I have said that the form of unbelief to which, on the principle of calling a spade a spade, I have taken the liberty of giving the name of Scientific Atheism, manifests itself now-a-days rather by ignoration than by formal denial of G.o.d. This, however, is not a new feature in any atheism really worthy of being styled scientific. Even as Mr. Darwin verbally recognises a Creator, although without a.s.signing to Him any share in creation, even so Kant, when more than a century ago undertaking, in his "General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies,"[42] to account for the const.i.tution and mechanical origin of the universe on Newtonian principles, spoke of the elements as deriving their essential qualities from the "eternal thought of the Divine Intelligence," without, however, crediting the said Intelligence with having interposed in order to carry out His thoughts. "Give me matter,"
he says, "and I will build the world;" and without other data than diffused atoms of matter endowed with simple attractive and repulsive forces, he proceeds to expound a complete cosmogony.
He pictures to himself the universe as originally an infinite expansion of minutely subdivided matter, and supposing a single centre of attraction to be somewhere therein set up, he endeavours to show that the result must be a prodigious central body surrounded by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development. "In vivid language," says Professor Huxley,[43] "he describes the great world-maelstrom widening the margin of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of millions of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the molecular waste, and converting chaos into cosmos." Then, fixing his attention more particularly on our own system, he accounts for the relation between the ma.s.ses and densities of the planets and their distances from the sun, for the eccentricity of their orbits, for their rotation, for their satellites, for the general agreement in the direction of rotation among the celestial bodies, for Saturn"s ring, and for the zodiacal light. All this he does, according to Professor Huxley, by "strict deduction from admitted dynamical principles," and I, well aware of my own inability to form an independent judgment on the point, gladly take so high an authority"s word for it. For aught that I know, Kant"s attractive and repulsive forces being admitted, the establishment of centres of attraction, and of circle within circle of revolutions round them, and all his other details, would follow naturally and of course. I limit myself to asking, Whence these simple forces?--and when Kant replies, "From the Eternal Thought of the Divine Understanding," I should be the last to criticise if his answer stopped there.
Unfortunately, he adds that the forces were "evolved without purpose"; in other words, that the Intelligence which thought them into existence failed to think of any purpose for them. "Matter," he proceeds, "is purely _pa.s.sive_, yet, nevertheless, has in its simplest state a _determination_ towards the a.s.sumption of a more perfect const.i.tution in the way of natural development, whereby it _breaks up_ rest, _stirs_ up nature, gives to chaos shape." For the elements whereof this pa.s.sively stirring up matter is composed "have native powers of setting each other in motion, and are to themselves a spring of life;" and when, having of course being previously dead, they have given themselves life, they forthwith begin to attract each other with a strength varying with their varying degrees of specific gravity. The scattered elements of the denser sort collect by attraction all particles of less specific gravity out of their immediate neighbourhood, and are themselves similarly collected by particles of still denser sort, these again by others denser yet, and so on, until, as results of this particular action, several ma.s.ses are formed which in like manner would converge towards and be united with the largest and densest of their number, were it not that the counter principle of repulsion now comes into play. This principle--familiarly exemplified in the elasticity of vapours, the emanations from strong smelling substances, and the expansion of all spirituous substances--causes the vertical movements of the converging ma.s.ses to be deflected laterally, so as ultimately to enclose the central ma.s.s within circles which, at first intersecting each other in all directions, are at length, by dint of mutual collision, made all to revolve in the same direction, and nearly the same plane.
Now I most earnestly protest against being suspected of what in me would be the intolerable impertinence of desiring to cast ridicule on these magnificent speculations, the grandeur of which I thoroughly appreciate so far as my scant mathematics enable me to follow them. I take exception to them only because the language in which they are couched seems to imply that operations, of whose nature one of the most powerful of human intellects could, at its utmost stretch, catch only a faint hazy inkling, may yet have been initiated and perfected without the intervention of any intellect at all. This is a falsism against which my respect for philosophy and philosophers makes me only all the more indignant when I find any of the latter falling into it, as those of them inevitably must who, busying themselves, early or late,
With a mighty debate, A profound speculation about the creation And organical life, and chaotical strife, With various notions of heavenly motions, And rivers and oceans, and valleys and mountains, And sources of fountains, and meteors on high, And stars in the sky,--propose by and bye,
like John Hookham Frere"s Aristophanic Birds,
If we"ll listen and hear, To make perfectly clear
how creation took place without a conscious Creator. All their fancied solutions of this hopeless puzzle have one feature in common--a family likeness which the wickedest wit finds it difficult to caricature. There is a note to Frere and Canning"s "Loves of the Triangles" which the reader will be grateful to me for transcribing here, the more frequently he may have laughed at it already, laughing now all the more, and laughing heartily at it now though he may never have before.
