John Morley

“ And if it is a fine thing for a man to leave money behind him in the shape of an endowment for the support of a scientific teacher of whom he has never heard, why should it not be just as natural and as laudable to give money, while he is yet alive, to a teacher whom he both knows and approves of? On the other hand, Grote and Molesworth might say that, for anything they could tell, they would find themselves to be helping the construction of a system of which they utterly disapproved. ”

“ Thus, physiology is an abstract science; but zoology is concrete. Chemistry is abstract; mineralogy is concrete. It is the method and knowledge of the abstract sciences that the Positive Philosophy has to reorganise in a great whole.
Comte's principle of classification is that the dependence and order of scientific study follows the dependence of the phenomena. Thus, as has been said, it represents both the objective dependence of the phenomena and the subjective dependence of our means of knowing them. The more particular and complex phenomena depend upon the simpler and more general. ”

“ A moral transformation must precede any real advance. The aim, both in public and private life, is to secure to the utmost possible extent the victory of the social feeling over self-love, or Altruism over Egoism. This is the key to the regeneration of social existence, as it is the key to that unity of individual life which makes all our energies converge freely and without wasteful friction towards a common end. What are the instruments for securing the preponderance of Altruism? Clearly they must work from the strongest element in human nature, and this element is Feeling or the Heart. ”

“ Seriously to examine an encyclopædic system, that touches life, society, and knowledge at every point, is evidently beyond the compass of such an article as this. There is in every chapter a whole group of speculative suggestions, each of which would need a long chapter to itself to elaborate or to discuss. There is at least one biological speculation of astounding audacity that could be examined in nothing less than a treatise. ”

“ On the other hand, if laws of social phenomena, empirically generalised from history, can, when once suggested, be affiliated to the known laws of human nature; if the direction actually taken by the developments and changes of human society can be seen to be such as the properties of man and of his dwelling-place made antecedently probable, the empirical generalisations are raised into positive laws, and sociology becomes a science.' The result of this method is an exhibition of the events of human experience in co-ordinated series that manifest their own graduated connection. ”

“ Comte is in no true sense a follower of Saint Simon, but it was undoubtedly Saint Simon who launched him, to take Comte's own word, by suggesting to his strong and penetrating mind the two starting-points of what grew into the Comtist system—first, that political phenomena are as capable of being grouped under laws as other phenomena; and second, that the true destination of philosophy must be social, and the true object of the thinker must be the reorganisation of the moral, religious, and political systems. ”

“ The Positive Philosophy has another object besides the demonstration of the necessity and propriety of a science of society. This object is to show the sciences as branches from a single trunk,—is to give to science the ensemble or spirit of generality hitherto confined to philosophy, and to give to philosophy the rigour and solidity of science. Comte's special object is a study of social physics, a science that before his advent was still to be formed ”

“ This undeniable Providence, the supreme dispenser of our destinies, becomes in the natural course the common centre of our affections, our thoughts, and our actions. Although this Great Being evidently exceeds the utmost strength of any, even of any collective, human force, its necessary constitution and its peculiar function endow it with the truest sympathy towards all its servants. ”

“ To have done anything to make the production of the Positive Polity easier would have been no ground for anything but remorse to any of the three. It is just to Comte to remark that he always assumed that the contributors to the support of a thinker should be in all essentials of method and doctrine that thinker's disciples; aid from indifferent persons he counted irrational and humiliating. But is an endowment ever a blessing to the man who receives it? ”

“ The elaboration of these ideas in relation to the history of the civilisation of the most advanced portion of the human race occupies two of the volumes of the Positive Philosophy, and has been accepted by competent persons of very different schools as a masterpiece of rich, luminous, and far-reaching suggestion. Whatever additions it may receive, and whatever corrections it may require, this analysis of social evolution will continue to be regarded as one of the great achievements of human intellect. ”

“ Even the re-adaptation of the Catholic system to a scientific doctrine was plainly in his mind thirty years before the final execution of the Positive Polity, though it is difficult to believe that he foresaw the religious mysticism in which the task was to land him. A great analysis was to precede a great synthesis, but it was the synthesis on which Comte's vision was centred from the first. Let us first sketch the nature of the analysis. Society is to be reorganised on the base of knowledge. What is the sum and significance of knowledge? ”

“ When the positive method has been finally extended to society, as it has been to chemistry and physiology, these social facts will be resolved, as their ultimate analysis, into relations with one another, and instead of seeking causes in the old sense of the word, men will only examine the conditions of social existence. ”

“ The Positive Philosophy opens with the statement of a certain law of which Comte was the discoverer, and which has always been treated both by disciples and dissidents as the key to his system. This is the Law of the Three States. It is as follows. Each of our leading conceptions, each branch of our knowledge, passes successively through three different phases; there are three different ways in which the human mind explains phenomena, each way following the other in order. ”

“ Comte separates the collective facts of society and history from the individual phenomena of biology; then he withdraws these collective facts from the region of external volition, and places them in the region of law. The facts of history must be explained, not by providential interventions, but by referring them to conditions inherent in the successive stages of social existence. This conception makes a science of society possible. ”

“ The system for which the Positive Philosophy is alleged to have been the scientific preparation contains a Polity and a Religion; a complete arrangement of life in all its aspects, giving a wider sphere to Intellect, Energy, and Feeling than could be found in any of the previous organic types,—Greek, Roman, or Catholic-feudal. ”

