comte, auguste - the positive philosophy vol III

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tion. We may attribute to the prevalence of this great error the irrational disdain of the Middle Ages entertained in our time, even by Catholics who do not appreciate the theory of Catholicism, and also the blind admiration for the polytheistic system of antiquity, which prevailed so deplorably during the revolutionary period, though Catholicism had before rightly assigned an inferior position to the civilization of that regime and again, to this error is owing the exclusive predilection of Protestantism for the primitive church and its yet more injurious enthusiasm for the Hebrew theocracy. The great conception of social progress has thus been overlaid, and wellnigh lost; saved only, as we shall presently see, by that growth of new social elements which has proceeded amidst, all the disturbances of the critical period.

Another consequence of the error hats been that all ambition, political and philosophical, has tended towards the absolute concentration of the two kinds of power. Kings dreamed of the Mohammedan type as the ideal of modern monarchy; priests, and especially the Protestant clergy, dreamed inversely of a kind of restoration of the Jewish or Egyptian theocracy; and philosophers renewed, under a different form, the primitive Greek dream of that metaphysical theocracy which they called the reign of Mind. The last is lone the most dangerous of these dreams, because it seduces the greatest number of active minds. Among the thinkers of the progressive school who have devoted themselves to social speculations, within three centuries, Leibnitz seems to me to be the only one who has entirely escaped the delusion. Descartes would doubtless have done so, if it had lain in his way to state his deliberate view of the subject, as Aristotle alone did in ancient times: but Bacon certainly participated in this illusion of philosophic pride. We shall hereafter consider the serious consequences of this view: and this brief notice of it is merely historical.

Finally, this capital error keeps up a habit of social disturbance by leading men to seek the satisfaction of social needs in change of legal institutions; whereas, in general, the thing wanted is a Preparatory reformation of principles and manners. The temporal dictatorship, whether monarchical or aristocratic, was little aware of its own responsibility when it made Political questions of all that had hitherto been moral. It matters little that such avidity for power brought on its own punishment: but the results to society have been most disastrous, as we see in a long series of disorders and disappointments, and in the mischievous operations of quacks and fanatics who see, or pretend to see, the solu-

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tion of all social difficulties in barren political revolutions: and, during the quietest times, in that narrow view which embraces only the immediate redress of social wants, when moral means, extensive and longprepared, are the true remedy. All political parties agree in proscribing lofty and comprehensive speculation, because all are alike involved in the error which causes the low and material view: and it is only under the positive philosophy that the true solution can be found.

As for the moral evils engendered by the Protestant introduction of the critical doctrine,—we need not dwell long on them, serious as they are; for they are too evident to require explanation. Considering that every mind was confided to its own decision on subjects the most important, and about which it must be least disinterested, the wonder is that the moral dissolution has not been complete. That it has not been so,—that morality has remained stable in the most evident cases,—is owing first to the spontaneous rectitude of human nature, Which it is impossible altogether to corrupt: and next, to the power of modern habits of steady toil, which divert the nations of our day from the social extravagances into which, in their position the idle populations of Rome and Greece would certainly have fallen. Protestantism must be charred with have seriously impaired the fundamental principles of morality, both domestic and social, which Catholicism had established, under precepts and prohibitions which will be sanctioned, in their spirit, more and more emphatically as the positive philosophy prevails. It was a sound observation of Hume’s, that the Lutheran revolution was aided by the passions of ecclesiastics who desired to release from celibacy, and the rapacity of nobles who coveted the territorial possessions of the clergy; and it was a necessary consequence of the lowered position of the moral authority, that it lost the power, and even the will, to sustain the inviolability of the most elementary rules of morality against the attacks of the critical spirit. I need point out only the permission of divorce, the relaxation of rules about the marriage of relations; and, as a decisive instance, the disgraceful dogmatic consultation by which the chiefs of Protestantism, with Luther at their head solemnly authorized bigamy in the case of a German prince. and again, the accommodating temper of the founders of the English Church towards the shocking weaknesses of their strange national pope. Catholicism was never thus openly degraded; but its growing weakness produced nearly equivalent effects. It was unable to repress the license of the time, in public speech and private act; and it so far supported moral excess that it roused a spirit of rebel-

