Auguste Comte

“ The work which Auguste Comte accomplished was immense. Its value can hardly be overestimated. Every modern Scientist and Thinker is largely indebted to him for that which is indispensable to high intellectual development and progress in thought. For the immense steps in Scientific advancement which he took; for his love of his Race; for his really religious spirit, exhibited in his utter devotion to that which he deemed the highest right; the love and sympathy of every student of Science and every devotee of truth is, and will be, forever his. ”

“ The best certificate to the worth of Auguste Comte lies in the fact that, in spite of marked personal limitations and much petty querulousness, he profoundly influenced such men as Littre, Humboldt, Mill, Lewes, Grote, Spencer and Frederic Harrison.
To have helped such men as these, and cheered them on their way, was no small achievement. Comte's sole claim for immortality lies in the Positive Philosophy. The word "positive," as used by Comte, is similar in intent to pose, poise—fixed, final. ”

“ If enthusiastic Positivists, more Comtist than Comte, ever gave countenance to such an extravagance, I can only say that they no more represent Positivism than General Booth’s brass band represents Christianity. If words of Auguste Comte have been understood to mean that the religion of Humanity can be summed up in the repetition of phrases, or can be summed up in anything less than a moral and scientific education of man’s complex nature, I can only treat it as a caricature unworthy of notice. ”

“ He was not a Christian. In the Eden of his hope there did not crawl and coil the serpent of eternal pain. In many languages he sought the thoughts of men, and for himself he solved the problems of the world. He accepted the philosophy of Auguste Comte. Humanity was his God; the human race was his Supreme Being. In that Supreme Being he put his trust. He believed that we are indebted for what we enjoy to the labor, the self-denial, the heroism of the human race, and that as we have plucked the fruit of what others planted, we in thankfulness should plant for others yet to be. ”

“ Clearness and depth, comprehensiveness and precision have never, perhaps, been so remarkably united as in Auguste Comte. He views his subject from an elevation which gives to each part of the complex whole its true position and value, while his telescopic glance loses none of the needful details, and not only itself pierces to the heart of the matter, but converts its opaqueness into such transparent crystal, that other eyes are enabled to see as deeply into it as his own. ”

“ Auguste Comte isolated himself not only from preference but on system, and whatever may have been the defects of his remarkable mind, and the weakness of its ultimate decay, it is certain that his amazing command over vast masses of heterogeneous material would have been incompatible with any participation in the passing interests of the world. ”

“ If you seek to place yourself in sympathy with Comte it is best to think of him only as the intellectual worker, pursuing in uncomforted obscurity the laborious and absorbing task to which he had given up his whole life. His singularly conscientious fashion of elaborating his ideas made the mental strain more intense than even so exhausting a work as the abstract exposition of the principles of positive science need have been, if he had followed a more self-indulgent plan. ”

“ Auguste Comte, notwithstanding his having apparently produced some unquestionably genuine thinking, was long the chief of such a band. The vogue of each particular maxim of theirs was necessarily brief. For what distinction can be gained by repeating saws heard from all mouths? No bygone fashion seems more grotesque than a panache of obsolete wisdom. I remember the days when a pronouncement all the rage was that no science must borrow the methods of another; the geologist must not use a microscope, nor the astronomer a spectroscope. ”

“ The founder and chief of the positivist philosophy, Auguste Comte, died at Paris in 1858, in the 59th year of his age. He was born in 1798 at Montpellier, of Christian parents; but, placed early in the lyceum of that city, he soon lost there, under the influence of the reigning spirit of the school, the faith of his childhood. From the lyceum he went to the École Polytechnique, in which the worship of the Convention and revolutionary ideas was at that period held in high honor. We recall these circumstances, because the childhood and youth of a man serve to explain his mature age. ”

“ No longer an aristocratic and learned art like the one which has been with us since the Renaissance,344 but an art closely connected with the convictions and the life of all, which will be accessible and familiar to all, as was the case with the art of the Middle Ages. The positive conception of man and of the world, will become an “inexhaustible spring” of poetical beauty.
All these results will be ordered, protected and sanctified by the positive religion, or religion of Humanity, of which Auguste Comte, in his “second career” established the dogma, the worship and the régime. ”

“ A new point of view, truly universal, although always relative, is needed. How could Comte have distinguished otherwise, in each science, what is lasting and in conformity with the positive spirit from what is decaying and still bears the mark of the theological and metaphysical spirit? Could he especially have fixed the relations which the sciences should maintain among themselves, and could he have imposed upon them a discipline whose principle was not to be found in any one of them? ”

“ The shafts of his irony are reserved for men on his own side, for the radical violences of M. Clémenceau, and for the exaggerated reputation of Auguste Comte, "who has been set up as a man of the highest order of genius, for having said, in bad French, what all scientific thinkers for two hundred years have seen as clearly as himself." ”

“ To know for the sake of knowing, appears to Comte to be a wrong use of the human intellect. The Newtons and the Laplaces in the past have fulfilled a necessary function, and humanity owes them eternal gratitude. They struck a decisive blow against theological and metaphysical philosophy; and secured the victory for the positive spirit. In their time scientific speculation which tended to the discovery of the laws of phenomena, and especially of celestial phenomena, was at once the most sublime and the most useful occupation which those men of genius could set themselves. ”

