Comte and positivismRobert BrownCOMTE’S AIMSThe chief aim of all of Auguste Comte’s publications, and the constant mission of hisentire working life, was the improvement of human character through the perfecting ofhuman society. He was convinced that the scientific knowledge available in his ownlifetime—the first half of the nineteenth century—was rapidly making possible, and in asense inevitable, the creation of the most suitable society for the ‘social regeneration ofWestern Europe’. Born in Montpellier in 1798, Comte was both literally andintellectually a child of the eighteenth century who became an adult during theNapoleonic aftermath of the French Revolution. In searching for social salvation bymeans of the application of science to political and economic questions, Comte was aperfectibilist of a sort that he helped to make typical of his period. The set of beliefsabout society that perfectibilists of his kind had inherited from the eighteenth centuryhave been well summarized by John Passmore in
The Perfectibility of Man:Man had until that time been a mere child in respect of knowledge and, inconsequence, of virtue; he was now at last in a position, as a result of thedevelopment of science, to determine how human nature develops and what isthe best thing for human beings to do; this new knowledge could be expressedin a form in which all men would find it intelligible; once they knew what it isbest to do, men would act accordingly and so would constantly improve theirmoral, political and physical condition. Provided only, then, that ‘sinisterinterests’ did not prevent the communication of knowledge, the development ofscience was bound to carry with it the constant improvement of the humancondition, to a degree which would be, like the growth of science itself,unlimited.([6.50], 208)Comte is most often remembered now as an early practitioner of the history of science,and as an advocate of the application of scientific method to the explanation andprediction of social behaviour and its institutions.His own opinion of his contribution tosociety was rather more ambitious in its claims. The nature and scope of these claims aremost briefly revealed in a letter that Comte wrote two months before his death in 1857:he would in the future sign all his circulars ‘Le Fondateur de la religionuniverselle, Grand Prêtre de l’Humanité,’ and he let it be known that his beingwould become more sacred than the Catholic pontiff’s. The Pope was only aminister, but he, Auguste Comte, who had discovered the fundamental laws ofhuman evolution, was the very personification of the Great Being.([6.43], 267)Comte’s formal qualifications for this role were few. He had spent the years 1814–16enrolled in the École Polytechnique in Paris, and had absorbed the faith in the power andutility of the current physical sciences which the school’s highly distinguished staff werenoted for instilling in their students. Expelled as a trouble-maker just before graduation,Comte lived by tutoring in mathematics until he became the secretary and, later, ‘adoptedson’ of Comte Henri de Saint-Simon in 1817, a relationship that lasted until the two menquarrelled and separated a year before Saint-Simon’s death in 1825. During those years,and up to early middle age, Comte read omnivorously and was influenced, as he reported,by a group of thinkers—Plato, Montesquieu, Hume, Turgot, Condorcet, Kant, Bonald, DeMaistre among others—whose widely different views on many topics he pieced togetherin the thousands of pages that make up his two major philosophical works, the
Cours dephilosophie positive (1830–42, [6.3]) and
Système de politique positive (1851–4, [6.1]).In the last fifteen years of his life Comte read and thought little about the seriousphilosophical and sociological problems that occupied him earlier. Increasingly detachedfrom scientific friends and philosophic debate by his growing confidence that he was areligious seer, bitter and hostile towards his estranged wife, financially dependent in thatperiod on contributions from French and British well-wishers who included, in England,Sir William Molesworth, John Stuart Mill and George Grote, Comte devoted himself,firstly, to the deification of Clothilde de Vaux, the unhappy woman whom he hadbefriended and loved during the last year of her life and, secondly, to his detailedproposals in
Catéchisme positiviste (1852) and the
Politique positive for creating a societyworthy of her character. The one person whose intellectual influence Comte refused toacknowledge was Saint-Simon, the hated collaborator whose ideas Comte had shared andextended, and whose career Comte was destined to duplicate in such unfortunate detailsas poverty, divorce, mental instability, advocacy of the messianic authoritarianism of anew religion of love and the conviction of being a divinely inspired leader. Of theproposal outlined in the
Politique positive for the Catholic Church to be replaced by a‘corporate hierarchy’ of philosophers with spiritual but not secular power, Mill washighly critical. The proposal required us to rely, he said, ‘on this spiritual authority as theonly security for good government, the sole bulwark against practical oppression’. Theremainder of the book Mill went on to characterize, in a much quoted passage, asthe completest system of spiritual and temporal despotism which ever yetemanated from a human brain, unless possibly that of Ignatius Loyola: a systemby which the yoke of general opinion, wielded by an organized body of spiritualteachers and rulers, would be made supreme over every action, and as far as inhuman possibility, every thought, of every member of the community, as well inthe things which regard only himself, as in those which concern the interests ofothers.([6.49], 221)How, then, had Comte’s attempt to regenerate European society, by the application of themethod and results of modern science, reached the stage of evoking such a response froma man who had contributed so greatly to the favourable reception of Comte’s ideas inBritain? To answer this question is our major task here.
THE LAW OF THREE STAGESIt is best to begin with the problem that troubled Comte: the disharmony he believed toexist between the backward state of the European social systems with which he wasfamiliar and the advanced state of the scientific knowledge to which he had been exposedin the École Polytechnique. During this period its staff included Gaspard Monge, theoriginator of descriptive geometry; Louis Poisson, still one of the most famous ofmathematical physicists; Gay-Lussac as the professor of chemistry; Ampère, as a chiefcontributor to electrodynamics; Cauchy, a creator of the theory of functions among manyother achievements; and Fresnel, the pioneer of optical research. These were some of themen whose work, both theoretical and applied, was transforming the intellectual andmaterial culture of Europe and was, in Saint-Simon’s and Comte’s view, also makingobsolete the political systems within which it was being conducted. In his two earlyessays ‘A Brief Appraisal of European History’ (1820) and ‘Plan of the ScientificOperations Necessary for Reorganizing Society’ (1822), Comte suggested that thepartnership of Catholicism and feudalism that had ruled Europe from the eleventh centurywas approaching its end. The prosperity of nations and the organization of theirintellectual life no longer needed either a military society or its theologicalsuperstructure. The rise of industry and the positive—or experience-based—sciencescould, and would, replace war and metaphysics as the unifying forces of the new socialorder. The development of this order could be encouraged if scientists transformed thepursuit of politics into a theoretical science with practical applications, a science that usedhistorical laws to explain and, above all, predict the course of our social existence.This was the state of affairs for which Comte believed that he had discovered both thecorrect analysis and the remedy. In the ‘Plan for Reorganizing Society’ he wrote:The fundamental law which governs the natural progress of civilizationrigorously determines the successive states through which the generaldevelopment of the human race must pass. On the other hand, this lawnecessarily results from the instinctive tendency of the human race to perfectitself. Consequently it is as completely independent of our control as are theindividual instincts the combination of which produces this permanenttendency.([6.13], 146)The ‘instinctive tendency’ referred to here is the tendency of human beings to make fulluse of their genetic capacities by means of a social life that they develop in a lawlikefashion, but of whose orderly sequence they are largely unaware. People have reachedtheir natural goals and satisfied their innate desires by evolving, over a long history, asocial life in several stages. This conclusion about historical stages is found throughoutthe eighteenth century. From Vico’s description of the necessary course of human historyto the later multi-stage views of economic advancement held by Turgot, Quesnay,Mirabeau, Smith, Condorcet and Robertson, interest concerning possible regularities ofevolutionary succession in human civilization was intense, and schemes of large-scalehistorical stages were numerous. By the time that Comte ‘discovered’ his Law of ThreeStages he was familiar with the earlier and similar schemes adapted by Condorcet fromTurgot’s ‘Second Discourse on Universal History’ (1751) and by Saint-Simon fromCondorcet. Turgot had discerned three stages in the history of human intellectualdevelopment:Before men were conversant with the mutual interconnection of physicaleffects, nothing was more natural than to suppose that these were produced byintelligent beings, invisible and resembling ourselves. Everything thathappened…had its god…When the philosophers had recognised the absurdity of these fables…the ideastruck them to explain the causes of phenomena by way of abstract expressionslike
