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THE LAW OF THE THREE STATES

In Comte's system the constitution of sociology may be considered at the same time as a terminus and as a starting point. One sees the positive method attaining with it to the order of the highest, the most "noble," the most complicated phenomena: in this sense sociology is the term reached by the positive spirit in its ascent. It thus reaches the summit of the hierarchy of the sciences, and henceforth rules over them all. On the other hand, positive philosophy, possible from this moment, will make this a starting point for establishing the principles of morality and of polity.

"According to the very nature of the human intellect every branch of our knowledge must necessarily pass successively in the course of its progressive development, through three different theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state, finally the scientific or positive state."

The words "theological" and "metaphysical" are here taken in a particular sense, strictly defined.

Comte calls "theology" a general system of conceptions concerning the universality of phenomena, which explains the appearance of these phenomena by the will of gods. He has not in his mind theological speculation as one usually understands it, as a rational or sacred science. He does not in the least dream of a study of revealed truth. He only designated by this name an interpretation of natural phenomena by means of supernatural and arbitrary causes. Theological--that is to say--fictitious. Elsewhere Comte calls this mode of explanation "imaginary" or "mythological." It is in this sense that he could ask if each one of us did not remember having been in regard to his most important notions, a theologian in his infancy, a metaphysician in his youth, and a physicist in his manhood? Comte does not allude to the religious traditions which the child receives from his parents, but indeed to the spontaneous tendency which causes him in the first place to explain natural phenomena by wills, and not by laws. Theology is here synonymous with anthropomorphism in the conception of causes.

Similarly Comte does not take the word "metaphysics" in the most usual extension of its meaning. The science of Being as such, the science of Substance or of first Principles, is not here in question, at least directly. He only refers to a certain mode of explaining phenomena given in our experience. For example, in physics, the hypothesis of an ether to explain optical and electrical phenomena is metaphysical. So it is in physiology with the hypothesis of a vital principle, or, in psychology, with the hypothesis of a soul. "Metaphysical or abstract," says Comte. At bottom this mode of explanation is no other than the preceding one, but more and more pale and colourless, vanishing, so to speak, as natural phenomena, better observed, are referred no longer to capricious wills, but to invariable laws.

The demonstration of this law presents itself under two distinct forms. In the first place Comte supports his argument by history. This proves indeed that every branch of our knowledge passes in turn through the three states, with never a single retrogression. It is true that much of our knowledge has not yet reached the positive state. But at any rate it is established that up to the present even those sciences which have not yet reached that state have all described the same curve, already described by those that have reached it.

Historical verification would suffice, if necessary, provided it were complete. Comte is not satisfied with it. He claims moreover to deduce the law of the three states from the nature of man. He will thus give a direct demonstration of it. However useful history may appear to him as an instrument of proof, he still wishes to render its verdict intelligible. To reach this end he has recourse to psychology. "We ought," he says, "carefully to characterise the general motives, drawn from an exact knowledge of human nature, which must have rendered partly inevitable, partly indispensable, the necessary succession of social phenomena, considered directly with respect to the intellectual development which dominates essentially their chief advance."

In the first place, the human mind could only begin to interpret nature by a philosophy of the theological type. For it is the only one which is spontaneously produced, the only one which does not presuppose another. Man at first conceives all activity on the same plan as his own. In order to understand phenomena, he likens them to his own actions, whose mode of production he thinks he apprehends, because he has the feelings of his own efforts and the consciousness of his own volitions. This anthropomorphic explanation comes so naturally to us that we are always ready to give way to it. Even to-day, if we forget positive discipline for a moment, if we venture to ask for the mode of production of some phenomenon, we immediately dimly imagine an activity more or less like our own. And among the metaphysicians who profess to give an idea of God, the most consistent, according to Comte, are those who make a person of Him.

