It follows from this that the effect of the progress of science must be to diminish human liberty, since in proportion as it elucidates questions it diminishes their complexity.
However, human intelligence must have an ideal:
"The ideal is its dream and its worship. Now what will be its ideal? Humanity itself. Humanity has a real existence; it is the great Being, really a great collective body, having a regular growth of its own, and provided, like every individual body, with temporary organs, which lose their activity, wither, and disappear in default of employment and nutrition" (ib. , p. 118). "Formerly, and conformably to the medium in which they moved, theology and metaphysics, its slave, gave their demonstration of the divine existence. In like manner science to-day gives the demonstration of the existence of humanity. It is no longer possible to mistake the growth of this ideal—the solidarity of its most remote past with its most distant future, and this powerful life of which each man has been, is, and will be an organ" (ib. , p. 283). "Humanity is a real ideal, which it is necessary to know (education), to love (religion), to embellish (the fine arts), to enrich (industry), and which therefore holds our whole existence, individual, domestic, and social, under its supreme direction" (ib. , p. 286).
To love and serve humanity is the whole positivist moral law. M. Littré says, pp. 291, 292: "This morality is much superior to the morality of the past, which was founded on selfishness. The 'salvation' of the theologians is as much a selfish calculation as the 'enlightened self-interest' [{729}] of the materialists. The materialists say, 'Do good: it is for thy interest in this life;' the theologians say, 'Do good: it is for thy interest in another life.' Never was there a more perfect system of selfishness organized in the world; and if powerful instincts, and, it is but justice to add, sacerdotal wisdom, had not in part counterbalanced the disastrous effects of such an habitual direction, individual asceticism and aspiration to salvation would have dissolved all social bonds."
It is, we see, no longer God whom we are to love and serve, but humanity, and as humanity has few or no rewards to bestow, the worship we render her must needs be disinterested. Selfishness falls in proportion as the hope of reward vanishes. [But suppose one does not love and serve humanity, will he suffer punishment or lose anything in consequence? If so, what becomes of the positivist doctrine of the disinterestedness of the worship of humanity?—TR.]
Such are the solutions offered by the positivist philosophy on the principal points of biology, or the science of the individual; we proceed now to sociology, or the science of society.
Positivism, being at once a philosophy and a religion, must admit and does admit two distinct societies—a temporal society and a spiritual society. We begin with the first.
The aim of the temporal society M. Littré, ib. , p. 119, explains in the following manner: "The historic tradition itself, without anything forced, arbitrary, fortuitous, or transitory, conducts us to the reign of industry. Before industry the whole past successively falls and disappears. For the modern man industrial activity is the only temporal occupation, the only practical activity. . . . If the accession of the industrial regimen is inevitable, it is also inevitable that the chiefs of our industry should be our temporal chiefs. We have no need of patricians or of gentlemen to lead us to war and conquest; we have no need of kings or kaisers to concentrate in their own hands the power of the sword. Their functions, formerly preeminent, are now without employment (!). But we have need of directors who can conduct the peaceful labors of industry with firmness and intelligence, labors which certainly want neither complication nor difficulty nor grandeur. It is to this end that all temporal power must aspire."
If so, if industry is the supreme and last end of humanity, evidently nothing is to be changed in the present condition of property, and that the wealth of the rich should be augmented rather than diminished. The constitution of the family must also be maintained. The marriage bond is, therefore, declared indissoluble; the positivist law is in this respect even more severe than the Christian law, for, not contented with prohibiting divorce, it even forbids second nuptials. In the purely political order the republican form must obtain.
"I have thought ever since February, 1848," said M. Littré, in 1850, p. 205, "that the establishment of the republic is definitive in France, having for it the guarantee of manners which have ceased to be monarchical, and after this wholly theoretical point of view, I have constantly lived, and engage to live, in security."