“ What is said of Mill may be said of nineteen out of every twenty, at least, of the English followers of Comte. They accept the philosophy as grand, scientific, inexorable truth; they reject the religion with pity or with scorn, as a fantastic and barren chimera. Mr. Congreve is, in London, the leader of the small school who go for taking all or nothing, and to whom Auguste Comte is the prophet of a new and final religion, as well as the teacher of a new philosophy. Now this little school is the nucleus of the body of Englishmen of whom I write. ”

“ To teach all children music and drawing, as Comte requires in his positivist plan of education, is not to make them participate in the luxury of “accomplishments.” It is placing within their reach works which appeal to the whole of humanity; it is giving them a stronger sense of the solidarity which is the essential characteristic of human society; finally it is teaching them the universal language of which they possess the instinctive rudiments, and whence have sprung the very languages which to-day appear as frigid systems of symbols and graphic representations. ”

“ It is the virtue of that impulse, I believe, which will save the name and fame of Auguste Comte from oblivion. As for his philosophy, I part with it by quoting his own words, reported to me by a quondam Comtist, now an eminent member of the Institute of France, M. Charles Robin:—
"La Philosophie est une tentative incessante de l'esprit humain pour arriver au repos: mais elle se trouve incessamment aussi dérangée par les progrès continus de la science. ”

“ Auguste Comte often says that the positive spirit consists in keeping oneself equally distant from two dangers, mysticism and empiricism.33 By mysticism he understands the recourse to non-verifiable explanations and to transcendent, hypotheses. Men’s imagination finds pleasure in these things, but we must be able to bring all “real” knowledge back to a general or particular fact. Positive science therefore abstains from searching after substances, ends, and even causes. It only bears upon phenomena and their relations. ”

“ Being founded upon positive science, Comte’s ethics will reproduce its essential characteristics. In the first place it will be “real,” that is to say it will rest upon observation and not upon imagination. It will consider man as he is and not as he fancies himself to be. It will then rest, not upon the abstract analysis which he may make of his own heart, but upon the proofs given by humanity of its inclinations and of the usual motives for its actions, during the centuries made known to us by history. ”

“ It is understood that he goes as far in the direction of the creed which was the dream of Auguste Comte's later years as any sane human creature can well go. I have, however, very little to say here of Mr. Congreve, individually; and I take his recent course of Sunday lectures only as a convenient starting point from which to begin a few remarks on the political principles, character, and influence of that small, resolute, aggressive body of intellectual, highly-educated and able men who are beginning to be known in the politics and society of England as the London Positivists. ”

“ The neo-imperialists, at all events, can hardly be expected to regard this as the "voice of sense and truth;" but it is unquestionably positive politics as understood by Auguste Comte, and his disciple is not the man to shrink from any of the consequences of his master's teaching. ”

“ This spirit is so intimately mingled with the general thought of our time that we scarcely notice it, just as we do not pay attention to the air we breathe. History, romance, and, even poetry have reflected its influence and, being charged with it, have contributed to its diffusion. Contemporary Sociology is the creation of Comte; scientific Psychology, in a certain degree has also sprung from him. From all these signs, it is not rash to conclude that positive philosophy expresses some of the most characteristic tendencies of the age. ”

“ Auguste Comte, with his boasted new science of Positivism, is but a systematiser of the doctrines of Confucius and the old philosophers of China,—and what are magnetism, clairvoyance, and suchlike researches at present making into the spiritual powers of man, but unconscious repetitions of what has been known or imagined in India for three thousand years? ”

“ On the other hand, the Grand Etre in its completeness ought to include not only all whom we venerate, but all sentient beings to which we owe duties, and which have a claim on our attachment. M. Comte, therefore, incorporates into the ideal object whose service is to be the law of our life, not our own species exclusively, but, in a subordinate degree, our humble auxiliaries, those animal races which enter into real society with man, which attach themselves to him, and voluntarily co-operate with him, like the noble dog who gives his life for his human friend and benefactor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In this world there is nothing absolute, everything is relative; Comte wrote this to his friend Valat as early as 1818.354 But as a matter of fact, there exists a supreme reality to which all others are subordinated, the idea of which is the principle of a rational conception of the world. Comte calls this reality humanity. Instead of being the ultimate end of all thought and all action “in itself,” it is the ultimate end “for us.” But this difference simply signifies that the new philosophy leaves the metaphysical for the positive point of view. ”

“ Still, we may well suppose that the sordid cares that come with want of money made a harmonious life none the more easy. Comte tried to find pupils to board with him, but only one pupil came, and he was soon sent away for lack of companions. ”

“ Why then does Comte attack the eclectics with such persistence and such violence, if, indeed, the results of his psychology are not very far removed from what they say?—It is because in reality, beneath the apparent resemblance of207 doctrine, a difference of method as serious as can be conceived is concealed. For Cousin, and especially for the Cousin we know before 1830, psychology is not an end in itself. It is a means which he uses to rise to the study of being in itself and of the Absolute. The “ego” which he analyses is independent of the organism. ”

“ Undoubtedly Comte recognises a long series of his precursors properly so-called, in the double line of philosophers and scientific men who have contributed to the progress of the positive spirit from Aristotle and Archimedes to Condorcet and Gall. But positive philosophy, none the less, looks upon itself as heir to all the philosophies, even to those which are most opposed to its principle. For they, like the others, have been necessary moments in the progress which was to end in the positive system. ”