After having presented the formula of its method, or rather of its two methods, the positivist school proceeds to the application and exposition of the consequences which are derived from it or them.
In the very outset they assert that there are no absolute truths, that all truth is relative; the true, the good, the fair, are such only by a provisional title; what was virtue yesterday may be crime to-day, and what is crime to-day may be virtue to-morrow. Thus speaks M. Littré:
"The positivist philosophy is experimental; . . . . it is composed of relative not absolute notions. . . . When man, in the beginning of his scientific career, launched into unrestricted researches after the absolute, he had only this way open to him; now another way has been opened, that of experience and induction. This way cannot conduct the inquirer to absolute notions, and when we demand them of reason we demand of her more than she has. The mind of man is neither absolute nor infinite, and to try to obtain from it absolute [{728}] solutions is to go out of the immutable conditions of human nature." [Footnote 112]—Littré, Conservatism, Revolution, and Positivism, pp. 5, 38.
[Footnote 112: M. de Chalambert might here reply, granting man has no infinite or absolute notions, which no finite mind can have, it by no means follows that he has no notions or conceptions of that which is infinite and absolute, or intuitions of necessary, eternal, and immutable truth, as are the first principles of all science, religion, and morals.—TRANSLATOR. ]
If there are no absolute truths, then there is no God:
"This conclusion," says M. Littré "rests on the decisive results of all scientific exploration during the long course of the ages, namely, that nothing of what is called first cause is accessible to the human mind, and the origin of the world can be explained neither by many gods nor by one god alone, neither by nature, chance, nor atoms. This result, erected into a principle, gradually takes possession of modern intelligence, and bears in its womb the social organization of the future of the race. . . . If, for a childish and individual satisfaction, the idea of some theological being, one or manifold, is retained, it is necessary to reduce the conception forthwith to a nullity, and to purely nominal and supererogatory functions; for the result of scientific investigation is, that there is in the course of things no trace of miracle or government from above, and nothing but an unbroken chain of laws modifiable, within certain limits, by the action from age to age of mankind. As Laplace says, such a being is henceforth a useless hypothesis."—lb. pp. 279, 298.
The soul has no existence distinct from that of the body, and therefore dies with it:
"This belief (concerning the survivance of the soul), which might be true, is not found to be so; science (always science!) has not been able to establish a single fact whatever of a life after death; and so, like a pond no longer alimented by inflowing streams, the opinion of an individual perpetuity gradually evaporates."—lb., pp.128.
There is room for liberty only because the biological phenomena are very complex:
"No science," says M. Littré (ib. , p. 114), "if the phenomenon has no law, and no power (liberty) if not complex enough to offer us struggles duly proportioned to the complication."