Auguste Comte and Positivism | Page 5

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 mistaken for things, who
is treating other words as