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lion against its own authority by its repression of mental development. Thus the various religious doctrines showed themselves inadequate to the moral guidance of mankind; either by using their intellectual liberty to impair the principles of morals, or by proving their impotence to keep moral order; or, by discrediting invariable laws by obstinately connecting them with articles of belief which human reason could never again receive. We shall perceive more and more as we proceed that morality, so far from having any occasion to dread philosophical analysis, can find a solid intellectual foundation only outside of all theology whatever; resting on a rational appreciation of human dispositions, actions, and habits, according to their total results, public and private. It was necessary to say thus much, to mark the period at which religious faith began to lose its power of moral guidance, and to show its tendency, so striking for three centuries past, to promote hatred and disturbance rather than order and charity. We see, now, that the degeneracy dates from the political degradation of the spiritual power, the dignity and purity of the moral laws being deeply impaired by their being subjected to the ascendancy of the passions which they were intended to rule.

We have now observed the advent of the negative philosophy, and of the corresponding social crises. The last phase remains to be re- viewed,—that which presents the revolutionary doctrine in its full development. This phase however is little more than a protraction of the last, and we shall have a sufficient view, generally speaking, of the historical course of the revolutionary philosophy if we merely attach deistical consequences to Protestant principles. Our attention must henceforth be concentrated on the spiritual disorganization, till we have to notice the great final explosion of the temporal power in connection with the reorganization which will be the closing topic of this Work.

We give too much credit to human intelligence if we suppose that it could have dispensed with this final elaboration of the critical doctrine, on the ground that its great principles having been furnished by Protestantism, the consequences of those principles might be left to develop themselves without assistance from any systematic formation of negative doctrine. In the first place, human emancipation must thus have been seriously retarded, as we shall admit if we consider how resigned the majority of men are to a state of logical inconsistency like that sanctioned by Protestantism, and especially when the understanding is still subject to the theological system. In countries where the philosophical movement has not fully penetrated the national mind, as England and

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the United States, we see the Socinians and other sects, which have rejected almost all the essential dogmas of Christianity, persisting in their original restriction of free inquiry within the purely biblical circle, and fostering a thoroughly theological hatred towards all who have pursued their spiritual liberty beyond that boundary. Moreover, it is evident that the expansion of the revolutionary doctrine would have been wholly repressed without the deistical movement which characterized the last century; for Protestantism, after having introduced critical principles, always abandoned them when they could be dispensed with, using its triumph to organize a retrograde system of resistance. It was thus with Lutheranism, which was as hostile to mental liberty as Catholicism; and thus it was with every form of Christianity, according to its power, till the triumph of the Anglican church and the expulsion of the Calvinists from France gave a systematic character to Protestant discouragement of progress. Protestantism having thus seceded frown the progressive movement, which it had hitherto represented, it became necessary that new and more consistent leaders should assume the conduct of the march; and we find in this case the usual correspondence between great social exigencies and their natural means of satisfaction. The Protestant period had brought the ancient social system to such a state of decay that it could not guide, but only impede the formation of modern society, so that a universal and decisive revolution was seen to be impending, by such thinkers for instance as Leibnitz. On the other hand the system would have lasted for an indefinite time, in its state of decay, and without fulfilling its professions, in virtue of its mere inertia, if the revolutionary ferment, which we shall see more of presently, had not entered in to direct the movement of decomposition towards that regeneration which is its necessary issue. The heretical movement which I before noticed aided the systematic formation of the negative philosophy. We have see n how ancient was the tendency to entire emancipation from theology, as when, in the decline of polytheism, there were Greek schools which speculatively transcended the limits of simple monotheism. At that time, when the very conception of a true natural philosophy did not exist, such an effort could issue in nothing but a kind of metaphysical pantheism, in which nature was abstractly deified; but there was little difference in fact between such a doctrine and that which has since been improperly called atheism; and it resembled it particularly in its radical opposition to all religious beliefs susceptible of real organization,— which is the point that concerns us here, where our business is with