The spontaneity which characterises the theological mode of thought has been extremely useful. Without it, we do not see how man's intelligence could have begun to unfold itself. For, in order to form a scientific theory, however modest and fragmentary, of natural phenomena, the mind needs previous observations, while, on the other hand, in default of a theory, or at any rate of a preexisting hypothesis, no scientific observation is possible. Absolute empiricism, says Comte, is barren, and even, strictly speaking, inconceivable. Simple collections of facts, however numerous we may suppose them to be, do not possess by themselves any scientific significance. Such, for instance, would be the case in the meteorological facts, making interminable lists, and filling volumes. They would only become observations if in collecting them the mind tried to put upon them some interpretation, however vague or precise, real or chimerical.

Caught between the two equally imperative necessities of observing in the first place in order to reach "suitable conceptions", and of conceiving at the same time some theory in order to make coherent observations, the human mind saves itself by the theological mode of thought. For it has no need of previous observations to imagine everywhere in nature activities similar to its own. Once this hypothesis has arisen, observation comes into play, first to confirm it, but soon to oppose it. From that moment the impulse has been given. The evolution of the sciences and of philosophy will be continued through doctrines which will succeed each other in a necessary order.

In the same way, from the moral point of view, a theological philosophy alone could at first inspire weak and ignorant humanity with sufficient courage and confidence to shake off its primitive torpor. To-day, if man knows that phenomena are subject to invariable laws, he also knows that a knowledge of these laws gives him a certain control over nature. But in the days when man could not foresee the power of science, the idea that phenomena obeyed necessary laws would have filled him with despair. It would probably have paralysed him for all exertion. The theological mode of thought was far more encouraging since the phenomena are imagined to be arbitrarily modifiable. Anything may happen. Nothing is impossible, neither is anything necessary. The will of the gods suffices for a thing to happen or not to happen. Directly, man has no power over nature; indirectly he can do everything, provided only that he can propitiate the divinities whose will is law. In this way, it is at the moment when man's impotence is greatest, that his confidence in his own power is the strongest.

Finally, from a social point of view, theological philosophy was indispensable for human society to subsist and to be developed. For this society does not merely imply sympathy of feeling and union of interests among its members, but first and above all unanimous adhesion to certain beliefs. Without a "certain system of common preliminary opinions" there can be no human society. But, on the other hand, how can we conceive the appearance of such a system, if social life is not organised? Here is a new vicious circle, out of which the theological philosophy alone can release us. It constitutes at first sight a totality of common beliefs. All the members of the society defend them all the more energetically, because with them are bound up their hopes and their fears, for this world, and for the next, if they already believe in it.

At the same time, this theological philosophy determines the formation, in society, of a special class, consecrated to speculative activity. What an immense progress this division between practice and theory must have been, however roughly outlined! Such a division was established as soon as a sacerdotal class began to be distinguished from the rest of the social body. And how slow this progress must have been, when we see even to-day how hard it is for men to accept any innovation which does not seem to carry with it any immediate practical advantage! The sacerdotal class, invested, by the nature of its functions with an authority which was precious for social progress, at the same time enjoyed that leisure which is indispensable for theoretical research. "Without the spontaneous establishment of such a class," says Comte, "all our activity, thenceforth exclusively practical, would have confined itself to the improvement, very soon checked, of some processes having reference to military or industrial life." The subsequent division of labour depended upon this initial step. Our savants, our philosophers, our engineers descend from the first priests, sorcerers and rain conjurors.

As a matter of fact, the theological stage of our knowledge, even when it exercises its greatest dominion, that is to say, at the time nearest to its origin, already contains the germs of its own decomposition. It is never perfectly homogeneous. There are very common phenomena whose regularity man has never failed to recognize, and which he has never conceived as depending upon arbitrary wills. Comte likes to quote a passage from Adam Smith, where that philosopher remarks that in no time and in no country do we find a god of Weight. Moreover, since the existence of society, man must have had some idea of psychological laws since he was obliged to regulate his conduct according to the way in which his fellows thought and acted. Consequently "the elementary germ of positive philosophy is quite as primitive, at bottom, as that of theological philosophy, although it could only be developed very much later." Not being universal, theological philosophy could only be provisional. The philosophy, that is to say, the method of interpretation of natural phenomena, will alone be final, which will be applicable to all phenomena without exception, from the most simple to the most complicated. For this philosophy alone will realise the unity demanded by the understanding.