“ He holds that any grouping of the sciences in a succession gives a radically wrong idea of their genesis and their interdependence; no true filiation exists; no science develops itself in isolation; no one is independent, either logically or historically. M. Littré, by far the most eminent of the scientific followers of Comte, concedes a certain force to Mr. Spencer's objections, and makes certain secondary modifications in the hierarchy in consequence, while still cherishing his faith in the Comtist theory of the sciences. ”

“ Reciprocally this continued service, while strengthening our true unity, renders us at once both happier and better.
The exaltation of Humanity into the throne occupied by the Supreme Being under monotheistic systems made all the rest of Comte's construction easy enough. Utility remains the test of every institution, impulse, act; his fabric becomes substantially an arch of utilitarian propositions, with an artificial Great Being inserted at the top to keep them in their place. The Comtist system is utilitarianism crowned by a fantastic decoration. ”

“ The least amongst us can and ought constantly to aspire to maintain and even to improve this Being. This natural object of all our activity, both public and private, determines the true general character of the rest of our existence, whether in feeling or in thought; which must be devoted to love, and to know, in order rightly to serve, our Providence, by a wise use of all the means which it furnishes to us. ”

“ Under the Catholic system the supremacy of Feeling was abused, and the intellect was made its slave. Then followed a revolt of Intellect against Sentiment. The business of the new system will be to bring back the Intellect into a condition, not of slavery, but of willing ministry to the Feelings. The subordination never was, and never will be, effected except by means of a religion, and a religion, to be final, must include a harmonious synthesis of all our conceptions of the external order of the universe. ”

“ And when all is said, the invention does not help us. We have still to settle what is for the good of Humanity, and we can only do that in the old-fashioned way. There is no guidance in the conception. No effective unity can follow from it, because you can only find out the right and wrong of a given course by summing up the advantages and disadvantages, and striking a balance, and there is nothing in the Religion of Humanity to force two men to find the balance on the same side. The Comtists are no better off than other utilitarians in judging policy, events, conduct. ”

“ The new philosophical unity will now in its turn regenerate all the elements that went to its own [Pg 366] formation. The mind will pursue knowledge without the wasteful jar and friction of conflicting methods and mutually hostile conceptions; education will be regenerated; and society will reorganise itself on the only possible solid base—a homogeneous philosophy. ”

“ The power of the priesthood rests upon special knowledge of man and nature; but to this intellectual eminence must also be added moral power and a certain greatness of character, without which force of intellect and completeness of attainment will not receive the confidence they ought to inspire. ”

“ The sympathetic instincts can only be developed by the Religion of Humanity.' Looking at the problem in this way, even a moralist who does not expect theology to be the instrument of social revival, might still ask whether the sympathetic instincts will not necessarily be already developed to their highest point, before people will be persuaded to accept the religion, which is at bottom hardly more than sympathy under a more imposing name. ”

“ In the Positive state inherent volition or external volition and inherent force or abstraction personified have both disappeared from men's minds, and the explanation of a phenomenon means a reference of it, by way of succession or resemblance, to some other phenomenon,—means the establishment of a relation between the given fact and some more general fact. In the Theological and Metaphysical state men seek a cause or an essence; in the Positive they are content with a law. To borrow an illustration from an able English disciple of Comte:—'Take the phenomenon of the sleep produced by opium. ”

“ Is there any one element which communicates the decisive impulse to all the rest,—any predominating agency in the course of social evolution? The answer is that all the other parts of social existence are associated with, and drawn along by, the contemporary condition of intellectual development. ”

“ They are said, though it is not easy to believe, to have been elaborated by way of Utopia. If so, no Utopia has ever yet been presented in a style so little calculated to stir the imagination, to warm the feelings, to soothe the insurgency of the reason. ”

“ They are thus the double key of Comte's systematisation of the philosophy of all the sciences from mathematics to physiology, and his analysis of social evolution, which is the basis of sociology. Each science contributes its philosophy. The co-ordination of all these partial philosophies produces the general Positive Philosophy. 'Thousands had cultivated science, and with splendid success; not one had conceived the philosophy which the sciences when organised would naturally evolve. ”

“ Comte's immense superiority over such præ-Revolutionary Utopians as the Abbé Saint Pierre, no less than over the group of post-revolutionary Utopians, is especially visible in his firm grasp of the cardinal truth that the improvement of [Pg 377] the social organism can only be effected by a moral development, and never by any changes in mere political mechanism, or any violences in the way of an artificial redistribution of wealth. ”

“ While men's minds were in the theological state, political events, for example, were explained by the will of the gods, and political authority based on divine right. In the metaphysical state of mind, then, to retain our instance, political authority was based on the sovereignty of the people, and social facts were explained by the figment of a falling away from a state of nature. ”

“ His friendship with Madame de Vaux had deepened the impression, and in the reconstructed society women are to play a highly important part. They are to be carefully excluded from public action, but they are to do many more important things than things political. To fit them for their functions, they are to be raised above material cares, and they are to be thoroughly educated. The family, which is so important an element of the Comtist scheme of things, exists to carry the influence of woman over man to the highest point of cultivation. ”

“ Through affection she purifies the activity of man. 'Superior in power of affection, more able to keep both the intellectual and the active powers in continual subordination to feeling, women are formed as the natural intermediaries between Humanity and man. The Great Being confides specially to them its moral Providence, maintaining through them the direct and constant cultivation of universal affection, in the midst of all the distractions of thought or action, which are [Pg 383] for ever withdrawing men from its influence.... ”