essences and
faculties: expressions which in fact explained nothing, andabout which men reasoned as if they were
beings, new gods substituted for theold ones. Following these analogies,
faculties were proliferated in order toprovide a cause for each effect.It was only much later, through observation of the mechanical action whichbodies have upon one another, that men derived from this mechanics otherhypotheses which mathematics was able to develop and experiment to verify.([6.57], 102)In Comte’s version, Turgot’s scheme of three stages becomes a ‘great fundamental law’that governs by ‘invariable necessity’ the entire development of human intelligence in itsdifferent fields. Comte’s law is that each of our principal conceptions, each branch of ourknowledge, passes in turn through three different theoretical stages: the theological, orfictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; the scientific, or positive. These are three distinctand opposed forms of philosophical thinking of which the first is a necessary point ofdeparture, the second merely transitional, and the third fixed and final. In the theologicalstage, the human mind, enquiring into the inner nature of things—the origin and purposeof the impressions that affect us—supposes these phenomena to be the result of direct andcontinuous action by supernatural agents. In the metaphysical stage, which for the mostpart is only a simple modification of the first, the supernatural agents are replaced byabstract forces, personified abstractions, inherent in everything, and conceived of ascapable of generating and explaining all observed phenomena by referring each one to acorresponding force. In the positive stage the human mind attempts to discover, bycombining reason and observation, the laws of phenomena: that is, their invariablerelations of succession and similarity. The explanation of facts is simply theestablishment of a connection between particular phenomena and some general factswhose number tends to diminish with the progress of science. The perfection of thepositive system, towards which it tends unceasingly, but which it will probably neverreach, would be the ability to exhibit all the different observable phenomena as particularcases of a single general fact such as gravitation ([6.8], I, 21–2)In the
Cours, Comte advances three kinds of evidence in support of his law. The first isthat the positive sciences of the present day still show traces of the two earlier stages. Thesecond is that since the starting point in the education of the individual is the same as thatof the species, the principal phases of both are the same, and hence, with respect to themore important ideas, each person is a theologian in childhood, a metaphysician in youthand a scientist in adulthood. The third and most important piece of evidence is that inevery age human beings have needed theories with which to connect events, but at theoutset of their mental development could not possibly have based their theories on theresults of observation. Because a scientific theory must be founded on the observation ofphenomena, and they in turn require a theory so that we can notice, connect and retainthem, the human mind would have been enclosed in a vicious circle, without any meansof escape, if it had not been for the spontaneous development of theological conceptionswhich provided a primitive solution—a solution that was improved only to a limitedextent in the metaphysical era. ‘The fundamental character of positive philosophy,’Comte writes, ‘is that of regarding all phenomena as subject to invariable natural lawswhose accurate detection, and reduction to the smallest number possible, is the goal of allour efforts. Because they are completely inaccessible, it is senseless for us to seek whatare called ‘causes’, whether they be first causes or final causes’. Thus positive philosophyeliminates the useless search for the ‘generating causes of phenomena’, and tries only ‘toanalyze exactly the circumstances of their production, connecting one to the other by thenormal relations of succession and similarity’ ([6.3], I, 25–6)In objecting to the search for ‘generating causes’—or indeed causes in general—Comteis giving a rather limited and special use to the term ‘causes’; and he is relying on asimple form of the verification principle with which to exclude such causes. In a genuinescience, he says, when we try to explain an obscure factwe proceed to form a hypothesis, in agreement, as far as possible, with thewhole of the data we are in possession of; and the science, thus left free todevelop itself, always ends by disclosing new observable consequences, tendingto confirm or invalidate, indisputably, the primitive supposition.([6.11] I, 243)However, when we go on to speculate about causes that are unobservable in principle,such as ‘chimerical fluids causing planetary motions’, we are introducing factors that are‘altogether beyond the limit of our faculties’ and must always remain so.What scientific use can there be in fantastic notions about fluids and imaginaryethers, which are to account for the phenomena of heat, light, electricity andmagnetism?… These fluids are supposed to be invisible, intangible, evenimponderable, and to be inseparable from the substances which they actuate.Their very definition shows them to have no place in real science; for thequestion of their existence is not a subject for judgment: it can no more bedenied than affirmed: our reason has no grasp of them at all.([6.11], I, 243)These unobservable causes explain nothing. To use the idea of an unobservable fluidexpanding between molecules as an explanation of the expansion of bodies when heatedis to use one mystery to account for another. When we employ such fictitious entitiesthere is a serious risk that sooner or later we shall take them to be real. They are simplyexamples of the metaphysical forces of whose emptiness we have already been warned([6.11], 1:244–5).
THE CHARACTER AND ORGANIZATION OF THE SCIENCESVery little of Comte’s Law of Three Stages has escaped criticism. In part, Comteencouraged this by his claims concerning its philosophical importance and the major rolethat he took it to play in his system. True, he emphasized that the different sciencesmoved through the three stages at different rates and at different times, and that somesciences—mathematics and astronomy, for example—were already in the positive stagewhereas physics, chemistry and biology were only on the verge of entering it.Nevertheless, Comte left the status of his law as obscure as had the many previousadvocates of such laws of large-scale, inescapable and fixed stages of social evolution. Inhis later work it became clear that he believed that the law provided the basis of his socialreforms: they, after all, were designed to entrench in the new society the methods andoutlook of the final, and positivist, stage of intellectual development. It was much lessclear whether Comte’s law was merely a classification of three types of explanatorytheories, and their accompanying social systems, or whether the law was a testablesociological hypothesis about the three historical phases of human thought. The kinds ofevidence that Comte himself produced in support of his law, and the fact that he took it tobe a truth that he had discovered, indicate that he believed the law to be the most generaland basic of all sociological propositions. In this interpretation it has met with manyobjections. John Stuart Mill produced a number of them in