Nevertheless, if we must refer this intermediate stage to one of the two extremes, Comte does not hesitate to approximate it to the theological stage. As a matter of fact, metaphysical philosophy substitutes entities to will, and Nature to the Creator, but with a very analogous function. It supplies, at bottom, the same "explanation" of the real, although weakened by a stronger and stronger sense of the need of natural laws. This equivocal method preserves theology, "while destroying its principal mental consistency." It denies the consequences in the name of the principles. Moreover, it offers no guarantee against an offensive return of theological conceptions, so long as they have not been replaced by positive notions. In the final conflict between the theological spirit, and the positive spirit, the metaphysicians will probably be seen, with the Deists, involved in a retrograde concentration." "Positive philosophy," says Comte, "has neither historical nor dogmatic solidarity with this negative philosophy, and can only contemplate it as a final preparatory transformation of theological philosophy."

Thus the metaphysical stage is never other than an unstable compromise. It only lasts on condition that it changes continually. In default of a principle of its own, metaphysical philosophy is purely critical in character. As a fact, there are but two philosophies, that is to say two methods, two organic modes of thought. Only theological philosophy and positive philosophy allow the mind to construct a logical and harmonious system of ideas, the basis of a morality and of a religion. The theological spirit is "ideal in its advance, absolute in its conception, arbitrary in its application." The positive spirit substitutes the method of observation to that of imagination, relative notions to absolute notions. It does not flatter itself with unlimited dominion over the phenomena of nature; it knows that its power is measured by its knowledge. The intellectual history of humanity shows by what stages it has passed from the former mode of thought to the latter.

Indeed this demonstration has shown that the successive advance through the three stages, in invariable order, was the necessary form of progress of the human mind in the knowledge of phenomena. It is founded upon the nature of the mind. In Comte's thought, the law of the three states could therefore have been equally called psychological or historical.

But we are not here concerned with introspective Psychology, which uses self-consciousness as a means of investigation. Comte does not recognize any scientific value in this method. He even denies its possibility. Moreover the observation of a subject by himself, were it possible, would be of no help in the present case. For it would only reveal to him the present state of his individual intellect, and not the law of the evolution of the human mind. For this law to become manifest, we must consider not the individual, but the species. Giving up a fruitless effort at self-contemplation in its activity, the intellect must grasp the law of its successive phases in the progress of what it has produced. The philosophical history of our beliefs, of our conceptions, and of our systems: such is the consciousness which the human intellect can have of itself. There only, the philosopher sees the faculties of which this intellect contained the germ coming into play by turns, to reach a "durable harmony." Then, once discovered, the law of the three States helps us to understand the intellectual evolution of each individual, and the study of the individual then furnishes us with a supplementary verification of the law. But, by itself, this study of the individual could not have established it. Whatever utility I may have often derived from the consideration of the individual, says Comte, it is evidently to the direct study of the species that I owed, not only the fundamental thought in my theory, but afterwards its specific development.

FOOTNOTES:

Cours de philosophie positive, I, 19 .

Cours, VI, 786.

Pol. pos. IV, appendice, p. 77.

Cours IV, 526.

Cours IV, 548.

Cours, IV, 554-5.

Correspondence de H. Comte avec John Stuart Mill. Lettre du 5 avril 1842, p. 51.

Cours, IV, 523.

Cp. infra, book II, chap. V, p.

THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES

Even in those sciences where the positive method has been finally and for a long time established, in physics, and in chemistry, for instance, we observe undoubted traces of the metaphysical spirit. To a still greater degree this spirit is manifested in what are called the moral and social sciences. Nevertheless, this "incoherence" cannot last. Now that the positive spirit has assumed full consciousness of itself, it is possible to proceed with a systematic purification, which will disentangle it from the theological and metaphysical spirit.

