Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics / With Some of Their Applications

by William Thomas Thornton

[44] 'Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin,' 1799, pp. 214-6.

[45] 'Auguste Comte and Positivism,' passim.

[46] 'History of Philosophy,' 4th edition, vol. ii. pp. 654-735.

[47] Not that so restricted a meaning can, with any propriety, be placed on positivist definitions of law. See, for instance, that of Mr. Lewes ('History of Philosophy,' vol. ii. p. 701), who defines law to be 'the invariable relation between two distinct phenomena, according to which one depends on the other.'

[48] Some few additional random remarks, however, though not permissible in the text may, perhaps, be less inappropriate in a note.

My scientific deficiencies do not prevent my understanding or, at least, fancying I understand, that Comte's famous 'Classification of the Sciences' may be extremely serviceable as indicating in what order the sciences may most profitably be studied. That a student's general progress would be swifter and surer if, before entering on physics or chemistry, he had already made considerable progress in algebra, geometry, and mechanics, than if he commenced all five sciences simultaneously, seems probable enough. If, however, the classification be intended also to indicate historically the order in which the sciences have actually been studied, I cannot but suspect it to be misleading. Certainly, if knowledge of number was the earliest knowledge acquired by man, those savage races which have not even yet learnt how to count beyond four, must have been content with very few lessons in arithmetic when turning off to other branches of learning.

As to the measure of success that attended Comte's scheme of creating a Philosophy of General Science, I presume not to utter one syllable of my own, preferring to cite what Mr. Mill says of that 'wonderful systematization of the philosophy of all the antecedent sciences from mathematics to physiology, which, if he had done nothing else, would have stamped him on all minds competent to appreciate it as one of the principal thinkers of the age.' In all sincerity, I say that the mere conception of the enterprise, whose vastness is so luminously expounded by Mr. Lewes, in the last edition of his 'History of Philosophy,' seems to me to betoken superior genius. I feel, as it were, simply awe-struck in the presence of an intellectual ambition, that within the brief span of one human life could aspire to a mastery over all the sciences, sufficient, first for co-ordinating the fundamental truths and special methods, and so obtaining the philosophy of each, and then for co-ordinating the manifold philosophies so obtained, and—by condensing them all into one homogeneous doctrine, and blending them into one organic whole, whereof each part would be seen to depend on all that preceded, and to determine all that succeeded—transforming all science into philosophy.

One point however remains on which I shall speak with some confidence, that, namely, of the inclusion among 'Comte's titles to immortal fame' of the creation of a Science of Sociology. 'What the law of gravitation is to astronomy, what the elementary properties of tissues are to physiology,' that, says Mr. Lewes, in the opinion of Comte's disciples, 'is the law of the three stages to sociology.' But if, as I have shown, there are not really three but only two stages, the so-called third stage being simply a return to either the second or the first, the law of the three stages cannot be much of a law, nor the science of which it is the essence much of a science.

Mr. Lewes, nevertheless, maintains that M. Comte created Social Science. Mr. Mill considers that he did not create it, but only proved its creation to be possible. With all possible deference, I submit that what he really did was to prove its creation to be impossible.

In a passage of Mr. Mill's 'Positivism,' quoted with approval in Mr. Lewes's 'History of Philosophy,' and presumably, therefore, expressing the sentiments of both writers, Comte is described as pronouncing inappropriate to the Science of Society, the method universally admitted to be proper to all other sciences—that, namely, of obtaining by induction the laws of the elementary phenomena, then, from these laws thinking out deductively those of the complex phenomena, and, finally, of verifying by specific observation the laws obtained by deduction. Among social phenomena, he is described as arguing, the elementary ones are human feelings and actions, the laws of which are the laws of universal human nature. But the human beings, on the laws of whose nature social facts depend, are not abstract or universal, but historical human beings, already shaped and made what they are, not by the simple tendencies of universal human nature, but by the accumulated influence of past generations of human society. This being the case, the laws of universal human nature evidently cannot serve as materials, whence it would be possible for any powers of deduction, starting from the bare conception of the Being Man, to predict beforehand how successive generations of men would feel and act. Wherefore, in order to get at social laws, we must reverse the ordinary method, seizing upon any generalizations which the facts of history, empirically considered, will supply, and then using the universal laws of human nature for the verification of these generalizations.