The Philosophy of Auguste Comte

by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

The same prejudices and the same false ideas have already predominated in the past on the subject of the more simple phenomena, which afterwards became objects of positive science. Should not this analogy cause philosophers to conceive “the rational hope of also succeeding in the dissipation of those errors of conception and of method in the system of political ideas.”[232] Nothing is more natural than that the science of the most complex phenomena should be the last to reach the positive stage. It would even have been impossible for it to have been otherwise. Finally, beyond the difficulties which belong to the complexity of its object, sociology had to overcome others, which arise from political passions. Problems of this kind are indifferent to no one. In them the interests of each one are involved, and they influence even without our knowledge, the direction taken by our thoughts. Political parties excel in framing plausible theories adapted to their requirements. Thus a constant effort at disinterestedness is necessary on the part of any one who purposes to take up the science of abstract politics.

At any rate, if these reasons make us understand that sociology should make its appearance last among the fundamental sciences, none of them imply that it would not have arisen in its turn. On the contrary, beside “vital physics” and “inorganic physics,” “social physics” was one day to take its place. From 1824, Comte had a very clear idea of this. We do not see, he says, why the phenomena which the development of a social species presents should not have laws like the others, why these laws should not be capable of being discovered by observation, like those of the other phenomena, with this reservation only that the nature of this section of philosophy makes its study more difficult. “I will make it felt by the very fact that there are laws as determined for the development of the human species as for the falling of a stone.”[233] Comte later on attenuated the rigidity of these expressions. He recognised that the social phenomena were of all others the most “modifiable.” But he none the less maintained that they were ruled by laws.

II.

Sociology, an abstract and wholly theoretical science, only sets itself the task of discovering the laws of phenomena, without first taking into account any possible applications. I shall not have, says Comte, to concern myself directly with political anarchy.[234] Here, more than anywhere else, science must be separated from the corresponding art. The same reasons which led to physiology being constituted apart from medicine, with which it had for so long been confused, also require that social science should be distinguished from politics, of which, up to the present time, it has only been a more or less empirical or arbitrary interpretation.

Comte who took such pains to define the physical fact, the chemical fact, the biological fact, has not given a definition of the sociological fact. The reasons for this are not difficult to see. In the first place, this fact defines itself so to speak, by elimination. As there are no phenomena accessible to us more complicated than those of the social life, all the phenomena which are not studied by the preceding sciences are of course the subject of sociology. Moreover, there might be a reason to seek for a definition of the sociological fact, if we started from the consideration of the individual to rise to that of society. But Comte’s conception is radically different. For him it is the individual who is an abstraction; and society is the true reality. He must not explain humanity by man, but on the contrary, man by humanity. From this moment, all the human phenomena properly so-called are ipso facto sociological. It is an essential characteristic of Comte’s system that man, considered individually, is not an object of science. The science of man belongs for one part to biology, for the other to sociology. To define the sociological fact amounts then to establishing the relations between biology and sociology.

We have already seen that these relations are extremely close. On the one hand, sociology could not be constituted so long as higher biology had not reached a certain degree of development. History has furnished us with a proof of this: the state of infancy of biology contributed largely to the failure of Montesquieu’s and Condorcet’s sociological attempts. But, on the other hand, the study of the intellectual and moral functions, that is to say, the highest part of biology, can only be made from the sociological point of view. Here we have a kind of mixed domain, which properly belongs neither to the one nor to the other of the sciences.

Could we not then consider sociology as a simple extension of biology, an extension which would be far more important in the case of the human species than in any of the others? Do we not do this implicitly when we attribute the study of the intellectual and moral functions to biology, since everything which bears the name of “moral science,” history, law, political economy, etc., finally rests upon these functions? What is the use of a new fundamental science for the study of phenomena which at bottom reduce themselves to biological phenomena?

Comte protested against this interpretation of his doctrine.[235] According to him, sociology is no less irreducible to biology, than the latter is to chemistry. The sociological phenomena, independently of the more general laws which are common to them with the subjacent orders, have laws of their own which regulate them. If animal societies only existed as we see them to-day, it would perhaps not be impossible to consider sociology as an appendix of biology. But human society excludes any attempt of this kind. For it is social life which has made the extraordinary development of the intellectual and moral functions possible in man, and this development is the very definition of humanity. Now, the first consequence of this development is that biology properly so-called, no longer suffices for studying it. We need a new method in it, the method of historical observation. Already, were it for this reason alone, there can be no question of reducing sociology to biology.

In the second place, when we pass from the individual to the collective organism, “the continued expansion and the almost indefinite perpetuity” of the latter makes it almost impossible not to separate it from the former in a scientific study.[236] Comte is not deceived by the analogy between the two kinds of organism. To speak accurately, sociology with him, hardly ever considers anything except a single organism. Let us leave aside the little that it says of animal societies. It represents the human race as constituting, in time and in space, “an immense and eternal social unity, whose various organs, individuals and nations, united by universal solidarity, each, according to a determined manner and degree concur in the evolution of Humanity.”

One of the ideas which Comte most admires in Condorcet, and which he regards as indispensable to social science, is that which makes a single being in process of evolution of the totality of the human species.[237] Henceforth, the parallelism between this immense “social unity,” and the organisms studied by biology could not be a strict one. “The complex nature of the former,” says Comte himself, “deeply differs from the indivisible constitution of living beings.” We must then know how to restrain comparison wisely, “in order that it should not give rise to faulty approximations, instead of precious indications.” Comte has sometimes failed in carrying out this prudent precept, for instance, when in the social organism he looks for what is analogous to tissues, organs, and systems studied by the anatomists. But he has, none the less, traced very firmly the limits beyond which the use of analogy here becomes an abuse.