It begins by tracing the genesis or original formation of _s.p.a.ce_ to a single point, in the same manner as the elder Darwin had, in his "Zoonomia," traced the whole organized universe to his six Filaments. It represents this primeval Point or _Pinctum saliens_ of the universe, after "_evolving itself by its own energies_, to have moved forwards in a right line _ad infinitum_ till it grew tired." Whereupon, "the right line which it had generated would begin to put itself in motion in a lateral direction, describing an area of infinite extent. This area, as soon as it became conscious of its own existence, would begin to ascend or descend, according as its specific weight might determine, forming an immense solid s.p.a.ce filled with vacuum, and capable of containing the present existing universe."
Thus slow progressive points protract the line, As pendant spiders spin the filmy twine: Thus lengthened lines impetuous sweeping round, Spread the wide plane, and mark its circling bound; Thus planes, their substance with their motion grown, Form the huge cube, the cylinder, the cone.
It then proceeds as follows:--
"s.p.a.cE being thus obtained, and presenting a suitable _nidus_ or receptacle for the _generation_ of _chaotic matter_, an immense deposit of it would gradually be acc.u.mulated; after which the filament of fire being produced in the chaotic ma.s.s by an _idiosyncrasy_ or _self-formed habit_ a.n.a.logous to fermentation, explosion would take place, suns would be shot from the central chaos, planets from suns, and satellites from planets. In this state of things, the filament of organization would begin to exert itself in those independent ma.s.ses which, in proportion to their bulk, exposed the greatest surface to the action of light and heat. This filament, after an infinite series of ages, would begin to ramify, and its viviparous offspring would diversify their forms and habits so as to accommodate themselves to the various _incunabula_ which nature had prepared for them. Upon this view of things, it seems highly probable that the first effort of Nature terminated in the production of vegetables, and that these being abandoned to their own energies, by degrees detached themselves from the surface of the earth, and supplied themselves with wings and feet, according as their different propensities determined them in favour of aerial or terrestrial existence. Others, by an inherent disposition to society and civilisation, and by a stronger effort of volition, would become men.
These in time would restrict themselves to the use of their hind feet; their tails would gradually rub off by sitting in their caves or huts as soon as they arrived at a domesticated state; they would invent language and the use of fire, with our present and hitherto imperfect system of society. In the meantime, the _Fuci_ and _Algae_, with the Corallines and Madrepores, would transform themselves into fish, and gradually populate all the submarine portions of the globe."[44]
Although the writers of this delicious drollery seem to have had Dr.
Erasmus Darwin only in view, they could not, we thus see, parody his peculiar crotchets without hitting off not less neatly some of the corresponding extravagances of both earlier and later expounders of Nature. Nature is a phrase which, greatly to the confusion of those who so employ it, is habitually used simultaneously in two quite opposite senses, so as to denote at the same time both the agency in virtue of whose action the universe exists, and likewise the universe itself which results from that action. Nature, in either signification, becomes to a great extent interpretable when the agency so designated is credited with sufficient sense to foresee and to intend the results of its own action. On that condition, although among the many unsolved problems she may continue to present there will be some evidently lying beyond the limits of human comprehension, there will be none running counter to human reason. Except on that condition, the universe is not simply uninterpretable, it is a bewildering a.s.semblage of irreconcilable certainties. Philosophy"s choice lies between such patent truisms as that there can be no force but living force, no _vis_ but _vis vivida_, no _vis inertiae_ otherwise than metaphorically, and such blatant falsisms as that inertness and exertion may coincide, unintelligence generate intelligence, agency of whatsoever sort produce, merely by its own act, and merely out of its own essence, other agency capable of higher action than its own. Philosophy, when with these sets of alternatives before her she deliberately chooses the latter, becomes Scientific Atheism, all the varieties of which have one point in common, resembling each other in their p.r.o.neness to rush upon and embrace demonstrable impossibilities for the sake of avoiding a few things hard to be understood. One variety, however, the Comtist, far exceeds all the rest in the lengths to which it is carried by this propensity.