Auguste Comte and Positivism(1865). It was unlikely, he thought, that mathematical theorems were ever thought todepend on the intervention of divine or metaphysical forces to make them true. ([6.47],47) Nor was it necessary for religious belief to be restricted to the theological andmetaphysical stages, for a positive scientist can believe that God always rules by means offixed laws, and this satisfies the chief characteristic of the positivist phase, namely thebelief that every event, as part of a ‘constant order’, is ‘the invariable consequent of someantecedent condition’. So Comte might be mistaken in claiming that every event has apurely natural antecedent condition ([6.47], 15). He was certainly mistaken, says Mill, innot recognizing that in every field some conclusions have always been drawn fromobservation and experience. For that reason, some portion of every discipline must alwayshave been in the positivist phase ([6.47], 51). However, here Mill’s complaint ismisguided. As early as 1825 Comte had written: ‘In truth, man has never been entirely inthe theological condition. Some phenomena have always existed, so simple and regular,that, from the first, he could only consider them as subjected to natural laws’ ([6.13], 183)Later critics have rejected the very conception of a law of social or intellectualevolution. Karl Popper, for example, has argued that all such ‘laws’ are simply trendsbased on past experience and then projected, unjustifiably, into the future. They aresummaries of previous events but offer no basis for reliable prediction. Because these‘laws’ are actually trends, and thus not accompanied by qualifications that identify theconditions under which the generalizations can be applied, unexpected changes in localconditions can alter the trends and make them inapplicable ([6.53], 105–30) Soembarrassing counter-examples need to be warded off by various defences: as beingsurvivals from the past, as having skipped over crucial stages, as having been subject tounusual rates of change. These devices, says Popper, are necessary because the trendstatementsthemselves can give us no clue as to why the past events to which they referhave ceased to occur; and since the trends are supposed to be the fundamental laws of thesystem there is no additional law available for explaining why they sometimes do notwork. Comte, of course, believed that his law was satisfactory, and he spent a great dealof time and energy in working out what he took to be its ramifications within the varioussciences. He also thought that the law made necessary the adoption of certainphilosophical principles concerning the nature, organization and application of scientificknowledge. As a result of holding these beliefs, Comte could not agree that the Law ofThree Stages was defective without also admitting that its supposed consequences mightbe mistaken. A large portion of his system would then be exposed to threat.Attached to Comte’s law is a hierarchical classification of the six basic sciencesarranged in the order of their decreasing simplicity, generality and abstractness—or in theorder of their increasing complexity, specificity and particularity. First is mathematics; itis followed by physics, chemistry, physiology (biology), and last, social physics, forwhich Comte later invented the name ‘sociology’. Each succeeding science relies onsome of the conclusions and laws of the earlier sciences, but the later science cannot bederived from them and they are independent of it. It is correct to refer to the sciences as‘earlier’ and ‘later’ because their hierarchical order is the approximate order in whichthey developed historically. It is also the order of their decreasing precision, and thus ofthe steps by which human beings advanced from the more precise but simple disciplinesto the less precise but increasingly complex fields. More significantly, says Comte, thisscheme shows us that there can be no rational scientific education, and hence no greatimprovement of scientific knowledge, until each science is studied with a knowledge ofall the sciences on which it is dependent.Physical philosophers cannot understand Physics without at least a generalknowledge of Astronomy; nor Chemists without Physics and Astronomy; norPhysiologists, without Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy; nor, above all, thestudents of Social philosophy, without a general knowledge of all the anteriorsciences.([6.11], 1:32)Moreover, the various sciences must be studied in their proper order. Otherwise, thestudent will not be able to use the indispensable methods and results of the simplerdiscipline in attempting to master the succeeding and more complex science. For thisreason the practice of sociology will require the longest, most arduous, preparation andthe outstanding ability, and disinterestedness, needed to make use of it.Comte was by nature and practice an inveterate and indefatigable classifier.Nevertheless, he gives two rational grounds for producing his scheme of classification.One is that by exhibiting the objectives, methods and limits of the different sciences, andtheir interrelations, we can improve the organization of scientific research. For new work,especially that requiring several disciplines, will be suggested by various features of thegeneral scheme and be fitted into it appropriately. We shall not, for example, wasteenergy in grappling with topics such as psychology for which there is, and can be, nopositive science. The other ground is that the scheme aids us to renovate our system oftheoretical education; the student learns the general concepts, procedures and conclusionsthat belong to the scientific method itself while also learning how they are exemplified inthe various sciences. For until ‘a certain number of general ideas can be acknowledged asa rallying point of social doctrine, the nations will remain in a revolutionary state’. Butonce ‘first principles’ are agreed upon, ‘appropriate institutions will issue from them…forthe causes of disorder will have been arrested by the mere fact of agreement’ and a‘normal state of society’ will ensue. ([6.11], 1:16). The disorder to which Comte referswas that marked both by the July revolution of 1830 in which the French king, Charles X,was forced to abdicate in the face of middle-class opposition, and by the proletarian riotsduring the turbulent years of his successor, Louis Philippe, until he abdicated during theFebruary revolution of 1848.The sociological significance of Comte’s law is that he took each of its three stages tobe closely intertwined—for he could not have said causally connected—with the threephases into which he divided European history, phases characterized by the relativestrength during each period of the temporal and spiritual (religious or philosophical)authorities. Society in the first phase, dominated from the fourth to the fifteenth centuryby Catholicism and feudalism, was organized, in its economic structure, for war, and inits intellectual structure for the need of a priestly caste, with its theological knowledge, toshare power with the nobles of a military court. The latter demanded ‘passive obedience’from the common people, and the former required their ‘mental submission’. In thesecond or metaphysical phase, the Protestant subversion of Papal authority replaced blindfaith with a limited degree of intellectual freedom and political authority for the educatedor the wealthy. At the same time, free cities, the bourgeoisie and science began theirdevelopment and interacted with the effects of the Protestant Reformation. Inconsequence, we are now in the modern phase of industrialism, positive science andpolitical revolutionaries seeking legislative, administrative and social power. Ourtechnological and scientific advances must be matched, therefore, by new forms of socialand political authority. These new forms are what Comte believes that he, and perhaps healone, can offer. He does so in his second major work, the
Système de politique positive,after having described in the
Cours the scientific method and knowledge that are toculminate in the positivist society.However, Comte devoted only two introductory chapters (or lessons), and one laterchapter, of the entire sixty in the
Cours to basic problems in the philosophy of science.These include the scientific status of psychology, the nature of scientific explanation and,of course, the character, scope and application of the Law of Three Stages. Comterejected the study of psychology because he took it to rely on unverifiable introspectionof the intellectual processes and the passions. To this he objected that ‘there can benothing like scientific observation of the passions, except from without, as the stir of theemotions disturbs the observing faculties more or less’. Nor can there be an ‘intellectualobservation of intellectual processes. The observing and observed organ are here thesame, and its action cannot be pure and natural’. The reason, for this, he thinks, is that ‘Inorder to observe, your intellect must pause from activity; yet it is this very activity thatyou want to observe’. Unless your intellect can pause, it cannot observe. But if it doespause, there is nothing left to observe ([6.11], 1:12). Of this argument John Stuart Millcomplained, many years after his initial enthusiasm for Comte’s views had waned, that itis ‘a fallacy respecting which the only wonder is that it should impose on anyone’. For ifwe can learn about the mental life of other people only by observing their behaviour, howcan we ever interpret it unless we are allowed to use our knowledge of our own feelingsand thoughts? We cannot obtain that knowledge merely by observing our own behaviour.In fact, we obtain self-knowledge both by memory and by our ability to attend to ‘aconsiderable number of impressions at once’. Comte’s wish to replace introspection withobservation of behaviour, including physiological reactions, neglects the impossibility ofthen correlating that behaviour with what on his own view is our inaccessible mental life.Mill recognizes that Comte believes that all mental states are produced by—invariablysucceed—states of the brain, and hence that the regularities of succession among mentalstates necessarily depend upon similar regularities among brain states. Nevertheless, evenif this is correct, Mill argues, mental regularities cannot be deduced at present fromphysiological regularities. We are able to investigate the latter only because we have abetter knowledge of the former ([6.47], 63–4). Mill could have added what he also knew:that for all Comte’s argument shows, the actual relation between mental states and brainstates is the reverse of what Comte believes, and that the latter invariably follow on theformer. In any case, the fact that one invariably follows on the other does nothing tomake the later regularity either impossible to observe or in some way fictitious. Thetemporal relation, if any, between the two kinds of regularity is irrelevant to theirobservability—except that if one of them were unobservable in principle we should findit difficult to establish the temporal relationship.Comte’s dismissal of psychology as a genuine science was not based on the scientificevidence available to him, and the rejection led him to neglect describing what Mill diddescribe in Book VI of
