Auguste Comte and Positivism | Page 5

largest volumes of the six composing his work, is a continuous
exemplification and verification of the law. How well it accords with
the facts, and how vast a number of the greater historical phaenomena it
explains, is known only to those who have studied its exposition, where
alone it can be found--in these most striking and instructive volumes.
As this theory is the key to M. Comte's other generalizations, all of
which arc more or less dependent on it; as it forms the backbone, if we
may so speak, of his philosophy, and, unless it be true, he has
accomplished little; we cannot better employ part of our space than in
clearing it from misconception, and giving the explanations necessary
to remove the obstacles which prevent many competent persons from
assenting to it.
It is proper to begin by relieving the doctrine from a religious prejudice.
The doctrine condemns all theological explanations, and replaces them,
or thinks them destined to be replaced, by theories which take no
account of anything but an ascertained order of phaenomena. It is
inferred that if this change were completely accomplished, mankind
would cease to refer the constitution of Nature to an intelligent will or
to believe at all in a Creator and supreme Governor of the world. This
supposition is the more natural, as M. Comte was avowedly of that
opinion. He indeed disclaimed, with some acrimony, dogmatic atheism,
and even says (in a later work, but the earliest contains nothing at
variance with it) that the hypothesis of design has much greater
verisimilitude than that of a blind mechanism. But conjecture, founded
on analogy, did not seem to him a basis to rest a theory on, in a mature
state of human intelligence. He deemed all real knowledge of a
commencement inaccessible to us, and the inquiry into it an
overpassing of the essential limits of our mental faculties. To this point,
however, those who accept his theory of the progressive stages of
opinion are not obliged to follow him. The Positive mode of thought is

not necessarily a denial of the supernatural; it merely throws back that
question to the origin of all things. If the universe had a beginning, its
beginning, by the very conditions of the case, was supernatural; the
laws of nature cannot account for their own origin. The Positive
philosopher is free to form his opinion on the subject, according to the
weight he attaches to the analogies which are called marks of design,
and to the general traditions of the human race. The value of these
evidences is indeed a question for Positive philosophy, but it is not one
upon which Positive philosophers must necessarily be agreed. It is one
of M. Comte's mistakes that he never allows of open questions. Positive
Philosophy maintains that within the existing order of the universe, or
rather of the part of it known to us, the direct determining cause of
every phaenomenon is not supernatural but natural. It is compatible
with this to believe, that the universe was created, and even that it is
continuously governed, by an Intelligence, provided we admit that the
intelligent Governor adheres to fixed laws, which are only modified or
counteracted by other laws of the same dispensation, and are never
either capriciously or providentially departed from. Whoever regards
all events as parts of a constant order, each one being the invariable
consequent of some antecedent condition, or combination of conditions,
accepts fully the Positive mode of thought: whether he acknowledges
or not an universal antecedent on which the whole system of nature was
originally consequent, and whether that universal antecedent is
conceived as an Intelligence or not.
There is a corresponding misconception to be corrected respecting the
Metaphysical mode of thought. In repudiating metaphysics, M. Comte
did not interdict himself from analysing or criticising any of the
abstract conceptions of the mind. He was not ignorant (though he
sometimes seemed to forget) that such analysis and criticism are a
necessary part of the scientific process, and accompany the scientific
mind in all its operations. What he condemned was the habit of
conceiving these mental abstractions as real entities, which could exert
power, produce phaenomena, and the enunciation of which could be
regarded as a theory or explanation of facts. Men of the present day
with difficulty believe that so absurd a notion was ever really
entertained, so repugnant is it to the mental habits formed by long and

assiduous cultivation of the positive sciences. But those sciences,
however widely cultivated, have never formed the basis of intellectual
education in any society. It is with philosophy as with religion: men
marvel at the absurdity of other people's tenets, while exactly parallel
absurdities remain in their own, and the same man is unaffectedly
astonished that words can be