Auguste Comte and Positivism | Page 6

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 with
Polytheism, and it is probable that the