A System of Logic (1843), the nature of the relationship betweenpsychological and sociological phenomena—between ‘the operations of mental life’ andthe genuine, or irreducible, laws of society of which Comte was the tireless herald.Comte did assert that the explanation of individual human actions could not be logicallyderived from supposed ‘laws of individual life’, whether these laws were psychologicalor otherwise. For individual actions are the outcome of combined biological and socialfactors that accumulate over time, and thus create the societies to which all actions ofindividual people owe their existence. Because such factors underlie and produce thepsychological features of every person, it is only the fundamental sociological laws thatpermit us to explain those features. The laws do so by explaining the character, origin andchanges of particular types of societies and of civilization taken as a whole. Theseconclusions, popular throughout the nineteenth century, were one answer to thewidespread demand by thoughtful people during that period for a new scientific certaintyto replace their lost religious beliefs. Certainly, the interest of both Comte and Mill insocial reform and laws of social change was motivated by their common need to beassured that civilization was proceeding at a reasonable pace on a worthwhile journey.But Mill disagreed with Comte in two important respects: firstly, in believing thatpsychological laws were a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the explanationof social phenomena; and secondly, in being convinced that there was not, and could notbe, one ultimate law of nature concerning the development of civilization. On this latterpoint Mill wrote that it is a misconception to supposethat the order of succession which we may be able to trace among the differentstates of society…could ever amount to a law of nature… The succession ofstates of the human mind and human society cannot have an independent law ofits own; it must depend on the psychological and ethological laws [of characterformation] which govern the action of circumstances on men and of men oncircumstances. ([6.48], 2:914)In objecting to Comte’s belief that there can be a law of social evolution, and that he hadformulated it in his Law of Three Stages, F.A.Hayek complained that it is ‘a curiousfeature of the Comtean system that this same law which is supposed to prove thenecessity of the new science is at the same time its main and almost sole result’ ([6.34],179) This verdict is somewhat harsh. It is true that Comte formulated few, if any, testablesocial laws—ordinary laws of the constant concomitance, whether of coexistence orsuccession, between identifiable social factors. That was not his aim. Instead, he wastrying to describe the need for a scientific study of social life, the ways in which themethods of the natural sciences could be used to establish a social science, and thegeneral form that its empirical laws would take as the result of genuinely scientificinvestigation. Comte did not, and could not correctly, claim to be practising empiricalsociology, for that discipline had yet to be created. He believed that the task of thesociologist of the future would be to discover social laws that presupposed the existenceof biological laws without being derivable from them—social laws that implied variousregularities of national and individual character, including those of mental life. Suchlaws, he reiterated in the last three volumes (lessons 46–60) of the
Cours, would takeaccount of two facts: the cumulative effect on people’s behaviour of social factors overtime; and the way in which social institutions and customs are always parts of a socialsystem and operate as an ‘ensemble’ of interrelated factors in much the same fashion asdo the organs of an animal’s body.Each law of observed phenomena offers us an explanation because every such lawconnects together under one heading a variety of otherwise disparate facts. Thus thetheory of gravitation explains planetary ‘attraction’ by showing that it conforms to ‘theordinary phenomena which gravity continually produces on the surface of our globe’.The theory brings togetherunder one head the whole immense variety of astronomical facts; exhibiting theconstant tendency of atoms towards each other in direct proportion to thesquares of their distances; whilst the general fact itself is a mere extension ofone which is perfectly familiar to us, and which we therefore say that we know;the weight of bodies on the surface of the earth. As to what weight and attractionare, we have nothing to do with that, for it is not a matter of knowledge at all.Theologians and metaphysicians may imagine and refine about such questions;but positive philosophy rejects them.([6.11], 1:6)The reason they are rejected, says Comte, is that the greatest minds have been able todefine the two properties only in terms of each other, so that terrestrial attraction is onlyweight and weight is nothing more or less than terrestrial attraction. Thus, according toComte, phenomena are observed facts, and facts can be either specific events andprocesses or general laws. Since weight and attraction are not directly observable, theyare not verifiable scientific facts; they are to be classified with ether and heat-fluid asimaginary causes. However, Comte does not make this complaint of the Newtoniantheory that atoms attract each other as the squares of their distances. Nor does he make itwhen discussing indirect observations of the earth’s size. His failure to do so reveals thedifficulties that he creates for his system by not distinguishing between things that areobservable only in principle and those that are observable in practice. As a result, he hasto rely on common sense for deciding which events and processes are observable in anygiven field of science. For this reason, he has trouble in distinguishing betweenmetaphysical and scientific entities, and hence between questions that can be given ascientific answer and those for which this is impossible. So his reliance on the possibilityof future verification to discriminate scientific hypotheses from metaphysical ones isunsupported, for he gives no developed account of any criterion of scientific verifiabilityexcept, as we shall see, to admit entailments that are unobservable but lead to observableconsequences. He leaves unanswered the question ‘what is to count as an observation inscience?’ Yet his Law of Three Stages assumes that he can discriminate between the stageof metaphysical explanation and that of positive scientific explanation.These problems are both a result and a source of Comte’s ideas about causes. As earlyas 1840, William Whewell pointed out that hypotheses about unobservable causes wereoften essential in scientific enquiry. How, for example, he asked, ‘could the phenomenaof polarization have been conceived or reasoned upon, except by imagining a polararrangement of particles, or transverse vibrations, or some equivalent hypothesis?’ Causescould not simply be metaphysical entities ([6.59], 2:268). Mill’s criticism of Comte oncauses was rather different. Comte overlooked the difference, Mill complained, betweenconditional and unconditional regularities of phenomena. The alternation of night and dayis an apparently invariable sequence but it is not a natural law, for it is merely the result ofa genuinely invariable regularity, or unconditional sequence, that of the earth’s rotationaround the sun.The succession of night and day is as much an invariable sequence, as thealternate exposure of opposite sides of the earth to the sun. Yet day and night arenot the causes of one another; why? Because their sequence, invariable in ourexperience, is not unconditionally so: those facts only succeed each other,provided that the presence and absence of the sun succeed each other.([6.47], 57–8)Unconditional regularities, ones in which the antecedent always will be followed by theconsequent ‘as long as the present constitution of things endures’, are laws of causation.Conditional regularities are those in which, as a mere fact of our experience, ‘theantecedent always
has been followed by the consequent’. They are Comte’s laws orregularities of phenomena. They simply record what has happened to date, and thus offerno basis for the explanation, prediction and control of phenomena that is so highly valuedin Comte’s system ([6.47], 57–8).
