“A deeper study of the great universal order reveals to us at length the ruling power within it of the true Great Being, whose destiny it is to bring that order continually to perfection by constantly conforming to its laws, and which thus best represents to us that system as a whole. This undeniable Providence, the supreme dispenser of our destinies, becomes in the natural course the common centre of our affections, our thoughts, and our actions. Although this Great Being evidently exceeds the utmost strength of any, even of any collective, human force, its necessary constitution and its peculiar function endow it with the truest sympathy towards all its servants. The least amongst us can and ought constantly to aspire to maintain and even to improve this Being. This natural object of all our activity, both public and private, determines the true general character of the rest of our existence, whether in feeling or in thought; which must be devoted to love, and to know, in order rightly to serve, our Providence, by a wise use of all the means which it furnishes to us. Reciprocally this continued service, whilst strengthening our true unity, renders us at once both happier and better.”
The exaltation of Humanity into the throne occupied by the Supreme Being under monotheistic systems made all the rest of Comte’s construction easy enough. Utility remains the test of every institution, impulse, act; his fabric Remarks on the religion. becomes substantially an arch of utilitarian propositions, with an artificial Great Being inserted at the top to keep them in their place. The Comtist system is utilitarianism crowned by a fantastic decoration. Translated into the plainest English, the position is as follows: “Society can only be regenerated by the greater subordination of politics to morals, by the moralization of capital, by the renovation of the family, by a higher conception of marriage and so on. These ends can only be reached by a heartier development of the sympathetic instincts. The sympathetic instincts can only be developed by the Religion of Humanity.” Looking at the problem in this way, even a moralist who does not expect theology to be the instrument of social revival, might still ask whether the sympathetic instincts will not necessarily be already developed to their highest point, before people will be persuaded to accept the religion, which is at the bottom hardly more than sympathy under a more imposing name. However that may be, the whole battle—into which we shall not enter—as to the legitimateness of Comtism as a religion turns upon this erection of Humanity into a Being. The various hypotheses, dogmas, proposals, as to the family, to capital, &c., are merely propositions measurable by considerations of utility and a balance of expediencies. Many of these proposals are of the highest interest, and many of them are actually available; but there does not seem to be one of them of an available kind, which could not equally well be approached from other sides, and even incorporated in some radically antagonistic system. Adoption, for example, as a practice for improving the happiness of families and the welfare of society, is capable of being weighed, and can in truth only be weighed, by utilitarian considerations, and has been commended by men to whom the Comtist religion is naught. The singularity of Comte’s construction, and the test by which it must be tried, is the transfer of the worship and discipline of Catholicism to a system in which “the conception of God is superseded” by the abstract idea of Humanity, conceived as a kind of Personality.
And when all is said, the invention does not help us. We have still to settle what is for the good of Humanity, and we can only do that in the old-fashioned way. There is no guidance in the conception. No effective unity can follow from it, because you can only find out the right and wrong of a given course by summing up the advantages and disadvantages, and striking a balance, and there is nothing in the Religion of Humanity to force two men to find the balance on the same side. The Comtists are no better off than other utilitarians in judging policy, events, conduct.
The particularities of the worship, its minute and truly ingenious re-adaptations of sacraments, prayers, reverent signs, down even to the invocation of a New Trinity, need not detain us. They are said, though it is not easy to The worship and discipline. believe, to have been elaborated by way of Utopia. If so, no Utopia has ever yet been presented in a style so little calculated to stir the imagination, to warm the feelings, to soothe the insurgency of the reason. It is a mistake to present a great body of hypotheses—if Comte meant them for hypotheses—in the most dogmatic and peremptory form to which language can lend itself. And there is no more extraordinary thing in the history of opinion than the perversity with which Comte has succeeded in clothing a philosophic doctrine, so intrinsically conciliatory as his, in a shape that excites so little sympathy and gives so much provocation. An enemy defined Comtism as Catholicism minus Christianity, to which an able champion retorted by calling it Catholicism plus Science. Comte’s Utopia has pleased the followers of the Catholic, just as little as those of the scientific, spirit.
The elaborate and minute systematization of life, proper to the religion of Humanity, is to be directed by a priesthood. The priests are to possess neither wealth nor material power; they are not to command, but to counsel; their authority is to The priesthood. rest on persuasion, not on force. When religion has become positive, and society industrial, then the influence of the church upon the state becomes really free and independent, which was not the case in the middle ages. The power of the priesthood rests upon special knowledge of man and nature; but to this intellectual eminence must also be added moral power and a certain greatness of character, without which force of intellect and completeness of attainment will not receive the confidence they ought to inspire. The functions of the priesthood are of this kind:—To exercise a systematic direction over education; to hold a consultative influence over all the important acts of actual life, public and private; to arbitrate in cases of practical conflict; to preach sermons recalling those principles of generality and universal harmony which our special activities dispose us to ignore; to order the due classification of society; to perform the various ceremonies appointed by the founder of the religion. The authority of the priesthood is to rest wholly on voluntary adhesion, and there is to be perfect freedom of speech and discussion. This provision hardly consists with Comte’s congratulations to the tsar Nicholas on the “wise vigilance” with which he kept watch over the importation of Western books.
