Positive philosophy organises labour within each science, and puts an end to “anarchy.” It distinguishes between “idle” researches, and those which should be pursued. It avoids waste of efforts and prevents digressions. We have seen within what limits Comte wishes to enclose astronomy in the name of philosophy. He does not perceive the means by which he can unite the various branches of physics; but he claims to replace the fragmentary and scattered chemistry of his time by a single systematic science, which will forsake the researches of detail which are without interest for humanity. “Almost the whole of those innumerable compounds will not finally be worthy of any scientific attention. Some well-chosen series may even be able to satisfy the logical requirements of chemistry for the discovery of the abstract laws which belong to each order of composition.”[153]
Finally positive philosophy causes the disappearance of the last remains of the theological and metaphysical spirit from the sciences of inorganic nature. This philosophy has already shown that mathematics is not a more absolute science than the others, and that it originates in experience. In physics and in chemistry it banishes the hypotheses which, more or less avowedly, tend to make us conceive the essence or the mode of production of phenomena. It is thus that it demands a science of physics freed from ethers and fluids, and a wholly rational chemistry which shall give up affinities.
Comte is not therefore possessed of a superstitious respect for the sciences in the state in which they appear before him. On the contrary, he intends that they should be subject to deep modifications, and that they should strive towards an ideal form which is laid down for them by philosophy. He calls this form “positive.” In reality it is Cartesian.
[CHAPTER IV]
BIOLOGY
The passage from the inorganic world to the world of Life constitutes a critical step in natural philosophy. Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry represented successive steps in the same series. If each order of phenomena presented in itself something which was irreducible to previous orders, nevertheless all these phenomena, in a certain sense, remained homogeneous. Without rashness, Descartes could conceive that physics, like astronomy, would one day assume the mathematical form. And to-day more than one scientific man considers the distinction between physics and chemistry as provisional.
But as soon as life appears, we enter a new world. At this degree the “enrichment of the real” is suddenly so considerable that we find it difficult to admit the homogeneity of these phenomena with the preceding ones. Comte here reaps the benefit of his prudence. His philosophy has guarded against reducing all science to a single type, and it is content with the unity of method and the homogeneity of doctrine. It only demands that each science should limit itself to the search after the laws of phenomena. As to the way in which this research is to be carried out, it is evidently subordinated to the nature of the phenomena in question. Now, biological phenomena present a number of characteristics which belong to them alone, and the first duty of the positive science which studies them is to respect their originality.
Comte, therefore, here breaks with Descartes who conceived biology as a prolongation of physics. He takes an entirely different view of this science, which, in a sense, is opposed to the whole of the sciences of the inorganic world. From this there arises a double effort. On the one hand, Comte wishes to maintain the continuity of the encyclopædic series of the sciences: he thus shows Biology as immediately following chemistry, and maintaining the closest relations with astronomy and physics. On the other hand he clearly brings out the irreducible character of the vital phenomena, and the modifications which the positive method must undergo when applied to them. Despite the extreme difference between the points of view and the doctrines, he often makes us think of those deep and difficult passages in the Critique du Jugement where Kant has shown that without the hypothesis of an inner finality, (although this hypothesis is in itself obscure), the phenomena which take place in living beings remain unintelligible.
With biology, says Comte, necessarily appear the ideas of consensus, of hierarchy, of “milieu”, of the conditions of existence, of the relation between the static and the dynamic states, between the organ and the function.[154] In a word, a biological phenomenon, considered alone is devoid of meaning. Strictly speaking, it does not even exist. It can only be understood by its relations with the other phenomena which take place in the living being, phenomena which react upon it. At the same time it reacts upon them. Here, in opposition to what takes place in the inorganic world, the parts are only intelligible through the idea of the whole. Undoubtedly a certain solidarity of phenomena exists in the inorganic world, which allows us to consider united wholes in it. But the solidarity of biological phenomena is far closer, for, without it we could not conceive them, while, as regards the phenomena of the inorganic world, there is nothing impossible in this abstraction.
Henceforth, the positive method must adapt itself to the characteristics which belong to biological phenomena. It does not always demand, as it has been wrongly stated, that we should go from the simple to the complex, but only that we should proceed from the known to the unknown. It is true that in the sciences of the inorganic world we proceed from the least complex to the most complex cases; we begin by the study of phenomena which are as isolated as possible from one another. But, on the contrary, living beings are all the better known to us in proportion as they are more complex. The idea of the animal is in some respects clearer to us than the idea of the vegetable. The idea of the superior animals is clearer to us than that of the inferior ones. Finally man for us is the principal biological unity, and it is from this unity that speculation starts in this science.