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negative ideas. This anti-theological disposition was overborne during the long continuance of Catholicism, but it never disappeared entirely, and we see its traces in the whole course of the persecution of the philosophy of Aristotle, in consequence of its sanction of the tendency. We trace it again in the predilection for the freest thinkers of Greece, who indirectly influenced many speculative men, and chiefly among the high Italian clergy, who were then the most thinking portion of mankind. Without actively interfering in the destruction of the Catholic system, the anti-theological spirit was stimulated and expanded by it: and in the sixteenth century, while leaving Protestantism to its world, it profited by the half-freedom afforded by philosophical discussion to develop its own intellectual influence, as we see be the illustrious examples of Erasmus, Cardan, Ramus, Montaigne, and others, confirmed be the artless complaints of true Protestants of the spread of an anti-theological spirit, which threatened the success of their nascent reform by showing forth the decrepitude of the system to which it related. Religious dissent was naturally favourable to the tendency, which ceased to become a source of mere personal satisfaction to leading minds, and extended to the multitude, to whom it served as the only refuge from the fury and extravagance of the various theological systems, which had now degenerated into mere principles of oppression or disturbance. The negative philosophy was, in fact, systematized about the middle of the seventeenth century, and not in the subsequent century, which was occupied by its universal propagation. Its advent was powerfully aided by an intellectual movement, which is perpetually confounded with it, but which is far nobler in nature and destination. The positive spirit had hitherto been concentrated upon obscure scientific researches; but, from the sixteenth century onwards, and especially during the first half of the seventeenth, it began to disclose its philosophical character,—no less hostile to metaphysics than to theology, but obliged to ally itself with the one to exclude the other. Its influence arose from its favouring the invasion of faith by reason, by rejecting, provisionally at least, all articles of belief that were not demonstrated. Bacon and Descartes could hardly have entertained any anti-religious design, scarcely reconcilable with the object of their active solicitude. but it is unquestionable that the preparatory state of full intellectual enfranchisement, which they prescribed to human reason must henceforth lead the best minds to entire theological emancipation at a time when the mental awakening had been otherwise in this respect sufficiently stimulated. The result was the more certain

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from its being unsuspected, for it was the consequence of a simple logical preparation, the abstract necessity of which could not be denied by any sensible man. Such is, in fact, the irresistible spiritual ascendancy of revolutions which relate purely to method, the dangers of which cannot commonly be perceived till it is too late to restrain therm. While the best minds were thus inevitably influenced, the multitude were troubled, at the moment of shaken conviction, by the rising and growing conflict between scientific discovery and theological views. The memorable persecution of Galileo for his demonstration of the earths motion must have made more unbelievers than all Jesuit intrigues and preachings could retrieve or save,—to say nothing of the exhibition that Catholicism made of itself as hostile to the purest and noblest aspirations of the human mind. Many other cases, less conspicuous but perfectly analogous, brought out this antagonism more and more towards the end of the seventeenth century. In both its aspects this influence, acting on all orders of minds, wrought against the beliefs which contended for the moral government of mankind, and therefore in favour of a final emancipation of human reason from all theology whatever,—the incompatibility of theology with the spread of genuine knowledge being thereby directly revealed.

The ascendancy of the negative philosophy was assisted by the good and the bad passions of men, as elicited by the circumstances of the time. The spirit of religious emancipation is closely connected with that of free individual activity; and there can be no doubt that the struggle against the retrograde dictatorship of the seventeenth century roused all the generous passions in favour of the critical doctrine, which, in its systematized condition, was the only universal organ of social progress. On the other hand, negative doctrine, speculative and social, is congenial with the worst parts of human nature. Vanity is pampered by the sovereignty given to every man by the right of private judgment. The term freethinker has been sufficiently abused by theological hatred, but, necessary as the title was to express resistance to intellectual bondage, it indicates also that no equivalent is provided for the ancient guidance. Ambition accepts with eagerness the principle of the sovereignty of the people, which opens a political career to all who can achieve it. Pride and envy are gratified by the proclamation of equality, which may be either a generous sentiment of universal fraternity or a hatred of superiority, according to the natures that entertain it. In short, the mental influences which conduced to the formation of the negative philosophy

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were strengthened by powerful moral influences, tending in their combination to insurrectionary crises, in which there is usually a welcome ready for those who fret under the habitual restraint of social laws.

