1. The more complex phenomena become, the more also our means of studying them increase in number.
It is a natural but an insufficient compensation. For the difficulty of establishing the science of phenomena grows much more quickly than the number and the power of our methodical processes. However, without this compensation, scarcely any fundamental science would ever reach the positive state. Thus, to the method of pure mathematics observation in astronomy comes to be added. Experimentation appears in physics, the art of nomenclatures in chemistry, the comparative method in biology, the historical method in social science. With this final science, the positive method is henceforth complete.
2. The more complex phenomena become, the more modifiable they are.
We have no power over astronomical phenomena. Even the perfect knowledge of their laws would only allow us to foresee them. But we can, in a great number of cases, bring about or arrest physical and chemical phenomena. Our intervention is still more efficacious if we are concerned with biological phenomena, as is sufficiently proved by the good and the evil wrought by medicine and surgery. And it finally reaches the height of its power in social and political life. So much so that even cultivated men find it difficult to persuade themselves that social phenomena are governed by invariable laws, and that politics can become the object of a science. Experience seems to tell them, on the contrary, that the activity of man, and especially that of the man of genius, is all-powerful in this domain. Nevertheless it is not so, as sociology, by the mere fact of its existence sufficiently proves. But it remains true that, of all the phenomena of nature, the social and moral phenomena are those in which man’s intervention is at once the easiest and the most efficacious.
3. The more complex the phenomena the more imperfect they are.
We shall perhaps be surprised to see Comte appealing to the idea of perfection. It seems that he ought to have excluded it as being something metaphysical. Further on we shall consider his theory of finality. At present let us only say that if he considers natural phenomena as imperfect, it is in the sense in which Helmholtz calls the eye a poor optical instrument. He simply states that certain ends, in fact, being realized by a natural arrangement of a group of phenomena, the same end might be better or more economically reached, by other arrangements that we can easily conceive. In this sense our solar system is imperfect, but less so than many living forms whose organism might present a much higher degree of advantageous adaptation. And yet these living forms are themselves less imperfect than societies subject as they are to all sorts of pathological alterations, as history clearly shows. It is remarkable that the most imperfect phenomena should precisely be the most modifiable, and also those whose study only became positive in the last stage.
II.
More or less complex, modifiable and imperfect, all phenomena are subject to laws. It is the supreme principle, the “fundamental dogma” of science and of positive philosophy. Comte thus enunciates it: “All phenomena whatever, inorganic or organic, physical or moral, individual or social, are all subjected in a continuous manner to rigorously invariable laws.”[51]
Undoubtedly this principle is not yet extended, by the majority of minds, to all phenomena. This is shown clearly enough by their mode of reasoning in ethics and in politics. But it is, however, implied in their general conception of nature. It thus assumes a universal character, which has caused it to be regarded by many philosophers as an innate, or at least a primitive notion, in the human mind. According to Comte, this is erroneous. Like John Stuart Mill, whom he expressly quotes on this point,[52] he sees in this principle the result of a long, gradual induction, at the same time individual and collective. Except in the case of the most familiar phenomena, whose regularity is most striking, the human mind does not begin by believing in an invariable order. Even the mind’s conceptions, (theological and metaphysical), conceal the existence of laws, long after observation would have made it see them, were it freed from bias. It is true that the “first germs” of this principle exist as soon as human reason begins to be exercised, since the dominion of theological philosophy never could be absolute. But these germs are only developed very slowly, like the positive method and conceptions themselves.
The induction upon which this principle is founded only began to acquire solidity when it was definitely verified for a whole order of important phenomena, that is to say when mathematical astronomy had been founded. Phenomena of the highest importance, from the theoretical as well as from the practical point of view, could then be predicted with perfect certainty. The invariability of their laws had been placed beyond doubt. From that moment, the principle must have been extended by analogy, to the more complex orders of phenomena, even before their own laws could be known. But according to Comte this “vague logical anticipation” remained valueless and fruitless. It is of no use to conceive, in the abstract that a certain order of phenomena must be subject to laws. This empty conception cannot outweigh the theological and metaphysical beliefs, which have the force of habit in their favour. In order that the principle of laws should be really established in an order of phenomena, some laws must in fact have been discovered and demonstrated in it.