HYPOTHESES AND SOCIAL LAWSDespite his difficulties with the notions of observation, cause, verification and law ofnature, Comte was one of the earliest social thinkers to stress the indispensability in socialscientific work of the appropriate use of theories and hypotheses. In his essay‘Philosophical Considerations on the Sciences and Savants’ (1825), he wrote:Unless man connects facts with some explanation, he is naturally incapable notmerely of combining and making deductions from them, but even of observingand recollecting them. In a word, it is as impossible to make continuousobservations without a theory of some kind, as to construct a positive theorywithout continuous observations.([6.13], 185)Some years later, in the
Cours, Comte expanded on this view. He suggested that withoutthe help of conjectures (or imaginative hypothesis) we could use neither deduction norinduction:Neither of these methods would help us, even in regard to the simplestphenomena, if we did not begin by anticipating the results, by making aprovisional supposition, altogether conjectural in the first instance, with regardto some of the very notions which are the object of the inquiry. Hence thenecessary introduction of hypotheses into natural philosophy. The method ofapproximation employed by geometers first suggested the idea; and without itall discovery of natural laws would be impossible in cases of any degree ofcomplexity; and in all, very slow.([6.11], 1:241)Comte’s belief in the importance of hypotheses and theories in scientific work leads himto comment on the relatively small role that observation plays in some astronomicalinvestigation:The few incoherent sensations concerned would be, of themselves, veryinsignificant; they could not teach us the figure of the earth, nor the path of aplanet. They are combined and rendered serviceable by long-drawn and complexreasonings; so that we might truly say that thephenomena, however real, are constructed by our understanding.([6.11], 1:151)So in contrast to his own simpler ideas about the limits of observation, Comte hererecognizes the need both for direct observations and for their unobservable entailments,concluding that ‘the perpetual necessity of deducing from a small number of directmeasures, whether angular or horary, quantities which are not themselves immediatelyobservable, renders the use of abstract mathematics indispensable’ ([6.11], 1:151). Ofcourse, this recognition of the necessity of using unobservable quantities makes theexclusion of unobservable metaphysical causes more difficult, for a general criterion thatdistinguishes one from the other has now to be found. This was the task undertaken muchlater by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, and in England by A.J.Ayer, in theform of a search for a reliable principle of verification that would separate sense fromnonsense, and separate theoretically necessary, but fictional, entities from unobservablebut actual ones.‘All sciences,’ Comte wrote, ‘aim at prevision. For the laws established by theobservation of phenomena are generally employed to foretell their succession.’ This is astrue of sociology as it is of chemistry and physics. All sciences use verified conjectures topredict, explain and thus control phenomena ([6.13], 167). However, in the case ofsociology Comte qualifies this view in two respects. The first is that the content of suchlaws, in sociology as in the other sciences, is to be restricted to the succession and coexistenceof observable phenomena, whether direct or indirect—to telling us, in the formof an accurate description, how an event or process takes place, but not why it does. Wecannot explain why a particular sequence occurs even though we can describe how ittakes place. This distinction between the explanatory ‘why?’ and the descriptive ‘how?’ isfound in the work of a long line of eighteenth-century philosophers, including Berkeley,Hume, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, and also in that of the Sicilianphysicist Ruggiero Boscovich. At the end of the nineteenth century the distinctionfeatured prominently in the writings of Ernst Mach, the Austrian physicist who was anearly advocate of logical positivism. In this group, Comte was forthright in claiming thatlaws of phenomena give us genuine explanations because all that we can sensibly want toknow is how, and not why, something happened.The other qualification that Comte applies to the laws of sociology is that they mustconcern large-scale collective events and processes, for it is the general features of anentire society or form of government or economic system, and the types to which theybelong, that are the operative factors in the historical growth of human faculties andachievements. ‘It is clear,’ he says, ‘that the social evolution must be more inevitablysubject to natural laws, the more compound are the phenomena, and the less perceptibletherefore the irregularities which arise from individual instances.’ A closely related pointis ‘that the laws of social dynamics are most recognizable when they relate to the largestsocieties, in which secondary disturbances have the smallest effect’. As a civilizationdevelops, ‘the social movement becomes more distinct and certain with every conquestover accidental influences’. The result, according to Comte, is that ‘these fundamentallaws become the more irresistible, and therefore the more appreciable, in proportion tothe advancement of the civilization upon which they operate’ ([6.11], 2:In describing this qualification, one of central importance in his system, Comte is ledastray, as he often is, by not distinguishing more clearly between a general law and theeffects of its operation in any given instance. Thus what is more recognizable, if it is,than the effect produced by a social law operating in a small society is the effect of thelaw’s operation in a large society. Again, it is not the fundamental laws themselves thatbecome more ‘irresistible’ but their effects in the fields in which they operate. That is, thenature, or content, of the laws does not change; it is the changes in the fields in whichthey operate that make the laws more recognizable and ‘irresistible’. For Comte, thesignificance for scientific procedure of the distinction between large-scale collectiveevents and ‘secondary disturbances’ is considerable. ‘Astronomers,’ he writes,’ incommencing their study of the laws of the planetary movements omitted all considerationof the perturbations. After these laws had been discovered, the modifications could bedetermined’ and brought within the scope of the law that applied to the chief movements.But if we had begun by trying ‘to account for the irregularities, it is plain that no precisetheory could ever have been constructed’.Comte’s conclusion, then, is that, in order to examine the secondary disturbances thataffect the rate of social change but do not fundamentally alter it, sociologists must firstfind the general laws that chiefly control social progress. The counter-influences exertedby secondary factors can then be reduced to the fundamental laws. But how, in Comte’sview, do we discover at the beginning which is the ‘principal movement’ and which thesecondary, or accidental, influences? What makes a sociological conjecture a plausibleone? To this query Comte offers no response, believing, as he did, that the question hasno informative answer other than what he has already said about scientific, and thussociological, procedure in general: a plausible conjecture is one that not only meets theprocedural criteria but takes account of the current state of knowledge within the field.We can only say what makes a particular hypothesis plausible, not what makeshypotheses in general plausible. True, we can exclude certain types. That does not,however, give us a useful characterization of the remainder.Comte’s emphasis on the importance of mass phenomena in sociology largelycontributed to a major difficulty in his account of the structure of sociological laws. Thedifficulty arises from his assumption that, for the most part, sociological laws of thefuture will be direct generalizations from various sorts of aggregates and collectiveevents. It is to assume, for example, that because the Great Depression of the 1930s was acollective event, each singular causal statement about its causes must imply ageneralization about the economic and social causes of depressions in general. Yet this isobviously not true. The fact that our palm tree has been torn up by the roots in a hurricanedoes not imply that there must be a physical law to the effect that all similar trees are tornup in similar hurricanes. What we are committed to by our singular causal statement issimply this: there are generalizations from which, given appropriate statements of initialconditions, our singular statement is derivable, for these generalizations are physical lawsthat we can use to explain the effects of certain physical forces, such as hurricanes of agiven intensity, on specific types of objects under specifiable conditions. Such laws canbe applied to many kinds of situations, and that of our palm tree is merely one of them.Comte thought that the future laws of sociology would be direct generalizations aboutforms of government, armed forces, rebellions, nations and all other collectivities whoseoperations could in some sense be observed directly, or indirectly. Yet it has often beenremarked that the operations and composition of such aggregates are the joint outcome ofhighly varied influences and causes. Hence, if there are any sociological laws to be foundconcerning these collectivities, whether observable or not, the laws must be quite generaland abstract.
THE SOCIAL REFORMEROn the first page of the preface to his second multi-volume work, the
Système depolitique positive (1851–4), Comte says that his philosophical career has been‘homogeneous throughout; the end being clearly aimed at from the first’. He is referringhere to his lifelong project to reform the intellectual, social and economic life ofEuropean society, and to his intention from the beginning of his career, as his earliestwritings show, to develop a social science that would both explain the unhappy state ofthat society and prescribe the appropriate remedies to eliminate its anarchic condition.Many of the early readers of the
Cours, such as Mill, Littré and Whewell, wereunprepared for the kinds of social prescriptions that Comte issued more and more freelyand at ever greater length in his succeeding publications. Comte’s history of science andhis discussion of its methodology had won their professional admiration; and his claimsof the benefits that applied science could bestow on a rejuvenated society, one thatembraced the positivist 7Religion of Humanity, had stirred their religious yearnings forindividual fulfilment through the pursuit of a worthy common goal, that of a rejuvenatedand unified society. In his ‘Introductory Remarks’ to the first volume of the
Système or
System of Positive Polity Comte makes his project of social regeneration quite explicit:it becomes every day more evident how hopeless is the task of reconstructingpolitical institutions without the previous remodelling of opinion and of life. Toform then a satisfactory synthesis of all human conceptions is the most evidentof our social wants: and it is needed equally for the sake of Order and ofProgress. During the gradual accomplishment of this great philosophical work, anew moral power will arise spontaneously throughout the West, which, as itsinfluence increases, will lay down a definite basis for the re-organisation ofsociety. It will offer a general system of education for the adoption of allcivilised nations, and by this means will supply in every department of publicand private life fixed principles of judgment and conduct. Thus the intellectualmovement and the social crisis will be brought continually into close connectionwith each other. Both will combine to prepare the advanced portion of humanityfor the acceptance of a true spiritual power. ([6.6], 1:2)In the fourth and final volume of the
Système Comte outlines the nature of socialreconstruction and true spiritual power, having used the other three volumes to qualifyand amplify the argument of the
