The Philosophy of Auguste Comte

by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

In a word, the triumph of the positive method, to be final, presupposes the acceptance of the positive philosophy by all men of learning. The old logic was bound by the narrowest ties to the metaphysical doctrines which were then dominant. In the same way positive logic is bound up with positive philosophy. Speaking more precisely, it is an expression of this very philosophy.

III.

Is the general method of positive philosophy objective, or subjective, or both at once? As we know, this question has raised passionate discussion among positivists.[96] Outside the school it has been solved by some historians as if Auguste Comte, at the end of his life, had gone back to a doctrine very different from the one set forth by him in the Cours de philosophie positive. It suffices, however, to distinguish, with him, two successive points of view, to see how the two methods, antagonistic in a certain sense, can, in another one, be very well reconciled.

If we only consider the process followed by our mind in the explanation of natural phenomena, that is to say the object of positive philosophy taken in the strict sense of the word, it is true that two opposite methods are found face to face. The subjective method goes from the consideration of man to that of the world, the objective method goes from the knowledge of the world to that of man. The first gives rise to theological and metaphysical philosophy, the latter to positive philosophy. The incompatibility of the two philosophies proceeds from that of the methods, which is irreducible. It allows us to say: “This will kill that.”[97] In this sense, the final establishment of the objective method, which is completed by the foundation of sociology, implies the exclusion, also final, of the subjective method.

But “having reached its full maturity, true philosophy should inevitably tend to reconcile these two antagonistic methods,” wrote Comte in 1838, in the third volume of the Cours de philosophie positive, that is to say, long before the time of what has been wrongly called his second philosophy.[98] This reconciliation will be accomplished by means of the distinction between the special point of view of the sciences, and the universal point of view of philosophy. The scientific investigation of the laws of natural phenomena can only be made by means of the objective method: Comte never varies in his thought on this point. But these sciences are but the parts in a greater whole, for which the subjective method alone is suitable.

Two arguments especially prove this, one belonging to the logical, the other to the moral and the religious order.

The supreme requirement of our intellect is unity. Shall we ever reach this unity by using the objective method in the sciences? Evidently not. Even in each order of phenomena separately considered we do not see how to reduce the laws which we know to a single law of a more general character. And what are the laws known to us compared with those which elude our search, and which perhaps may do so for ever? Considered in its object, each one of our sciences reaches, so to speak, to infinity, far beyond our limited horizon. If then, in order to satisfy us, a single conception of the world is necessary, we shall never obtain such a conception from the objective point of view. But if we change our point of view, if we refer the whole of the sciences to man, or better, to humanity, as a centre, we shall then be able to realise the unity which we seek. This is precisely what is made possible by sociology, by subordinating the hierarchy of the positive sciences to the final science of humanity.

To consider the other fundamental sciences as “indispensable preliminaries,”[99] to represent the evolution which has brought them forth in turn as the very history of human progress; to verify the law of the three states in all our beliefs, and in all our knowledge; finally, to control all scientific research from the sociological point of view: this is what Comte understands by the conciliation of the two methods.

The whole development of positive science from mathematics to sociology, lies between the new use which is made of subjective method and that which was spontaneously made of it by theological philosophy. When theological philosophy considered the knowledge of man and that of the world as interdependent, the instinct which animated it was a just one. But it was imagining instead of observing. It represented the world as filled with “causes” analogous to the will of man and equally capricious. The new subjective method rests, on the contrary, upon the very results of the positive sciences, brought to a synthesis in sociology. It takes as established that the intellectual and moral phenomena depend upon the biological laws, and that the biological laws themselves are subordinate to the laws of the inorganic milieu. But, since the “final systematisation of all these laws”[100] must always remain impossible from the objective point of view, the new subjective method undertakes it from the point of view of humanity as a centre.

We can thus distinguish two great periods in the intellectual advance of humanity. During the first, the positive spirit successively applies the scientific, that is to say objective, method, to higher and higher orders of phenomena. The foundation of sociology marks the term of this progress. Then the second period begins. The positive spirit from special has become universal, from analytical synthetical. It reacts upon the particular sciences, and henceforth makes use of the “regenerated” subjective method, to govern the whole of them.