Returning then to Gall’s psychology, Comte can explain its defects to himself. Gall had “oscillated between subjective inspiration and objective tendencies,” without adopting a systematic plan. There has not been any very great disadvantage in this empirical fluctuation in what concerns the theory of the affective functions. Without a doubt, Gall had established an ill-founded distinction between the inclinations and the feelings. But he could not be mistaken concerning the fundamental inclinations of human nature. In default of the true method, he was supported on this point by common wisdom, and by the observation of animals. It is on the subject of the intellectual functions that he is entirely wrong, because here this twofold help failed him, and nothing, in this case, filled the place of the true method which was then unknown. In order to discover the static and dynamic laws of the intellect, it was necessary to abandon the biological point of view. To Gall’s theory Comte then substitutes a new classification of the intellectual functions. He distinguishes between the faculties of conception and the faculties of expression. He indicates the relations of the intellectual functions proper with the affective functions and the functions of motion. He makes us apprehend the very intimate relations which connect desire and will. Finally, to determine the fundamental intellectual functions, he takes into account the historical evolution of the human species.
It does not enter into the purpose of this work to set forth Comte’s theory in detail, and to examine the eighteen irreducible faculties of the cerebral table one by one. But the systematic character of the doctrine does not prevent us from taking up a certain number of interesting and deep psychological views in it. To limit ourselves to a few examples, Comte drew imitation near to habit, and he brought habit itself back “to the great cosmological law of persistence,” which, in the vital order is modified by the intermittance of phenomena.[197] He remarked that attention is never produced without an affective phenomenon upon which it depends.[198] He also indicated the distinction between strong states and weak states, and the “reduction” of images by actual perceptions. “If our images could offer as much intensity, he says, as our external sensations, our mental state would not allow of any consistency. The appreciation of what is without would be troubled by this conflict with what is within....” Hence a theory of hallucination and insanity.[199]
The theory of perception which Comte opposes to the abstract sensualism of the ideologists is allied to his general conception of the relations between the subject and the object. Our internal operations are never anything but the direct or indirect prolongation of our external impressions. But “reciprocally, the latter are always complicated by the others, even in the most elementary cases.” The sensation, which appears simple, is already the result of a very complex combination.[200] For no sensations are really perceived except after reiterated impressions. If the mind is ever passive, it can only be the first time. For the second, it is already prepared by the preceding one, combined with the whole of previous acquisitions. And Comte insists upon “the habitual participation of reasoning in the operations which are attributed to sensation alone.” The activity belonging to the mind enters into all its actions, even the smallest of them.
Mental pathology scarcely exists, owing to the lack of the scientific spirit among specialists for the diseases of the mind. Still if Broussais’ principle be true, that is to say, if morbid phenomena are produced according to the same laws which govern normal phenomena, what advantage might not scientific men derive from the observation of mental diseases? They are privileged cases which nature supplies for them, real experiments, where that which is inseparable in the normal state appears disassociated. What light might be thrown by this means upon many physiological and even anatomical questions, in particular in what concerns the sentiment of the ego (diseases of personality, aboulia, etc.), and the faculties of expression, isolated from the faculties of conception (diseases of speech).
Animal psychology would not be less instructive. All the affective and intellectual faculties are common to men and higher animals, save perhaps the highest intellectual aptitudes. Even this exception is a doubtful one, if without prejudice we compare the actions of the highest animals with those of the least developed savages. We should study the habits and the mind of wild animals. We should observe the changes which are produced in them by domestication. Here again almost everything has to be done afresh.[201]
IV.
In spite of whatever may have been said, Comte then has a psychology. And, what is more, this psychology is in a sense not far removed from that of the Scottish school and of the Eclectics although he so much fought against their methods. The points of contact are numerous and important. In both doctrines the psychical phenomena are referred to faculties and these are represented as “dispositions,” innate “properties.” In both, the essential psychological problem appears to be the determination of the number and the relations of these faculties, whose action variously combined produces psychical phenomena: before everything, it is a question of not considering as an elementary faculty that which as a matter of fact results from the combination of several faculties, or inversely. Finally in both, it is claimed to establish this doctrine of the innate faculties upon the observation of human nature.
Comte himself had seen that, at any rate in the case of Condillac’s criticism, he was in accordance with the eclectics. On this point he only refused to grant them originality. According to him they merely popularised, in obscure and emphatic declamations, what physiologists like Charles Bonnet, Cabanis, and chiefly Gall and Spurzheim had long before stated on this subject in a far clearer and especially in a far more exact manner. For his part Garnier, the author of the Traité des Facultés de l’âme had clearly seen the relations of eclecticism to Gall’s doctrine, and had studied them in a work entitled De la Phrénologie et de la Psychologie comparées which appeared in 1839.
Why then does Comte attack the eclectics with such persistence and such violence, if, indeed, the results of his psychology are not very far removed from what they say?—It is because in reality, beneath the apparent resemblance of doctrine, a difference of method as serious as can be conceived is concealed. For Cousin, and especially for the Cousin we know before 1830, psychology is not an end in itself. It is a means which he uses to rise to the study of being in itself and of the Absolute. The “ego” which he analyses is independent of the organism. This is what Comte condemns as a retrogression. “Some men, not recognizing the present and irrevocable direction of the human mind, have endeavoured for ten years to transplant German metaphysics into our midst, and to constitute, under the name of psychology, a so-called science entirely independent of physiology, superior to it, and to which should exclusively belong the study of moral phenomena.”[202] And this attempt at reaction takes place at the very moment when the works of Cabanis and of Gall have brought this study upon the positive path!
It is needless to say that, in Comte’s system, psychical phenomena are subordinated, as far as their conditions of existence are concerned, to all the orders of more general natural phenomena. Comte should then have followed Cabanis and Gall, as a matter of course. But he thought that to establish the science of the “transcendent functions,” the biological point of view was insufficient. In this case anatomical considerations are only a kind of reduplication and transcription of physiological considerations. As Maine de Biran said, in terms curiously like Comte’s, “a distinction of places assigned to the exercise of each faculty must necessarily be itself referred to another pre-established division of the faculties.... Hypothesis thus grafted upon hypothesis of a different order would not much contribute to throw light upon the analysis of our intellectual functions.”[203] Only, instead of appealing, like Maine de Biran, to reflection, Comte rises from the biological to the sociological point of view He recognises that the subjective method alone is suitable for the science of psychical phenomena, but, in place of the metaphysical subjective method, by means of which the “ego” is deluded into the belief that it analyses its operations, and grasps its own activity, he will make use of the positive subjective method. The subject which he will analyse will be the human mind, or better, the human soul considered in its continuous evolution, that is to say in its religions, in its sciences, in its philosophy, in its language and in its art. Here is matter for a psychology which will no longer be chimerical, but real, which will be positive, in a word, like the biology upon which it depends and of which it is the fulfilment.