The Philosophy of Auguste Comte

by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Many of Comte’s disciples, even some of the more illustrious, and at first more fervent, such as Littré, refused to follow him in his “second career.” Their admiration for the philosopher could not persuade them to submit to the pontiff.

Littré and his friends were undoubtedly free to follow Comte only up to a certain point, and, while accepting his philosophy, to reject his religion. If they had stopped there, Comte could but have blamed their want of logic and himself have disowned “those incomplete positivists, who are not more intelligent because they call themselves intellectual.” But it is they, on the contrary, who accused Comte of inconsistency and of self contradiction. Comte, they said, betrayed his own principles. The “subjective method” in his second career ruined the precious results he had obtained in the first by his objective method. In refusing to go beyond the Cours de philosophic positive they remained more faithful to Comte’s master-thought than Comte himself. In a word, they defended true positivism against its misguided founder.

Comte answered these attacks, which were all the more painful to him because they came from those whom he had long regarded as his faithful disciples and his best friends. In the course of this work it will appear that those attacks were unfounded.[6] Comte’s two methods are not opposed to each other. They complete each other, as do also the two “careers” which they characterize.

It is true that during the last two years of his life an increasingly marked tinge of mysticism spread over his thought and his writings. His brief friendship with Mme. de Vaux, and the death of this “holy” friend had stirred very strong emotions within him, and these emotions with him were transformed into ideas which came to be incorporated into his system. At the same time he laboured to organise the Religion of Humanity. He claimed to secure for it an authority over souls at least equal to that which had been enjoyed by Catholicism at the period of its greatest power. The exaltation of his sentiments, the preoccupation of the new religion which was to be established, the ever-present consciousness of his sacerdotal mission, all this was necessarily bound to react upon the doctrine which he had founded in the preceding period.

Thus the philosophy of the sciences and of history is no longer presented to us in the same way in the Politique positive as it is in the Cours de philosophie positive. But it is designedly so. The difference in tone and the difference of method in the setting forth is explained, according to Comte, by the different object which he has in view in each of these works.[7] Essentially, the philosophical doctrine has not varied. All we can grant to Littré is that by the fact of its being presented from the religious, that is to say from the synthetic, point of view in the Politique positive, it undergoes an apparent alteration. If we only knew the doctrine through this work we should not get the perfectly clear view of it given in the Cours de philosophie positive. Comte himself often advises the reader of the Politique to refer to his “great fundamental treatise.”

But, on the other hand, in carefully reading the Cours, we find numerous indications of the future structure of the Politique positive. Comte might have been content with a reference to the Cours, to answer the objections of his dissenting disciples. He did better. He reprinted at the end of the fourth volume of his Politique positive six pamphlets written in his youth from 1818 to 1826. In them, not only is his philosophy already sketched in its main outlines with sufficient precision; but the idea that philosophy is a preliminary work, a simple prelude and that the essential work, the supreme end, is the positive religion which shall arise upon this philosophy—this idea is the very soul of these pamphlets. The proof is given. Upon the question of the unity of his doctrine Comte wins the case against Littré.

IV.

In his correspondence with Stuart Mill which takes place between 1841 and 1846, that is to say which embraces the end of his first career and the beginning of the second, Comte has repeatedly explained how the two successive portions of his work are connected together, and in what they are distinct. It may not be useless to quote his own words. “The second half of my philosophical life,” he says, “must differ notably from the first, especially in that feeling must take, if not an obvious, at least a real part in it, one as great as that of the intellect. The great work of systematization which has been reserved for our century, must indeed embrace equally, both feelings and ideas as a whole. Truly it was the ideas which had first to be systematized, under pain of failing to bring about a complete regeneration by falling into a more or less vague mysticism. That is why my fundamental work had to appeal almost exclusively to the intellect. It was to be a work of research, and accessorily of discussion, destined to discover and to constitute the true universal principles, in rising by hierarchical degrees from the simplest scientific questions to the highest social speculations.”[8] But this being done, Comte passed to the systematisation of the feelings, “a necessary sequel to that of the ideas, and an indispensable basis for that of the institutions.”

It is, therefore, an entirely new work. Comte can imagine without difficulty that it might have been reserved for another than himself. His personal mission might have been limited to the foundation of the philosophy which puts an end to the “mental anarchy.” The ethics and the religion which were to be established upon this philosophy, to put an end to moral and political anarchy, would, in this case, have been the work of one of his successors. Stubborn labour and good fortune allowed Comte to undertake this work himself. But even in 1845, he says how “under the holy influence of Mdme. de Vaux,” he had very clearly seen his two careers as distinct and as one, these two careers of which the second was to transform philosophy into religion, as the first had changed science into philosophy.

The object of the present work is to study Comte’s philosophy properly so called, leaving aside the transformation of this philosophy into religion. The choice which we thus make is not an arbitrary one, since, in order to justify it, we have the distinction formally established by Comte himself, when he admits that his philosophy and his religion might have been the work of two different persons.