If biology still often hesitates in the statement of its problems and in the choice of its hypotheses, it is in a great measure due to the two opposite tendencies between which it oscillated in the last century. On the one hand, Boerhaave, and the school of physiology which is more or less directly connected with Descartes, sought a mechanical explanation of biological phenomena, and tended to reduce biology to physics and chemistry. On the other hand, Stahl in Germany, and the vitalist school of Montpellier in France, appealed to metaphysical principles and to unverifiable hypotheses. Being thus swayed from one extremity to another, biology only escaped the “oppression” of the inorganic sciences to involve itself in conceptions which were scarcely scientific.[179] It is only at the end of the XVIII. Century, with Haller, Gall and Bichat, that it finds its equilibrium, takes possession of its method, and at last enters into its positive phase.
By its lower extremity it is contiguous to inorganic science (the physico-chemical phenomena of vegetative life). By its higher extremity, (intellectual functions), it reaches to the final science, or sociology. But the adherence is far from being as close in one case as in the other. At the moment when we pass from the inorganic world to the world of living beings, according to positive philosophy, there is a sudden “enrichment of the real.” The transition is very marked. The domain of biology is not so sharply separated from that of sociology. For the higher biological functions, the intellectual functions, cannot be analysed from the point of view of the individual, at least in man, but only from the point of view of the species. We must then, while preserving the distinction between the two sciences, admit a kind of inter-relation between them. Undoubtedly sociology could not be founded so long as biology had not made decisive progress. But, conversely, sociology once founded alone completes the positive study of the highest biological functions.
Certainly, biology has not been less transformed than chemistry during the last sixty years, and the state in which we see it to-day differs singularly from that in which Comte knew it. It has been developed and differentiated far beyond what he could foresee. None the less he conceived some of its principles with remarkable power. He had a precise idea of that which could constitute a general biology that is, a single physiology and anatomy for the whole of living beings. He knew the fecundity of the comparative method, and he pointed out its analogy with the method of analysis in mathematics. Finally, although he refused to adopt the transformist hypothesis, he had understood the importance of Lamarck’s work.
[CHAPTER V]
PSYCHOLOGY
Psychology has no place in the classification of the fundamental sciences. In it Sociology immediately succeeds Biology. Use has been made of this fact in order to reproach Comte with having neglected an order of most important phenomena. A grave objection has been raised against his doctrine in general. What are we to think of a philosophy which, deliberately, omits a part, and, according to many philosophers, the chief part of reality, the world of consciousness, the spiritual nature of man?
Presented in this way, the objection rests upon many confused notions about words and ideas. What do we understand by psychology? If the word means: “the science of the soul reached through the introspective method,” we must own that Comte does not admit the possibility of such a science. But the same objection will also hold good against the majority of the psychologists of our time. For they do not admit this possibility any more than Comte, and they have endeavoured to constitute the science of psychical facts by a different method than that of introspection, pure and simple. Is psychology defined as “the science which investigates the laws of feeling, of the intellect and of moral phenomena in man and in animals?” Then it is inaccurate to say that there is no psychology for Comte. On the contrary, he thinks that positive psychology has just been founded by contemporary science of whose methods he approves. If he did not use the word “psychology,” he did so in order to avoid confusion. At that moment the word was, so to speak, the property of the eclectic school. By the “psychological” method, everyone then understood that of Jouffroy. “Psychology” was the science founded by Cousin on the analysis of the ego. Comte who opposes these philosophers, did not wish his theory of psychical phenomena, which differs from theirs, to be called by the same name. It is this very precaution which has come to be no longer understood, now that “psychology” does not designate the eclectic doctrine alone, but any theory whatsoever concerning mental facts.
I.
Comte finds the field occupied by three psychological schools, and he combats all three, for reasons of method and also of doctrine. He looks to them to refute each other mutually, and he will only attack what is common to them all.[180]
The representatives of these three schools are the Ideologists, with Condillac, from whom they proceed, then the Eclectics, and finally the philosophers of the Scottish school. Comte sometimes calls the eclectics the German school, in opposition to the ideologists, who are the French school, and to the Scottish school, the first of the three in point of time. But he always speaks sympathetically of the Scottish school, remembering that, in part, he owes to it his philosophical education. He also esteems the sincerity and logical vigour of the ideologist Destutt de Tracy. But, after all, we have here metaphysicians, as are also the eclectics upon whom he passes a more severe judgment. By “metaphysicians,” he understands all those who study phenomena, (in this case psychical phenomena), by means of a method which is no longer theological, but which has not yet become positive. In this sense, Locke is a metaphysician, as well as Condillac and his other successors in the XVIII. century, Hume alone excepted.