Cours. It is in this last volume that Comte advances hisbelief that the cultivation and use of the benevolent emotions produces the fullesthappiness; that the only moral actions are those performed entirely for the good of otherpeople, and that self-gratifying actions are morally worthless and to be eliminated; that allscientific enquiry is to be pursued and valued only in so far as it fulfils human needs anddesires of a practical kind, for disinterested investigation, especially of abstract topics, ismorally unwholesome for most people; that useless plants and animals should bedestroyed along with the major portion of existing printed material; that the practice of artis the most suitable occupation for human beings since it stimulates their worthwhileemotions; and that these views can best be realized by the concerted action of theworking classes and the intellectuals, the latter of whom will later form a priesthood thatwill lead and maintain the public worship of the Religion of Humanity—that is, theworship of the great and valued dead for their past contributions to human happiness.This priesthood will also be in charge of the educational system that will support thedetailed arrangements which Comte laid down for the social and economic tasks to whichthe various classes of citizens will be assigned according to their ability andqualifications. In brief, the reorganized society will have a theoretical class and apractical class: the former will provide the principles and system of general ideas neededfor the guidance of the society; the latter will carry out the administrative and practicalmeasures, such as the distribution of authority and the arrangement of institutions that areneeded to fulfil the general plan.In the early essay, ‘Plan for Reorganizing Society’, Comte remarked on the long spanof time that a scientific or social revolution displayed between the announcement of itsbasic principles and their embodiment in practice. It required a century, he says, for theconception of the elastic force of steam to find a use in machinery, and five centuries forthe ‘triumph of Christian doctrines’ to develop into the Catholic-feudal system of westernEurope—the system upon which his own proposed two classes are modelled. Hence, therate of social change depends both on the adoption of clear, well understood policies orprinciples and on the amount of effort put into carrying them out over a long period. Thisshows us ‘the absurdity of attempting to improvise a complete plan for reorganizingsociety down to its smallest details’ ([6.13], 122). Yet this absurdity is what Comteembraces late in the
Système. There he proposes that school ‘instruction will occupyseven years, during which each pupil remains throughout under the same teacher,teaching, be it added, both sexes, though in separate classes’. Every school will needseven priests and three vicars. Each professor will give two lectures a week for tenmonths, in addition to a month of examinations. ‘Every school is annexed to the templeof the district, as is the presbytery, the residences of the ten members of the sacerdotalcollege and of their families’. The upshot of these arrangements is ‘that the spiritualwants of the West may be duly met by a corporation of twenty thousand philosophers, ofwhom France would have the fourth’ ([6.6], 4:223). It is true that Comte warns us thatthese numerals will be corrected when better data become available. However, many ofthe other details will remain, and throughout the volume Comte provides a very largenumber of fixed and highly specific recommendations.The philosophical interest of these Utopian schemes is slight, but their presence clearlyreveals that the dominant impulse in Comte’s thought is social reform. For him,philosophical discussions are just a necessary stage in that regenerative process. For thatreason, they often form part of his grand system without themselves being systematic orthorough, and often without being advanced or defended by argument. If the distinctivefeature of philosophy is, in John Passmore’s phrase, ‘its being a critical discussion
ofcritical discussion’, then Comte is a philosopher only on rare occasions. Moreover, heoften proceeds to his conclusions without either first- or second-order critical discussion.For instance, in his treatment of astronomy in the
Cours he begins by asserting that‘astronomical phenomena are the most general, simple, and abstract of all’ and that thestudy of science must begin with them ([6.11], 1:28). However, this claim depends uponthe truth of Comte’s later and additional belief that in the case of the planets ‘we maydetermine their forms, their distances, their bulk, and their motions, but we can neverknow anything of their chemical or mineralogical structure; and much less of organizedbeings living on their surface’. Not only can we ‘never learn their internal constitution’,and the amount of heat absorbed by their atmospheres, but their mean temperatures are‘for ever excluded from our recognition’. The laws of astronomy must therefore be thelaws solely of the geometrical and mechanical features of the heavenly bodies ([6.11],1:148–9) It is this limitation achieved by tendentious definition that makes astronomicalphenomena most general, or simple, and abstract; for knowledge, such as we now have,of the chemical and physical structure of astronomical bodies would convert portions ofastronomy into ‘celestial’ physics and chemistry, thus destroying, for Comte, itsgenerality and abstractness.Again, in his discussion of intellectual progress Comte says of truth,our doctrines never represent the outer world with exact fidelity. Nor is itneedful that they should. Truth, in any given case, social or individual, meansthe degree of exactness in representation possible at the time. For positive logicis but the construction of the simplest hypothesis that will explain the whole ofthe ascertained facts.Any superfluous complication, besides causing a waste of labour, would be adownright error, even though a fuller acquaintance of facts might at a later timejustify it. In fact, without this rule subjectivity runs wild, and the mind tendstoward madness… But in proportion as our observations are extended, we areforced to adopt more complicated theories in order adequately to represent facts.([6.6], 3:19)There are two points of immediate interest here. The first is that the notion of ‘exactnessin representation’ is ill prepared to stand unsupported as it does. For Comte,representation or enunciation of facts—whether the facts are statements of observation orstatements of a lawlike kind—can have meaning, and thus be scientific, only if they aretestable. The construction of simple explanatory hypotheses is an essential part of theprocess of confirmation that establishes the claim of factual statements to have meaning.But what makes a testable representation, of varying degrees of exactness, a true onerather than merely a meaningful one? On this point Comte is unhelpful. On the secondpoint he is little better. Permitting undue complication of hypotheses has often beencriticized for leading us away from the truth, but seldom for allowing, or perhapsencouraging, the wilder flights of imagination. It is true that unduly complicatedhypotheses are sometimes the expression of unchecked imagination although, as Comtehimself points out, complex hypotheses are often required. However, what injunctions ofsimplicity, such as Occam’s Razor, are designed to do is to smooth the path to adequatehypotheses, not to constrain imaginative and complex conjectures. Whether they areunnecessarily complex is often impossible to determine until simpler testable onesbecome available, and even then the nature of the criterion of simplicity may itself beopen to debate.Against such defects in Comte’s architectonic method must be set his achievements,near-achievements and fertile errors. His outline of sociology as a new science of socialsystems, one using empirical data and testable laws to study collective behaviour,combines all three of these characteristics. Before Comte, many writers had advocatedthe creation of a natural science of politics, but it was Comte who produced a detaileddescription of its future structure, subject-matter, the scientific procedures appropriate toits topics and the relationship of sociology both to the other sciences in the hierarchy ofscientific knowledge and to political action. Social behaviour in the form ofinterconnected practices, systems and institutions is the cumulative outcome of thehistorical development of a society in its conformity to the Law of Three Stages, eachstage bearing within itself the seeds of the next one. In the case of Europe, Comte thoughtthat each of these intellectual stages was correlated with a distinct type of social system:the theological stage with a theological-military system; the metaphysical stage with ametaphysical-legal system; and the positive stage with a scientific-industrial system. Alarge portion of the second half of the
Cours, and also volume three of the
Système, aredevoted to the characteristics, historical development and geographical location of thethree systems and their correlated stages. Comte’s procedure was to begin with what hetook to be the basic general properties of the systems—their types of religion,government, commerce, industry and art, for example—and then to account for eithertheir maintenance or their changes by means of reference to more specific factors andlocal conditions. He did this because he believed that our knowledge of the three stagesand their associated systems was superior to our knowledge of particular institutions andcustoms. Knowing the Law of Three Stages and their systems we know both the past andpresent of civilization better than we know the sub-sections that they so stronglyinfluence.In a general way, we can predict, explain, and thus control, aggregate social behaviourwhereas we often cannot do this in cases of individual or sectional or local behaviour andbeliefs. Our knowledge of the laws of social wholes, and our ability to observe them, isprimary; our information about small-scale phenomena is derivative from that we have onlarge-scale ones. ‘All political action,’ Comte says, ‘is followed by a real and durableresult, when it is exerted in the same direction as the force of civilization, and aims atproducing changes which the latter necessitates. On every other hypothesis it exerts noinfluence or a merely ephemeral one’ ([6.13], 148). The phrase ‘force of civilization’refers to the Law of Three Stages that ‘rigorously determines the successive statesthrough which the general development of the human race must pass’. Because ‘this lawnecessarily results from the instinctive tendency of the human race to perfect itself…it isas completely independent of our control as are the individual instincts the combinationof which produces this permanent tendency’ ([6.13], 146). One of the obvious benefits ofour knowledge of this rigorous succession, according to Comte, is this:When in tracing an institution and a social idea, or a system of institutions and acomplete doctrine, from their birth to their present stage, we find that, from agiven epoch, their influence has always been either diminishing or increasing,we can foretell with complete certainty the destiny which awaits them… Theperiod of their fall or triumph may even be calculated, within narrow limits,from the extent and rapidity of the variations observed.([6.13], 151)Claims to foreknowledge of the pattern of social history held special appeal for aneducated, and largely Christian, audience in the nineteenth century. Many people agreedwith Comte—and with such groups as the British Chartists, the young Hegelians and laterthe Marxists—that industrial capitalism was in an economic, social and moral crisis. Anexplanation of its sources and ‘prevision’ of its outcome were constantly called for, andequally often supplied either as a supplement to, or substitute for, Christian eschatology,these various considerations emerge very clearly in Harriet Martineau’s preface to hertranslation into English in 1853 of the
Cours. ‘We are living in a remarkable time,’ shewrote, ‘when the conflict of opinions renders a firm foundation of knowledgeindispensable.’ She thought that ‘for want of an anchorage for their convictions’ a greatnumber of people are now ‘alienated for ever from the kind of faith which sufficed for allin an organic period which has passed away’. No new firm and clear conviction had takenits place, and although ‘The moral dangers of such a state of fluctuation are fearful in theextreme’, Comte’s work, she believed, was ‘unquestionably the greatest single effort toobviate this kind of danger’ ([6.11], 1:xxiii–xxiv). For in his work ‘We find ourselvesliving, not under capricious and arbitrary conditions…but under great, general, invariablelaws, which operate on us as a part of the whole’. Martineau concluded that despiteComte’s singular and wearisome style with its ‘constant repetition’ and overloadedsentences, positive philosophy opened boundless prospects. It had established, amongmany other ‘noble truths’, that ‘The law of progress is conspicuously at work throughouthuman history’ ([6.11], 1:xxx).