But is not this critical review of the whole of human knowledge an enterprise above the powers of a man?--Happily positive philosophy itself furnishes a means of lightening the task. It establishes an order which allows us to determine without too much trouble to what degree of positiveness the conception of a given category of phenomena has reached up to the present time. Comte calls this order the classification, or, more precisely the "positive hierarchy" of the fundamental sciences. It is "the plan which he will follow in the exposition of positive philosophy."

These sciences are the only ones whose consideration is of consequence to the end which Comte has in view. For why does he need a classification of the sciences? It is in order to study the ascent of the positive spirit through the successive orders of phenomena. For this, he has no occasion to consider the applied or concrete sciences, which receive their principles from the theoretical and abstract sciences. It suffices for him to be concerned with these. It is in the methods and the progress of these sciences that the characteristic efforts of the human mind have been manifested; and it is therefore here that we can grasp the laws of its evolution.

In order to classify the fundamental sciences, Comte will conform to the principles of the positive method. He will be guided by the rational classifications of which the model is to be found in the natural sciences. The classification must spring from the very study of the objects which are to be classified, and must be determined by the real affinities and the series of connected links which they present, in such a way that this classification may itself be the expression of the most general truth, made manifest by the searching comparison of the objects which it embraces.

Comte will not therefore stop to consider the classifications which have preceded his own. In the first place, when they appeared, the rational method of classification was not established. Further, how could anyone have united the whole of the sciences into an encyclopaedic conception, when some had already reached the positive state, while others remained in the theological or metaphysical states? How could anyone rationally arrange heterogenous conceptions in a single system?

Henceforth, the fundamental sciences are all conceived as equally positive. They have all given up the pursuit of the absolute for the study of the relative, and the search after causes for the knowledge of laws. All now proceed by means of the same general methods and their differences can therefore only arise from their object, that is to say from the nature of the phenomena which are studied. Consequently their relations of mutual dependence will solely result from the relations of these phenomena. Now, observation shows us that these phenomena form themselves into a certain number of natural categories, such that the rational study of each category presupposes a knowledge of the laws of the preceding category, and that a knowledge of this one is in turn presupposed for understanding the one that follows. This order is determined by the degree of generality of the phenomena, from which their successive dependence upon each other results, and as a consequence the greater or lesser simplicity of each science results from it also.

Upon this principle, the encyclopaedic ladder of the fundamental sciences is easily constructed. After the mathematics, in an order of diminishing generality and of growing complexity, come astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology or biology, social physics or sociology. The first science considers the most general, the most simple, the most abstract phenomena, and those furthest removed from humanity. They influence all the others, without being influenced by them. The phenomena considered by the last are the most particular, the most complicated, the most concrete, and the most directly interesting for man; they depend more or less upon all the preceding ones. "Between these two extremes, the degrees of specialisation, of complication, and of individualisation, are in an ever-growing quantity."

This classification is confirmed, in fact, by the general usage of learned men. It reproduces the historic order of the development of the sciences. Thus, for a long time, mathematics was the only science of a positive type. On the other hand, social science has been the last to reach this point. Nevertheless, Comte does not mean to say that the fundamental sciences came into existence one after the other, nor that, for every one of them, each period is sufficiently explained by the period immediately preceding it. His thought is very different. On the contrary, he represents the development of the several sciences as simultaneous. They act and react one upon another in a thousand ways. Often some progress in a science is the direct effect of a discovery made in an art which has apparently no affinities with it. Such is, to quote an example which Comte could not in the least have foreseen, the progress of astronomical observations due to photography. In fact, the history of a science during a given period is closely allied to that of the other sciences and arts during the same time, or rather, to be more explicit, to the general history of civilisation. But their respective transitions to the positive state is accomplished in the order set forth in the classification. For individually they could not reach this state, if the fundamental science immediately preceding had not attained to it before them. "It is in this order that the progress, although simultaneous, must have taken place."