IV.
If, in speaking as I am about to do of Comtism, I commit--heedless of Mr. Lewes" solemn warning--the grave offence of speaking confidently about a writer whom I have never read, I may at least plead in extenuation of my fault, that, although my knowledge of that writer be confessedly merely an echo of what others have said of him, those others, at any rate, far from being his antagonists, are two of the most ardent of his not undiscriminating admirers. It is from Mr. Mill[45] and from Mr. Lewes[46] himself that I have derived the notions of Comtist philosophy that suggest to me the following notes.
I lay no stress on certain flaws in the fundamental propositions that "we have no knowledge of anything but phenomena, and that our knowledge of phenomena is only relative, not absolute; that we know not the essence nor the real mode of production of any fact, but only its relations to other facts in the way of succession or similitude; that the constant resemblances which link phenomena together, and the constant sequences which unite them as antecedent and consequent, are all we know about them, and that their causes, whether efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable." I will only suggest that our mere consciousness of possessing some knowledge of phenomena is itself a knowledge distinct from the knowledge which const.i.tutes its subject--distinct, that is, from the knowledge of phenomena; that if it were possible for us to be aware of only one single fact, we should know something about that fact, notwithstanding that there were no other facts which it could be perceived to have preceded or followed, or to which it could be likened, even as a polype with a stomach-ache would know something about a stomach-ache, although ignorant that it had a stomach, and oblivious of any former sensation, whether painful or pleasurable; and that if the causes of phenomena be utterly unknown, our ignorance of them ought not to be so signified as to sound like knowledge, as it does when resemblances are said to link, and sequences to unite, phenomena together, thereby warranting the inference that one phenomenon succeeds another _because_ the two are so linked and united.
These, however, are trifles--mere spots on the sun one might say, were but the surface on which they appear altogether sunlike--and I leave them without additional remark except that, although it may perhaps have been hypercritical to point them out, still the language of a new philosophy, claiming to supersede all old ones, ought to be proof even against hypercriticism. I pa.s.s on to a generalisation, termed by Mr.
Mill "the key to Comte"s other generalisations: one on which all the others are dependent, and which forms the back-bone, so to speak, of his philosophy," insomuch that "unless it be true he has accomplished little." This is the so much vaunted discovery that all human thought pa.s.ses necessarily through three stages, beginning with the theological, and proceeding through the metaphysical to the positive.
These three terms, however, in the novel sense in which they are used by Comte, stand very urgently in need of definition. By the theological is to be understood that stage of the mind in which the facts of the universe are regarded as governed by single and direct volitions of a being or beings possessed of life and intelligence. It is the stage in which winds are supposed to blow, seas to rage, trees to grow, and mountains to tower aloft, either because winds, seas, trees, and mountains are themselves alive and so act of their own accord; or because there is a spirit dwelling in each of them which desires that it shall so act; or because each separate cla.s.s of objects is superintended by an out-dwelling divinity, which similarly desires; or, finally, because one single divinity, supreme over all things, initiates and maintains all the apparently spontaneous movements of inanimate bodies.
In the metaphysical stage, phenomena are ascribed not to volitions, either sublunary or celestial, but to realised abstractions--to properties, qualities, propensities, tendencies, forces, regarded as real existences, inherent in but distinct from the concrete bodies in which they reside; while the characteristic of the positive stage is the universal recognition that all phenomena without exception are governed by invariable laws, with which no volitions, natural or supernatural, interfere. These being the three stages, the discovery of which as a series necessarily pa.s.sed through by human thought in its progress towards maturity, const.i.tutes one of Comte"s chief glories, I almost tremble at my own audacity, shrinking from the sound myself am making, when by inexorable sense of duty constrained to declare that the grand discovery is after all merely that of a distinction without a difference.