COMTE’S INFLUENCEAfter Comte’s death, when positivism had to make its own way without the guidance ofits first ‘High Priest of the Religion of Humanity’, it exerted influence in several ways.The first, and least significant, was by doctrinal descendants and proselytizingenthusiasts, and by friendly critics. Prominent in the last group was Emile Littré, editor ofthe
Journal des savants, and a decade later of the highly regarded
Dictionnaire de lalangue française. In the former two groups were Pierre Lafitte, a mathematics teacher notfavoured by Comte as his successor but who afterwards was the Professor of History ofScience at the Collège de France, and an English band consisting, among others, ofEdward Beasly, Professor of History, University College, London; Frederick Harrison,the lawyer, philosopher and prolific author; F.S. Marvin, historian and author of
Comte:the Founder of Sociology (1936); and the Anglican clergyman, and former Oxford tutor,Richard Congreve, who in 1867 founded the London Positivist Society and wrote that‘Positivism is the one idea of my life’ ([6.56], 49). Both the British and the Frenchsocieties founded journals that lasted for several decades, and both societies underwent along series of internal quarrels and schisms. Nevertheless, the various positivist societieswith their small number of members, and a Parisian lending library, kept up a programmeof meetings, lectures and courses, in addition to their doctrinal rivalry, until the FirstWorld War. They strongly agitated for, and gave firm support to, the establishment ofboth sociology and the history of science as academic fields of study, and they alsocampaigned, with some success in France, for a scientific and secular education inschools. However, their more ambitious hopes of arousing popular support for the futureReligion of Humanity were never fulfilled.A second, and more important, influence exerted by positivism on the intellectual lifeof the nineteenth century was independent of both the organized piety of the positivistsocieties and the messianic aspirations of Comte himself. Through the early enthusiasmof Mill, a number of eminent and able people in Britain came to read and appreciate the
Cours. They included not only Grote, Whewell and Molesworth, but also G.H.Lewes,consort of George Eliot, and author of
The Biographical History of Philosophy (1845–6)which favoured positivism, and of
Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences (1853); GeorgeEliot herself who was impressed by religious positivism; Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridgephilosopher, who later criticized Comte’s views; John Morley, editor, biographer ofGladstone and highly successful politician; and John Austin, one of the most influentialjurists of the nineteenth century. Of these people only Mill and Lewes were eversubstantially influenced by Comte in their work, but the earlier editions of Mill’s
ASystem of Logic (1843) owed much to Comte’s methodology and the later Mill stilldefended the Law of Three Stages. In France, the historian of science Paul Tannery, aneditor of the standard edition of Descartes’
Works (1897–1910), was said to havebelieved that Comte’s influence on him was stronger than that of any other thinker([6.56], 133). The philosopher of science Emile Meyerson was a friendly critic of Comte,and in
Identity and Reality (1908) respectfully criticized Comte’s ideas on cause,scientific laws, psychology and physics. Claude Bernard, famous as a physiologist andfor his book
An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), was thoughtto have been a disciple of Comte until middle age; after 1865 he became a resolute antipositivist([6.56], 15). These three men are merely a small sample of Comte’s seriousreaders in France during the half-century after his death. They, like many otherphilosophers, scientists and historians, took the reading and study of the
Cours forgranted. They absorbed from it the conceptions that seemed to them valuable anddiscarded or ignored the remainder. Hardly any of the eminent ones among them,however sympathetic to some of Comte’s views, could be described as disciples. In thatrespect they would have bitterly disappointed Comte’s expectations for the future successof his system.Another and most important way in which Comte’s influence made itself prominentwas through the young Emile Durkheim, the man who in 1887 was the first personappointed to lecture on sociology in a French university. For a few years Durkheim was adiscriminating enthusiast for Comte’s conception of the nature of sociology; he adoptedmuch of Comte’s belief in the significance of the collective mind in society as the creatorand sustainer of religious and moral attitudes, the guarantor of social stability, and thechief bulwark against the loss of self-esteem by the members and their accompanyingalienation from common values. However, even though Durkheim’s second book,
TheRules of Sociological Method (1895), attacks positivist claims on many issues, he laterreiterated his debt to Comte and ‘continued to recommend the
Cours as the best possibleinitiation into the study of sociology’ ([6.56], 147). Other sociologists of this period, suchas Gabriel Tarde, were similarly both critical and appreciative of Comte’s work. Much oftheir kind of discussion was incorporated into the academic teaching of sociology andanthropology throughout Europe and America, and in that form has continued toinfluence social science until the present day.In its devotion to major social reform, positivism found a responsive audience amongthe early Fabians. Like Durkheim, they rejected the anarchic, irrational, inefficientindividualism that they took to be the hallmark of materialistic capitalism. Like Saint-Simon and Comte, they wished to create a scientifically organized society in which, touse Gertrude Himmelfarb’s words,the parts were arranged, ordered, regulated, planned, so as to make for the mostefficient and equitable whole. Such a society could come about only through theconscious effort of intellectuals and ‘scientists’…who were prepared to dedicatethemselves to the public good and bring their superior reason to bear upon thereorganization of the public order.([6.35],359–60)The Fabian collectivist society of the future would be led and presided over, as were theutopias of Comte and Saint-Simon, by a theoretical class devoted to the social good andthe elimination of competitiveness. It would be ascetic and non-materialistic as waspositivism, and yet evolutionary rather than revolutionary—and so anti-Marxist. TheseFabians were not, of course, religious positivists, but as socialists they claimed thepolitically conservative Comte as one of their own. Five of the seven authors of
FabianEssays (1889) were positivist sympathizers:Beatrice Webb (then Beatrice Potter) had been familiar with Comte from herschoolgirl reading of Mill, Harrison, and George Eliot; by 1884 her diarycontained frequent references to Comte and excerpts from his writings. Longbefore he met her, Sidney Webb had heard about Comte at the Zetetical Societyand later at the London Positivist Society. He and his friends Sydney Olivier, afellow clerk in the Colonial Office, and Graham Wallas, a young schoolmaster,were so taken with Comte that they embarked upon a systematic reading of allhis works.([6–35], 358–9)These four were not the only Fabians who were sympathetic to positivism. Its project ofindividual moral reform produced by social regeneration, the latter itself the result of theapplication of scientific knowledge and method to a sick society, had widespread appealin the late nineteenth century. It is an appeal which—however viciously distorted byvarious communist regimes in the twentieth century—is still with us today.
