If we leave aside the conception of the “faculties” which Comte accepted rather hastily at the hands of the Scottish school and of Gall, and the “cerebral table” which he believed to be once for all constructed, his psychology contained more than one important and fertile seed. To the eclectic psychology, which is not positive, Comte substituted two sciences which are such. In the first place, an experimental science of the psychical phenomena studied in their relation to their organic conditions: it is the physiological psychology of which no one to-day questions the legitimacy. Then, by the introduction of the sociological point of view, Comte opened the way to a whole series of studies which begin to be developed, (social psychology, ethnical psychology, psychology of the masses, etc). It is often said that sociological laws have their foundation in psychological laws. But the reverse is no less true. The psychological laws, at least the mental and moral laws, are, at the same time, sociological laws, since they are only revealed in the study of the intellectual history of the human species. “We must not explain humanity by man, but man by humanity.” To the “Τγνῶθι σεαυτόν” of ancient psychology, the positive method substitutes this precept: “To know yourself, know history.” Man only becomes conscious of himself, when he becomes aware of his place in the evolution of Humanity.
BOOK III
[CHAPTER I]
THE TRANSITION FROM ANIMALITY TO HUMANITY.
ART AND LANGUAGE
Of the philosophers who flourished before the rise of the positive doctrine, the greater number assumed as a postulate in the comparative study of man and animals, that there was between them a difference of nature, and not merely one of degree. Whatever fundamental difference be attributed to reason, language, moral sense, religion, etc., the “human kingdom” is conceived for the most part as superior to the animal kingdom and as clearly separated from it. Taking their stand upon an analysis of the present state of the human conscience, those philosophers recognise an order of “moral realities,” to which animals have no access. Thus they give to the science of Man a privileged object which separates it from the group of the natural sciences.
The positive method admits neither this postulate, nor the consequences which are drawn from it. In general this method is characterised by the substitution of the objective to the anthropocentric point of view, and also by the substitution of observation to imagination. It does not suddenly change its orientation when it comes to the study of man. The positive method is not therefore concerned with knowing what idea man forms of himself to-day and of his relations with other living beings. Into this idea enter elements of religious and metaphysical origin, whose presence is explained by historical reasons. The question is to observe the nature of man in his real relations with other beings. Man, so considered, at once takes his place again at the top of the zoological scale.
The problem will then be set in the following terms: Given that man is included in the animal series, of which he is the highest term, but still a term, to account for the differences which to-day place him so high above the term immediately below him. This is taking the very reverse attitude of nearly all the philosophers, whose main difficulty is to give an account of the likenesses which exist between man and animals. It is the position which Darwin will take in his Descent of Man.
Comte takes his stand upon two postulates. The first affirms the fundamental identity of the essential functions in man and animals. Since the whole of the moral and intellectual functions constitutes the necessary complement of animal life properly so-called, it would be difficult to conceive that all those functions which are fundamental should not, by this very fact be “common, at various degrees, to all the higher animals, and perhaps even to the entire group of the vertebrata.”[204] The animal functions are as a blossoming out of organic life, destined in the first place to make this life more perfect and more complex: in the same way, the intellectual and moral functions are, originally, as it were, another blossoming out of animal life, and must consequently be found, at least as a possibility, wherever animal life has reached a certain degree of development.
This postulate, according to Comte, is sufficiently established by biology, by means of the comparative method. All the principal characteristics which pride and ignorance set up as absolute privileges of our species, also appear, more or less rudimentary, in the majority of the higher animals.[205] The mistake was made because metaphysical ideology and psychology place intelligence foremost in the study of psychical functions. Intelligence indeed puts to-day an immense distance between man and animals. But a more accurate psychology recognises that the most energetic, the most “fundamental” of mental functions are the affective functions, since, in default of the impulse given by them, intelligence itself would not be developed. The analogy between man and the animals at once appears: for the affective functions are common to them both. It is the same with the intellectual functions, when allowance is made for the development they have assumed in man. In a word, if the dynamical superiority of the human species over the other species is strong, its statical superiority is weak. The problem consists in finding how, to such an apparently unimportant difference in the organs, such a considerable difference in the functions corresponds.[206]
Here comes in the second postulate: “The fundamental constitution of man is invariable.” Evolution but not transformation: this great principle, transmitted by biology to sociology, dominates the latter science entirely. In the course of the long history which leads humanity from savage animality to positive civilisation,[207] nothing absolutely new appears. Everything which manifests itself little by little, pre-existed in the nature of man—in a potential state it is true; and this state would perhaps never have ceased if a number of favourable conditions had not occurred together.