed facts, so as to deduce from the least possible number of fundamental data, the most extensive series of secondary phenomena, in renouncing absolutely the vain search after causes and essences.” So long as men seek to “explain” phenomena the theological and metaphysical spirit has not yet disappeared. Positive science abstains from all explanations of this kind. Thus, Newton has placed in the same category universal gravitation and the attraction of bodies. We cannot know what this mutual action of the stars and the attraction of terrestrial bodies are in themselves. But we know with full certainty, the existence and the law of these two orders of phenomena and moreover we know that they are identical. For the geometer weight is explained when he conceives it as a particular case of general gravitation. On the contrary it is weight which makes the physicist proper understand celestial gravitation. We can never go beyond such juxtapositions “of ideas.”[36]
But while science brings together similar phenomena, its chief function is to connect them, that is to say to determine them one by another according to the relations which exist between them. All science, says Comte, consists in the co-ordination of facts; and if the several observations remained isolated there would be no science. We may even say generally that science is destined, as far as the various phenomena permit, to dispense with direct observation, in allowing us to deduce the greatest possible number of results from the smallest number of acquired data. If a constant relation is found to subsist between two phenomena, it becomes useless to observe them both; for from the observation of one the variations of the other will be deduced. But the first may in its turn be the function of a third, and so on; until at last we conceive a constant connection between all the phenomena of a given order, which may allow us to deduce them all from a single law. Such for Comte would be the perfect form of science: how near it is to the Cartesian ideal! “The positive spirit,” he says, “without failing to recognize the preponderance of reality directly ascertained, tends to enlarge the rational at the expense of the experimental domain, by substituting the prevision of phenomena to their immediate observation.” Scientific progress consists in diminishing the number of distinct and independent laws, by continually multiplying their respective connections.[37]