In surveying the history of the critical philosophy, we must carefully separate the spiritual from the temporal case. The latter was indispensable to the political action of the revolutionary doctrine; but it could not take form till the spiritual function was accomplished. The philosophical emancipation was the most important, because it brought the political after it; and the political could not have occurred without the philosophical. The survey is, in fact, naturally divided into three portions: the first comprehending the systematic formation of the critical doctrine; the second, the universal propagation of the movement of mental emancipation; and the third, the political emancipation, which is the complement of the spiritual.

The first operation, though commonly referred to the eighteenth century, certainly belongs to the seventeenth. Arising out of the most advanced Protestantism, it grew in silence in countries which, like England and Holland, had been chief seats of Protestant change. Its organs, like those of Protestantism, must be derived from the metaphysical school. which had risen to power in the chief universities; but they were genuine philosophers, seriously at work, in their own way, on the whole range of human speculation, and not at all like the mere men of letters of a succeeding age. Three great men led the philosophical revo- lution,—men mutually unlike and unequal, but concurring in the result; Hobbes first, then Spinoza, and finally Bayle, who, a Frenchman by birth, was obliged to go to Holland to work freely. Spinoza, under the special influence of the Cartesian principle, no doubt aided the emancipation of many systematic minds, of which indeed we have proof in the multitude of refutations aroused by his audacious metaphysics; but be cannot be called the founder of the negative philosophy, both because he followed Hobbes, and because the highly abstract nature of his obscure dogmatic exposition admits of no sufficiently marked social use. Bayle’s labours had this last quality; but the disconnected character of his partial attacks, even more than chronological considerations, marks him out as a leader of the propagation of the doctrine rather than as one of its framers; though he had undoubtedly a share in its formation. We are thus obliged to regard Hobbes as the father of the revolutionary philosophy. We shall hereafter find that he held a much higher position than this, as one of the chief precursors of the true positive polity; but he was

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also the author of some of the most important critical views which have been attributed to men of the succeeding century who were only the propagators of them.

In this philosophy, the anti-theological analysis is urged as far as the metaphysical spirit admits; and it therefore affords the best opportunity for contesting the negative philosophy with the positive, with which superficial inquirers are very apt to confound it. The negative doctrine, improperly called atheism, is simply a final phase of the ancient philosophy, first theological, then more and more metaphysical, while retaining the same qualities, the same absolute spirit and the same tendency to handle questions which sound philosophy discards, as inaccessible to human reason. It substitutes Nature for the Creator, with much the same character and office, impelling to a very similar worship so that this supposed atheism amounts to inaugurating a goddess in the place of a god,—by those at least who regard this transient stage as a settled one. Such a transformation may effect an entire disorganization of the social system which corresponded to the theological philosophy; but it is altogether inadequate to the formation, social or intellectual, of a genuine new philosophy. The human understanding must remain subject to the theologico-metaphysical regime till the consideration of universal natural laws becomes prevalent: and that was impossible at the time of which I speak, from men’s imperfect knowledge of those laws. The positive philosophy therefore can acknowledge no connection with the negative doctrine, further than that the negative opened a way, and established a preparation for the positive. Till positive conceptions prevail, there is perpetual danger of a recurrence to the old theological doctrine; and the negative philosophy affords little better security against this danger than deism itself. It partakes of the nature of all theological ideas, which are identical through all their transformations; and thus we may explain the seeming paradox of the affinity between the obscure systematic pantheism of the metaphysical schools which are most proud of their advanced position, and the spontaneous fetishism of primitive times. Such is the historical estimate of the intellectual character of the critical movement.