What Comte chiefly condemned in the metaphysical mode of thought, are the conception of mental abstractions as real ent.i.ties which exert power and produce phenomena, and the enunciation of these ent.i.ties as explanations of the phenomena; and certainly "it is," as Mr. Mill says, or rather was, previously to his own ingenious solution of it, "one of the puzzles of philosophy, how mankind, after inventing a set of mere names to keep together certain combinations of ideas and images, could have so far forgotten their own act as to invest these creations of their will with objective reality, and mistake the name of a phenomenon for its efficient cause." Those natural laws, however, on which Positivism relies--are not they as purely mental abstractions as the essences, virtues, properties, forces, and what not, for which it is proposed to subst.i.tute them? Yet since Positivism regards these laws as "governing" phenomena, and having phenomena "subject" to them, must it not necessarily regard them likewise as realised abstractions, as real ent.i.ties? Plainly, if its language be taken literally, its professors must acknowledge that it does, unless they prefer to stultify themselves by propounding such unmitigated nonsense as that power may be exercised, and phenomena produced, by _non_-ent.i.ties. But if so, what else is Positivism than another form of that very metaphysicism which it condemns? and a form, too, peculiarly obnoxious to Mr. Mill"s caustic remark that "as in religion, so in philosophy, men marvel at the absurdity of other people"s tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities remain in their own, and the same man is unaffectedly astonished that words can be mistaken for things, who is treating other words as if they were things every time he opens his mouth."
Possibly, however, it may be replied that "government by natural laws"
is a phrase which Positivists never use except metaphorically, and by which they never mean more than certain successions of events.[47] Very well. Either, then, they acknowledge no real government of phenomena at all, in which case to speak of phenomena as governed by law is, if not a purely gratuitous mystification, as glaring an instance as can well be conceived of a "bare enunciation of facts, put forward as a theory or explanation of them:" or, if they do recognise real government, then they must suppose that, behind those mere mental abstractions, laws or order of Nature, there must be some lawgiver or other being that originally issued the laws, or ordained the order, and still enforces them, or maintains it. But if this be the positivist faith, then, that we may discover its other self, we have only to go still further back; as far back, however, as to the theological stage, supposed to have been so early left behind, yes, even unto the deities or deity that the metaphysical ent.i.ties had displaced. Positivism, in short, is in this dilemma: either the mode of thought claimed by it as peculiarly its own is simply that process so justly ridiculed by Comte himself as the "naf reproduction of phenomena as the reason for themselves," and by Mr.
Lewes as "a restatement" (by way of explanation) "of the facts to be explained;" or it is at any rate nothing more than a return, either to the metaphysical or to the theological mode of thought, according as one or the other is adopted of the only two interpretations that can possibly be placed on its own nomenclature. A new mode it certainly is not. It is either no mode of thought at all, but merely an empty form of words; or it is at best only a new name for one or other of two old-fashioned modes, both of which its author denounces as false from the beginning, and now worn out and obsolete into the bargain.
Of other features of Comtist philosophy it would be out of place to speak here,[48] where, indeed, that philosophy would not have been mentioned at all but for its having been transformed by its author into a religion, and that, too, an atheistical religion--the "Religion of Humanity." To myself, as to most people, a religion without a G.o.d is a contradiction in terms. To const.i.tute what is almost universally understood by religion it does not suffice that there be a "creed or conviction claiming authority over the whole of human life: a belief or set of beliefs deliberately adopted respecting human destiny and duty, to which the believer inwardly acknowledges that all his actions ought to be subordinate:" nor that there be in addition "a sentiment connected with this creed or capable of being invoked by it, sufficiently powerful to give it, in fact, the authority over human conduct to which it lays claim in theory:" nor yet that there be, moreover, "an ideal object, the believer"s attachment and sense of duty towards which are able to control and discipline all his other sentiments and propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life."[49] That such an object is fully capable of gathering round it feelings sufficiently strong to enforce the most rigid rule of life, will certainly not be denied by me, privileged as I am to count among my friends more than one whose whole life is little else than a life of devotion to an object, "the general interest of the human race," plainly incapable of affording them in exchange that "eternity of personal enjoyment" to which ordinary devotees look forward as their reward, and whose virtue I honour as approaching the sublime, on account of its independence of all the props and stimulants which ordinary virtue finds indispensable. But the sublimest virtue does not of itself const.i.tute religion. For, besides the "creed," "conviction," and "sentiment" indicated above, there is needed some suitable object of worship to which the soul may alternately bow down in humble reverence, and look up in fervent love--some being to whom its prayer, praise, and thanksgiving may be fittingly addressed.
