It is then towards the idea of humanity as their centre that the scientific, social and religious ideas of Auguste Comte converge. If this convergence be perfect, his work is accomplished. Henceforth mental and moral anarchy is cured; political and religious anarchy is about to disappear. Unity will be everywhere re-established. This is already done in the understanding, since henceforth all our conceptions are homogenous, that is to say positive, since the same method is made use of in all our researches, since finally the whole sum of the sciences is regulated from the social point of view. Unity is also accomplished in the whole soul, since the intellect, henceforth conscious of its laws and of its essential functions, subjects itself to the heart, to be directed by love. Finally, unity will be brought about in society, since a new spiritual power, possessed of universally admitted principles, will give to all men and women a common education, will teach them all the same morality, and will rally them all within a same religion of love and goodness. The harmony which is realised in the individual soul is the symbol and, as it were, the guarantee of the harmony which will be established in the social body. Undoubtedly, obstacles remain to be overcome. The positive spirit must still struggle to become altogether universal. The old mental régime will not disappear without struggles which, Comte foresees, will be both formidable and bloody. But these crises, however acute they may be, cannot prevent the human evolution from taking place in accordance with its law.
CONCLUSION
At the end of the Cours de philosophie positive Comte has himself summed up the results which he believed himself to have established. In the first place it is, from the intellectual point of view (which at first takes precedence of all others, although, in the positive state, the mind must be subject to the heart), a “perfect mental coherence which, as yet, has never been able to exist in a like degree,” not even in the primitive period when man explained the phenomena of nature by the action of wills. For already, in this period, although imperceptibly, the positive spirit was making itself felt, while, in the positive period, nothing will subsist of the theological and metaphysical mode of thought. From the moral point of view, which comes next, the agreement of minds upon speculative problems, and in particular upon the relations between man and humanity, will allow of a common education, which will bring about ardent moral conviction in all. Powerful “public prejudices” will develop, and with them, such irresistible fulness of conviction, according to Comte, that Humanity will be able to realise what our penal system is incapable of achieving: to prevent instead of punishing, at least in the majority of cases. From the political point of view, the two spiritual and temporal powers will be duly separated, and a lasting organisation will at once insure order and progress. Finally, from the æsthetic point of view, a new art will appear. No longer an aristocratic and learned art like the one which has been with us since the Renaissance, but an art closely connected with the convictions and the life of all, which will be accessible and familiar to all, as was the case with the art of the Middle Ages. The positive conception of man and of the world, will become an “inexhaustible spring” of poetical beauty.
All these results will be ordered, protected and sanctified by the positive religion, or religion of Humanity, of which Auguste Comte, in his “second career” established the dogma, the worship and the régime.
Without entering into the details of this religious construction we see that, like the ethics and the politics, it depends upon the “perfect mental coherence” founded, in the first place, by positive philosophy. In its turn, this perfect mental coherence, reduces itself to the unity of the understanding, whose necessary and sufficient conditions are “homogeneity of doctrine and unity of method.” Now, when Comte began to write, this homogeneity and this unity already existed for all the categories of natural phenomena. The moral and social phenomena alone were still an exception. In conclusion everything was reduced to this question: “can moral and social facts be studied in the same way as the other natural phenomena?” If not, we must be resigned to the indefinite duration of the disorder of minds, and consequently of the disorder of customs and institutions. But, if the contrary is true, then the human understanding reaches the unity to which it aspires. Is sociology impossible? then we have no politics and no religion. Is sociology founded? then all the rest is based upon it.
Thus, the creation of social science is the decisive moment in Comte’s philosophy. Everything starts from it and comes back to it. As in Platonism, all paths lead to the theory of ideas, so, from all the avenues of positivism we see sociology. Here, as in a common centre, are joined the philosophy of the sciences, the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of history, psychology, ethics, politics and religion. Here, in a word, is realised the unity of system, a unity which, in Comte’s eyes, is the best proof of its truth.
If, in sociology, we chiefly consider the end which Comte proposes to attain by its means, it is true that this doctrine is principally a political one, and the very title of Comte’s second great work bears this out. But, considered in itself, it is essentially a speculative effort, and the principle of a philosophy in the proper sense of the term. What Kant called a totality of experience is made possible by the creation of social science.
Before Comte, this totality had been attempted many times. But those who attempted it started from this postulate that philosophy is specifically distinct from scientific knowledge proper. Whether philosophy were dogmatic or critical, whether it had bearings upon the essence of things or rather upon the laws of the mind, it none the less presented characteristics of its own, which seemed to separate it from positive science, and even allowed it to dominate over this science, and to “explain” its principles. Comte rejects this postulate. He is going to endeavour to see if, by taking the contrary postulate as his foundation, he will not succeed better than his predecessors.
In order to reject the postulate admitted by philosophers before him, he appeals at the same time to arguments founded on facts and demonstration; but we must notice that, in his doctrine, these two orders of arguments logically reduce themselves to one another. Indeed he says, up to the present time no philosophy which commands acceptance by all minds has been established. Idealisms, materialisms, pantheisms from all sources and in every shape have never done more than ruin the doctrines opposed to them, without becoming finally established themselves. Those systems claimed to give a rational knowledge of that which by nature is beyond the reach of science. They prided themselves upon explaining the essence, the cause, the end and the order of the phenomena of the universe. Thus they could only build up temporary conceptions which were undoubtedly indispensable at the time but which were doomed to die. Metaphysics is never anything but a rationalised theology which is weakened by this very fact, and deprived of what constituted its strength during the period when it was an object of belief.