From his earliest manhood Comte had been powerfully impressed by the necessity of elevating the condition of women. (See remarkable passage in his letters to M. Valat, pp. 84-87.) His friendship with Madame de Vaux had Women. deepened the impression, and in the reconstructed society women are to play a highly important part. They are to be carefully excluded from public action, but they are to do many more important things than things political. To fit them for their functions, they are to be raised above material cares, and they are to be thoroughly educated. The family, which is so important an element of the Comtist scheme of things, exists to carry the influence of woman over man to the highest point of cultivation. Through affection she purifies the activity of man. “Superior in power of affection, more able to keep both the intellectual and the active powers in continual subordination to feeling, women are formed as the natural intermediaries between Humanity and man. The Great Being confides specially to them its moral Providence, maintaining through them the direct and constant cultivation of universal affection, in the midst of all the distractions of thought or action, which are for ever withdrawing men from its influence.... Beside the uniform influence of every woman on every man, to attach him to Humanity, such is the importance and the difficulty of this ministry that each of us should be placed under the special guidance of one of these angels, to answer for him, as it were, to the Great Being. This moral guardianship may assume three types,—the mother, the wife and the daughter; each having several modifications, as shown in the concluding volume. Together they form the three simple modes of solidarity, or unity with contemporaries,—obedience, union and protection—as well as the three degrees of continuity between ages, by uniting us with the past, the present and the future. In accordance with my theory of the brain, each corresponds with one of our three altruistic instincts—veneration, attachment and benevolence.”
How the positive method of observation and verification of real facts has landed us in this, and much else of the same kind, is extremely hard to guess. Seriously to examine an encyclopaedic system, that touches life, society Conclusion. and knowledge at every point, is evidently beyond the compass of such an article as this. There is in every chapter a whole group of speculative suggestions, each of which would need a long chapter to itself to elaborate or to discuss. There is at least one biological speculation of astounding audacity, that could be examined in nothing less than a treatise. Perhaps we have said enough to show that after performing a great and real service to thought Comte almost sacrificed his claims to gratitude by the invention of a system that, as such, and independently of detached suggestions, is markedly retrograde. But the world will take what is available in Comte, while forgetting that in his work which is as irrational in one way as Hegel is in another.
See also the article [Positivism].
Bibliography.—Works, Editions and Translations: Cours de philosophie positive (6 vols., Paris, 1830-1842; 2nd ed. with preface by E. Littré, Paris, 1864; 5th ed., 1893-1894; Eng. trans. Harriet Martineau, 2 vols., London, 1853; 3 vols. London and New York, 1896); Discours sur l’esprit positif (Paris, 1844; Eng. trans. with explanation E. S. Beesley, 1905); Ordre et progrès (ib. 1848); Discours sur l’ensemble de positivisme (1848, Eng. trans. J. H. Bridges, London, 1852); Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie (4 vols., Paris, 1852-1854; ed. 1898; Eng. trans. with analysis and explanatory summary by Bridges, F. Harrison, E. S. Beesley and others, 1875-1879); Catéchisme positiviste (Paris, 1852; 3rd ed., 1890; Eng. trans. R. Congreve, Lond. 1858, 3rd ed., 1891); Appel aux Conservateurs (Paris, 1855 and 1898); Synthèse subjective (1856 and 1878); Essai de philos. mathématique (Paris, 1878); P. Descours and H. Gordon Jones, Fundamental Principles of Positive Philos. (trans. 1905), with biog. preface by E. S. Beesley. The Letters of Comte have been published as follows:—the letters to M. Valat and J. S. Mill, in La Critique philosophique (1877); correspondence with Mde. de Vaux (ib., 1884); Correspondance inédite d’Aug. Comte (1903 foll.); Lettres inédites de J. S. Mill à Aug. Comte publ. avec les résponses de Comte (1899).
Criticism.—J. S. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism; J. H. Bridges’ reply to Mill, The Unity of Comte’s Life and Doctrines (1866); Herbert Spencer’s essay on the Genesis of Science and pamphlet on The Classification of the Sciences; Huxley’s “Scientific Aspects of Positivism,” in his Lay Sermons; R. Congreve, Essays Political, Social and Religious (1874); J. Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874); G. H. Lewes, History of Philosophy, vol. ii.; Edward Caird, The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte (Glasgow, 1885); Hermann Gruber, Aug. Comte der Begründer des Positivismus. Sein Leben und seine Lehre (Freiburg, 1889) and Der Positivismus vom Tode Aug. Comtes bis auf unsere Tage, 1857-1891 (Freib. 1891); L. Lévy-Bruhl, La Philosophie d’Aug. Comte (Paris, 1900); H. D. Hutton, Comte’s Theory of Man’s Future (1877), Comte, the Man and the Founder (1891), Comte’s Life and Work (1892); E. de Roberty, Aug. Comte et Herbert Spencer (Paris, 1894); J. Watson, Comte, Mill and Spencer. An outline of Philos. (1895 and 1899); Millet, La Souveraineté d’après Aug. Comte (1905); L. de Montesquieu Fezensac, Le Système politique d’Aug. Comte (1907); G. Dumas, Psychologie de deux Messies positivistes (1905).