Auguste Comte and Positivism | Page 6

mistaken for things, who is treating other
words as if they were things every time he opens his mouth to discuss.
No one, unless entirely ignorant of the history of thought, will deny that
the mistaking of abstractions for realities pervaded speculation all
through antiquity and the middle ages. The mistake was generalized
and systematized in the famous Ideas of Plato. The Aristotelians carried
it on. Essences, quiddities, virtues residing in things, were accepted as a
_bonâ fide_ explanation of phaenomena. Not only abstract qualities,
but the concrete names of genera and species, were mistaken for
objective existences. It was believed that there were General
Substances corresponding to all the familiar classes of concrete things:
a substance Man, a substance Tree, a substance Animal, which, and not
the individual objects so called, were directly denoted by those names.
The real existence of Universal Substances was the question at issue in
the famous controversy of the later middle ages between Nominalism
and Realism, which is one of the turning points in the history of
thought, being its first struggle to emancipate itself from the dominion
of verbal abstractions. The Realists were the stronger party, but though
the Nominalists for a time succumbed, the doctrine they rebelled
against fell, after a short interval, with the rest of the scholastic
philosophy. But while universal substances and substantial forms,
being the grossest kind of realized abstractions, were the soonest
discarded, Essences, Virtues, and Occult Qualities long survived them,
and were first completely extruded from real existence by the
Cartesians. In Descartes' conception of science, all physical
phaenomena were to be explained by matter and motion, that is, not by
abstractions but by invariable physical laws: though his own
explanations were many of them hypothetical, and turned out to be
erroneous. Long after him, however, fictitious entities (as they are
happily termed by Bentham) continued to be imagined as means of
accounting for the more mysterious phaenomena; above all in
physiology, where, under great varieties of phrase, mysterious forces

and principles were the explanation, or substitute for explanation, of
the phaenomena of organized beings. To modern philosophers these
fictions are merely the abstract names of the classes of phaenomena
which correspond to them; and it is one of the puzzles of philosophy,
how mankind, after inventing a set of mere names to keep together
certain combinations of ideas or images, could have so far forgotten
their own act as to invest these creations of their will with objective
reality, and mistake the name of a phaenomenon for its efficient cause.
What was a mystery from the purely dogmatic point of view, is cleared
up by the historical. These abstract words are indeed now mere names
of phaenomena, but were not so in their origin. To us they denote only
the phaenomena, because we have ceased to believe in what else they
once designated; and the employment of them in explanation is to us
evidently, as M. Comte says, the naïf reproduction of the phaenomenon
as the reason for itself: but it was not so in the beginning. The
metaphysical point of view was not a perversion of the positive, but a
transformation of the theological. The human mind, in framing a class
of objects, did not set out from the notion of a name, but from that of a
divinity. The realization of abstractions was not the embodiment of a
word, but the gradual disembodiment of a Fetish.
The primitive tendency or instinct of mankind is to assimilate all the
agencies which they perceive in Nature, to the only one of which they
are directly conscious, their own voluntary activity. Every object which
seems to originate power, that is, to act without being first visibly acted
upon, to communicate motion without having first received it, they
suppose to possess life, consciousness, will. This first rude conception
of nature can scarcely, however, have been at any time extended to all
phaenomena. The simplest observation, without which the preservation
of life would have been impossible, must have pointed out many
uniformities in nature, many objects which, under given circumstances,
acted exactly like one another: and whenever this was observed, men's
natural and untutored faculties led them to form the similar objects into
a class, and to think of them together: of which it was a natural
consequence to refer effects, which were exactly alike, to a single will,
rather than to a number of wills precisely accordant. But this single will
could not be the will of the objects themselves, since they were many:

it must be the will of an invisible being, apart from the objects, and
ruling them from an unknown distance. This is Polytheism. We are not
aware that in any tribe of savages or negroes who have been observed,
Fetichism has been found totally unmixed