This want, recognised--as one of the few who do not recognise it admits--by nine out of every ten persons, was distinctly recognised by Comte, who, however, attempted to supply it by pointing, not to G.o.d, but to Man. His reason for this was not a conviction that there is no G.o.d.
On the contrary, he habitually disclaimed, not without acrimony, dogmatic atheism; and once even condescended so far as to declare that "the hypothesis of design has much greater verisimilitude than that of a blind mechanism." But in the "mature state of intelligence" at which his mind had arrived, "conjecture founded on a.n.a.logy did not seem to him a basis to rest a theory upon." He preferred a religious theory without a basis, and therefore adopted one as dest.i.tute of support as the tortoise on which stands the earth-upholding elephant of Hindoo mythology; selecting, as the "Grand etre" to be worshipped, "the entire Human Race, conceived as a continuous whole, past, present, and future." For this great collective _non_-existence, this compound of that which is, that which has been but has ceased to be, and that which is not yet, he elaborated a minute ritual of devotional observances, and would, if he had had the chance, have consecrated a complete sacerdotal hierarchy, subordinated to himself as supreme pontiff. Having, for fear of recognising what possibly might not be, begun by, wilfully and with his eyes open, recognising what could not possibly be, he proceeded to invest this sanctified non-existence with precisely those attributes best calculated to render it unfit to receive the admiration he prescribed for it. That feeble Humanity--the actually living portion thereof, that is--may need and be the better for our services, which Divine Omnipotence of course cannot be, was distinctly urged by him as a reason why _prayers_, or at least those outpourings of feeling which he so designated, should be addressed to the former and not to the latter.
That Humanity is in a constant state of progress, so that both the collective ma.s.s and choice specimens of each successive generation of men must always be superior to the corresponding ma.s.ses and specimens of all previous generations, is a prime article of the Comtist creed; but not the less is it an imperative injunction of the Comtist rubrick that religious homage shall be paid, not only to the collective "Grand etre"
of Humanity, but also to individual worthies of past ages--that superiors shall consequently fall down before, and worship, and take as models, their intellectual and moral inferiors. The fact of a religion made up of tenets like these having been thought out by one of the profoundest of reasoners does not prevent its being the very perfection of unreason. Even though on the one side there were nothing more than some doubt whether Deity might not exist, still with complete certainty on the other of the non-existence of "Humanity," Deity ought in fairness to have at least the benefit of the doubt. In selection for adoration, that which only perhaps may be, at any rate deserves to be, preferred to that which positively is not. The excess of superst.i.tion with which St.
Paul reproached the Athenians, for raising an altar to the "Unknown G.o.d," looks like excessive circ.u.mspection, beside the solemn dedication of temples to a chimera known not to be. Nay, even Isaiah"s maker of graven images is at length outdone. Even he who, having hewn down a tree, "burneth part thereof in the fire, with part thereof eateth flesh, roasteth roast, and is satisfied, warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire; and with the residue maketh a G.o.d, yea, his graven image, and falleth down unto it and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me, for thou art my G.o.d"--even he has at last found more than his match in irrationality. For he has at least before him a visible tangible block of wood, not the mere memory of one that has long ago rotted, nor the dream of one that is yet to grow, whereas that mental figment, Consecrated Humanity, is not even a real shadow, but only a fancied one, a shadow cast by no substance. And it is to Comtists of all people--intellectual salt of the earth as they are--that this figment is recommended for adoration--yes, to those who, pharisaically standing aloof from the common herd, thank their imaginary subst.i.tute for G.o.d, or whatever else it is they deem thankworthy, that they are not blind as other men are, and least of all as those dazed metaphysicians who actually personify their own mental abstractions. No wonder that such extreme provocation should try the patience of all but the stanchest disciples. No wonder that Mr. Lewes himself should seem half inclined to apostrophise his quondam master in words resembling those once addressed to Robespierre, "Avec ton Grand etre, tu commences a m"embeter."