BIBLIOGRAPHYWorks—French editions6.1
Système de politique positive, 4 vols, Paris, 1851–4; reprint Osnabrück: O. Zeller,1967.6.2
Oeuvres, 12 vols, reprint Paris: Editions Anthropos, 19686.3
Cours de philosophie positive, ed. M.Serres et al., 2 vols, Paris: Hermann, 1975.6.4
Lettres d’Auguste Comte à John Stuart Mill, 1841–1846, Paris: E.Leroux, Paris:1877.6.5
Correspondance Générale et Confessions, ed. P.Berredo Carneiro and P. Arnaud, 8vols, Paris: Mouton, and J.Vrin, 1923–90.
English translations6.6
System of Positive Polity, trans. J.H.Bridges, Frederic Harrison et al., 4 vols, London:1875: reprint New York: Burt & Frankin, 1966.6.7
A General View of Postivism, trans. J.H.Bridges of
Discours sur l’ensemble dupositivisme (1848), London: W.Reeves, 1880.6.8
Appeal to the Conservatives, trans. T.C.Donkin and R.Congreve of
Appel auxConservateurs d’ordre et progrès (1855); London: Trübner, 1889.6.9
Religion of Humanity… Subjective Synthesis, vol. I, trans. R.Congreve of
Synthèsesubjective (1856), London: Trübner, 1891.6.10
The Catechism of Positive Religion, trans. R.Congreve of
Catéchisme positiviste(1852), London: Kegan Paul, 1891; reprint Clifton, N.J.: Augustus Kelley, 1973.6.11
The Positive Philosophy, trans. and condensed by H.Martineau, 3 vols (1853), from
Cours de Philosophie positive (1830–42), London: George Bell, 1896.6.12
Confessions and Testament of Auguste Comte and his Correspondence withClothilde de Vaux, trans. A.Crompton of
Testament d’Auguste Comte etcorrespondance avec Clothilde de Vaux (1884), Liverpool: H. Young & Sons, 1910.6.13
The Crisis of Industrial Civilization: The Early Essays of Auguste Comte, London:Heinemann, 1974; reprint of general appendix, vol. 4,
System of Positive Polity.Discussions6.14 Acton, H.B. ‘Comte’s Positivism and the Science of Society’,
Philosophy, 26 (99)(1951): 291–310.6.15 Annan, N.
The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Thought, London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1959.6.16 Arnaud, P.
Sociologie de Comte, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969.6.17 Aron, R.
Main Currents in Sociological Thought, trans. R.Howard and H. Weaver, 2vols, vol. 1, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965.6.18 Bréhier É.
The Nineteenth Century: Period of Systems, 1800–1830 (1932), trans.W.Baskin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.6.19 Brown, R.
The Nature of Social Laws, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1984.6.20 Caird, E.
The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte, Glasgow: James Maclehose,1885.6.21 Charlton, D.G.
Positivist Thought in France, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.6.22 Ducassé, P.
Méthode et Intuition chez Auguste Comte, Paris: Félix Alcan, 1939.6.23 Dumas, G.
Psychologie de Deux Messies, Positivistes Saint-Simon et AugusteComte, Paris: Félix Alcan, 1905.6.24 Durkheim, E.
The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), trans. S.A.Solovay andJ.H.Mueller, New York: Free Press, 1964.6.25——
Socialism and Saint-Simon (1928), trans. C.Sattler, London: Routledge, 1959.6.26 Eisen, S. ‘Herbert Spencer and the Spectre of Comte’,
The Journal of BritishStudies, 7 (1967): 48–67.6.27 Evans-Pritchard, E.E.
The Sociology of Comte: An Appreciation, Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1970.6.28 Fletcher, R.
Auguste Comte and the Making of Sociology, London: Athlone Press,1966.6.29 Flint, R.
Historical Philosophy in France, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1893.6.30 Gouhier, H.G.
La Jeunesse d’Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, 3 vols,Paris: J.Vrin, 1933–41.6.31——
La Vie d’Auguste Comte, Paris: J.Vrin, 1965.6.32 Hawkins, R.L.
Auguste Comte and the United States, Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1936.6.33——
Positivism in the United States (1853–1861), Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1938.6.34 Hayek, F.A.
The Counter-Revolution of Science, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955.6.35 Himmelfarb, G.
Poverty and Compassion, New York: Knopf, 1991.6.36 Höffding, H.
A History of Modern Philosophy, 2 vols, vol. 2, New York: Doverreprint, 1955.6.37 Kremer-Marietti, A.
Auguste Comte et la théorie sociale du positivisme, Paris:Seghers, 1970.6.38 Laudan, L. ‘Towards a Reassessment of Comte’s “Méthode Positive”’,
Philosophyof Science, 37 (1971):35–53.6.39 Lévy-Bruhl, L.
The Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. K.de Beaumont-Klein,London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1903.6.40 Lewes, G.H.
The History of Philosophy, From Thales to Comte, 4th edn, 2 vols, vol.2, London: Longmans, 1781.6.41 Littré, E.
Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, Paris: Hachette, 1863; reprintWestmead, Gregg, 1971.6.42 Manuel, F.E.
The New World of Henri Saint-Simon, Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1956.6.43——
The Prophets of Paris, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.6.44 Marvin, F.S.
Comte, The Founder of Sociology, reprint, New York: Russell &Russell, 1965.6.45 Meyerson, E.
Identity and Reality (1908), trans. K.Lowenberg, London: Allen &Unwin, 1930.6.46 Michel, U.
La Théorie du savoir dans la philosophie d’Auguste Comte, Paris: FélixAlcan, 1928.6.47 Mill, J.S.
Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), 2nd edn, London: Trübner, 1866.6.48——
A System of Logic, 2 vols, Toronto and London: University of Toronto Pressand Routledge, 1974.6.49——
Autobiography and Literary Essays, Toronto and London: University ofToronto Press and Routledge, 1981.6.50 Passmore, J.
The Perfectibility of Man, London: Duckworth, 1970.6.51 Pickering, M. ‘Comte and German Philosophy’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 50(3)(1989):443–63.6.52 Plamenatz, J.
Man and Society, 2 vols, vol. 2, London: Longmans, 1963.6.53 Popper, K.
The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge, 1957.6.54 Scharff, R.C. ‘Mill’s Misreading of Comte on “Interior Observation”’,
Journal ofthe History of Philosophy, 27 (4) (1989):559–72.6.55——‘Positivism, Philosophy of Science, and Self-Understanding in Comte and Mill’,
American Philosophical Quarterly, 26 (4) (1989):253–68.6.56 Simon, W.M.
European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century, Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1963.6.57 Turgot, A.
On Progress, Sociology and Economics, trans. and ed. R.L.Meek,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.6.58 Vernon, R. ‘Auguste Comte and the Withering-Away of the State’,
Journal of theHistory of Ideas, 45 (4) (1984):549–66.6.59 Whewell, W.
The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols, London: Parker,1840.6.60 Whittaker, T.
Comte and Mill, London: Constable, 1908.6.61——
Reason: A Philosophical Essay, Cambridge: ambridge University Press, 1934.6.62 Wright, T.R.
The Religion of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1986.