Morally considered, the metaphysical philosophy presents the first rational co-ordination of the celebrated theory of self-love, improperly ascribed to the following century. The theory is an immediate consequence of the doctrine or the I, as before explained,—of the notion of unity in the human living, where a great multiplicity in fact exists: fop

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the preponderance of personal inclinations in our orgallism is unquestionable. The laborious efforts since male to concentrate our moral nature on benevolence or justice the centres of which are naturally weak in comparison, may have been of use as a test and exposure of the metaphysical doctrine; but they have been no corrective of the foregoing error, and therefore no resource against the injury to our moral progress that it has caused. It is right to add that the selfish theory, though speculatively appropriate to the metaphysical theory, is directly derived from theology, which makes morality consist in a care for personal salvation, to the exclusion of the disinterested affections which the positive philosophy alone can duly encourage and direct. Metaphysics has merely transferred the personal anxiety from eternal to temporal interests, without being able to rise to the conception of a morality which should not rest on personal calculation of one levied or another. The appropriate danger of the negative doctrine, in this respect, was that by its dogmatic confirmation of this view of human nature it destroyed the antagonism which went far to neutralize the mischief of the theological view,—the setting up of imaginary personal interests in happy opposition to real ones, but it must not be forgotten that the original mischief was in the religious proposal of a personal interest so engrossing that its prescribed consideration must repress, as far as our nature allows, all other affections whatever. Here again we see that the metaphysical philosophy is a protraction of the theological, in its moral as in its intellectual aspect; and the theory of self-interest is no mere accident occurring in the development of the metaphysical philosophy, but one of its primary features, transferred, under modification, from the preceding regime.

Politically regarded, the formation of the negative philosophy is marked by the dogmatic sanction it gives to that subordination of the spiritual to the temporal plower which we have seen to be already established, but which was not fully accounted for till Hobbes offered his decisive discussion. I have said enough of the necessity and probable duration of this state of things to be enabled now to pass over the subject lightly merely observing that while there was a general acquiescence in the temporal dictatorship, the action of the critical philosophy must stop at the spiritual disorganization, deferring its attacks on the temporal till the corresponding reorganization had begun. To doubt, Hobbes had such a course of things in view, though his metaphysical treatment of his subject gave him the appearance of supposing the provisional state to be a permanent one. It is inconceivable that a man of his

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sagacity should have supposed that he was thus framing a natural and durable state of modern society so immediately after the best thinkers had declared the inevitableness of a universal revolution. Nor is it probable that his philosophical successors, of whom Voltaire was the chief, could, however much levity was, as in his case, mingled with sagacity have doubted that their doctrine was a transitional one. However this may be, it is easy to see that a doctrine which restricted its action to the spiritual order of ideas must have been in a favourable position, from the security which was felt by rulers as long as their temporal power was undisturbed. In regard to Hobbes, it seems to me remarkable that, notwithstanding his national predilection for aristocracy rather than royalty, he should have chosen monarchical power for the single centre of his political scheme; and this view of his has furnished to the retrograde school, which is more powerful in England than anywhere else at present, a specious pretext for avenging the peers and clergy on the progressive spirit, by representing it as an abettor of despotism, so as to impair by a welcome calumny its European reputation. My impression is that in the first place, Hobbes was aware that the monarchical dictatorship was better adapted than the aristocratic to facilitate the necessary decay of the old system, and the development of new social elements: and that, in the second place, he was instinctively aware that his doctrine, far from being specially English, must meet with its completest reception and development among nations in which royalty was the form of political concentration: instances of insight and foresight to which I believe the sagacity of the illustrious philosopher to be fully adequate.

So much for the formation of the negative doctrine. We must now proceed to observe its propagation. Hitherto, it had been restricted to a few select minds; but its final destination depended above everything on its becoming sufficiently popularized. The first observation we have to make on this new revolutionary phase relates to the change in the centre of movement, and in its permanent organs.

The work of destroying the old theological and military system had first been carried on, as we have seen, in Germany, Holland, and England. In those countries the political triumph of Protestantism had neutralized its tendency to philosophical emancipation by connecting with the conservative system the kind of organization that Protestantism would admit of. Thenceforth, all emancipation of the human mind became more repugnant to official Protestantism than to the most degenerate Catholicism itself, because it evidenced the radical insufficiency of the spiritual