Here make we one more pause. This chapter"s theme is, as was betimes premised, not the strength of theism, but the weakness of atheism. I have in it attempted to execute a design which, according to Boswell, was conceived by Lord Hailes, and approved by Dr. Johnson, that of writing an essay, _Sur la credulite des incredules_, and I think I have succeeded so far as to show that, if any one who can swallow atheism affects to strain at theism, it cannot, at any rate, be for want of a sufficiently capacious gullet.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] The story was thus told by Diderot, to Sir Samuel Romilly, when a young man:--"Je vous dirai un trait de lui, mais il vous sera un peu scandaleux peut-etre, car vous autres Anglais, vous croyez _un peu_ en Dieu; pour nous autres, nous n"y croyons gueres. Hume dina dans une grande compagnie avec le baron D"Holbach. Il etait a.s.sis a cote du baron; on parla de la religion naturelle. "Pour les athees," disait Hume, "je ne crois pas qu"il en existe; je n"en ai jamais vu!" "Vous avez ete un peu malheureux," repondit l"autre, "vous voici a table avec dix-sept pour la premiere fois.""--_Edinburgh Review_ for January 1847.
[37] "Studies in Animal Life," chap. v.
[38] The reader who, having skipped some of the earlier chapters, may find this language obscure, is requested to turn back to the essay on "Huxleyism," pp. 194-6.
[39] See again, pp. 194-6.
[40] "Mr. Darwin"s Hypotheses." Part II. "Fortnightly Review" for June 1868.
[41] "Origin of Species," p. 226.
[42] Of this treatise, no English or French translation has, I believe, been published. For my own very limited acquaintance with it, I am indebted to the extreme kindness of my friend, Professor Croom Robertson, who has most obligingly favoured me with a ma.n.u.script version of the portion referred to in the text.
[43] "Lay Sermons," p. 240.
[44] "Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin," 1799, pp. 214-6.
[45] "Auguste Comte and Positivism," _pa.s.sim_.
[46] "History of Philosophy," 4th edition, vol. ii. pp. 654-735.
[47] Not that so restricted a meaning can, with any propriety, be placed on positivist definitions of law. See, for instance, that of Mr. Lewes ("History of Philosophy," vol. ii. p. 701), who defines law to be "the invariable relation between two distinct phenomena, according to which one depends on the other."
[48] Some few additional random remarks, however, though not permissible in the text may, perhaps, be less inappropriate in a note.
My scientific deficiencies do not prevent my understanding or, at least, fancying I understand, that Comte"s famous "Cla.s.sification of the Sciences" may be extremely serviceable as indicating in what order the sciences may most profitably be studied. That a student"s general progress would be swifter and surer if, before entering on physics or chemistry, he had already made considerable progress in algebra, geometry, and mechanics, than if he commenced all five sciences simultaneously, seems probable enough. If, however, the cla.s.sification be intended also to indicate historically the order in which the sciences have actually been studied, I cannot but suspect it to be misleading. Certainly, if knowledge of number was the earliest knowledge acquired by man, those savage races which have not even yet learnt how to count beyond four, must have been content with very few lessons in arithmetic when turning off to other branches of learning.
As to the measure of success that attended Comte"s scheme of creating a Philosophy of General Science, I presume not to utter one syllable of my own, preferring to cite what Mr. Mill says of that "wonderful systematization of the philosophy of all the antecedent sciences from mathematics to physiology, which, if he had done nothing else, would have stamped him on all minds competent to appreciate it as one of the princ.i.p.al thinkers of the age." In all sincerity, I say that the mere conception of the enterprise, whose vastness is so luminously expounded by Mr. Lewes, in the last edition of his "History of Philosophy," seems to me to betoken superior genius. I feel, as it were, simply awe-struck in the presence of an intellectual ambition, that within the brief span of one human life could aspire to a mastery over all the sciences, sufficient, first for co-ordinating the fundamental truths and special methods, and so obtaining the philosophy of each, and then for co-ordinating the manifold philosophies so obtained, and--by condensing them all into one h.o.m.ogeneous doctrine, and blending them into one organic whole, whereof each part would be seen to depend on all that preceded, and to determine all that succeeded--transforming all science into philosophy.
One point however remains on which I shall speak with some confidence, that, namely, of the inclusion among "Comte"s t.i.tles to immortal fame"
of the creation of a Science of Sociology. "What the law of gravitation is to astronomy, what the elementary properties of tissues are to physiology," that, says Mr. Lewes, in the opinion of Comte"s disciples, "is the law of the three stages to sociology." But if, as I have shown, there are not really three but only two stages, the so-called third stage being simply a return to either the second or the first, the law of the three stages cannot be much of a law, nor the science of which it is the essence much of a science.
Mr. Lewes, nevertheless, maintains that M. Comte created Social Science.
Mr. Mill considers that he did not create it, but only proved its creation to be possible. With all possible deference, I submit that what he really did was to prove its creation to be impossible.
In a pa.s.sage of Mr. Mill"s "Positivism," quoted with approval in Mr.
Lewes"s "History of Philosophy," and presumably, therefore, expressing the sentiments of both writers, Comte is described as p.r.o.nouncing inappropriate to the Science of Society, the method universally admitted to be proper to all other sciences--that, namely, of obtaining by induction the laws of the elementary phenomena, then, from these laws thinking out deductively those of the complex phenomena, and, finally, of verifying by specific observation the laws obtained by deduction.
Among social phenomena, he is described as arguing, the elementary ones are human feelings and actions, the laws of which are the laws of universal human nature. But the human beings, on the laws of whose nature social facts depend, are not abstract or universal, but historical human beings, already shaped and made what they are, not by the simple tendencies of universal human nature, but by the acc.u.mulated influence of past generations of human society. This being the case, the laws of universal human nature evidently cannot serve as materials, whence it would be possible for any powers of deduction, starting from the bare conception of the Being Man, to predict beforehand how successive generations of men would feel and act. Wherefore, in order to get at social laws, we must reverse the ordinary method, seizing upon any generalizations which the facts of history, empirically considered, will supply, and then using the universal laws of human nature for the verification of these generalizations.
I will not linger over the glaring inconsistency involved in the conclusion thus arrived at, of appealing, for the verification of empirical generalizations, to a species of deduction confessed to be impracticable for want of the requisite materials. I prefer to show that from Comte"s own premises, as rendered by Mr. Mill, necessarily results a separate conclusion, absolutely fatal to his sociologically creative pretensions. According to him, as we have seen, the laws of elementary social facts, or of human actions and feelings, are the laws of universal human nature, which latter can, of course, be no other than whatever habits of invariably, in given circ.u.mstances, feeling and acting in given modes, may be common to all mankind. But it is admitted that the particular generation of human beings at any time existing must, by the acc.u.mulated influence of preceding generations, have been rendered very different from every preceding generation: and nothing is more certain than that two generations differing widely from each other in character, would, in many given circ.u.mstances, not only not feel and act in precisely the same, but would inevitably feel and act in widely different, manners. Nor is this all. The circ.u.mstances by which any generation is surrounded have been partly shaped for it by preceding generations, partly modified by itself--so that it is not possible for any two generations ever to find themselves in the same circ.u.mstances.
Wherefore, as there never can be a repet.i.tion of either men or of circ.u.mstances precisely the same, it is manifestly impossible for any habits of feeling and thinking, in given modes in given circ.u.mstances, to be common to any two generations of men, still less to universal mankind. In other words, there cannot possibly be any laws of human nature: and if no laws of human nature, then no laws of elementary social facts; and if no laws of elementary social facts, then no laws of complex social facts; and if no laws of social facts, elementary or complex, then no single particle of material wherewith to build up the Science of Society or Sociology.