Among Mr. Spencer's objections, there is one which, bearing upon the very conception of the classification of the sciences, shows very clearly the misunderstanding which we are pointing out.

Mr. Spencer insists upon the "anthropocentric" character of Comte's classification, which is indeed remarkable; and he is surprised at what appears to him to be a glaring contradiction. Is not the conception of things from man's point of view, one of the essential forms of the theological mode of thought, according to Comte himself? Does not positive philosophy teach that man must not consider himself as a sort of "imperium in imperio," but as a being subordinate to the whole of nature? If therefore we must substitute the objective to the subjective point of view in which man at first spontaneously places himself, how can the classification of the sciences be at the same time "anthropocentric" and positive?

This objection would perhaps be a strong one against positive philosophy as Littr? understood it. Against Auguste Comte it has no force, for he accepts it. He admits that his classification presents these two characters at the same time, and he does not think that in so doing he is contradicting himself. We must only distinguish with him two successive and different periods. So long as positive philosophy is in process of formation, it is quite true that it is orientated from the objective point of view, in other words, that it goes from the world to man. During this period, it is indeed opposed to the na?ve belief which makes man the centre and the end of the universe. But, when from special the positive spirit has become universal, when it has risen from science to philosophy, when sociology is at length founded, and when the understanding realises, from the positive point of view the logical unity which is indispensable to it, this unity is only completed when, in its turn, it takes man for its centre.

Considered as an exact reproduction of the real world, says Comte, our science is not capable of being completely systematised; and in this sense we must not seek for any unity save that of method, aspiring only to homogeneity and to the convergence of the different doctrines. It is otherwise in regard to the inner source of human theories contemplated as the results of our individual and collective mental evolution. "Thus referred, not to the universe, but to man, or rather to humanity, our real knowledge tends on the contrary towards an entire systematization. We must then conceive a single science, the human science, more precisely social, of which our existence constitutes at once the principle and the end. Into this human science the rational study of the external world becomes fused, at once as a necessary element and a fundamental preamble."

Comte would therefore not have repudiated, for his classification of the sciences, the qualification of "anthropocentric" on condition that it were understood. It is no longer the spontaneous subjectivism from which the theological philosophy starts; it is the conscious subjectivism to which the positive philosophy attains. It has the merit of uniting in itself the two methods called objective and subjective. The former has been in the ascendant during the long evolution of the sciences, which were by degrees and successively reaching the positive state. The latter allows us to concentrate the aim of the distinct sciences thus constituted into a supreme science, which subordinates all the others to itself, without absorbing them.

So long as this idea of the whole was not defined, that is to say, so long as positive science remained special, these relations could not be rationally established. But, once sociology was created, and with it positive philosophy, it became possible to embrace the whole of the fundamental sciences in a single conception. For, from that time, they can be represented as being various aspects of the development of the human intellect.

Truly, the object of science is single, and the divisions which are introduced into it for our convenience, without being arbitrary, are artificial. All the branches of our knowledge, that is to say all the fundamental sciences, must be considered as issuing from a single trunk. Not that these sciences can ever be reduced one to another. It suffices that they be homogeneous, and their homogeneity results from their subjection to the same method; further, from their tendency towards the same end, and finally, from their subordination to the same law of progress. In respect to the last and highest of these sciences, the others "must only be finally regarded as indispensable preliminaries in a progressive order."

Comte takes up the leading ideas of Descartes again, and, at the same time, he corrects them, according as the progress of the positive spirit during two centuries enabled him to do. The position of "leading science," if this expression can be allowed, passes from mathematics to sociology. Moreover, the unity of science, as Comte conceives it, no longer prevents the fundamental sciences from being irreducible to one another. This unity is sufficiently secured by the homogeneity of the sciences, which form a continuous series, an "encyclopaedic hierarchy," and which are all subordinated to the final science. Lastly the unity of the positive methods does not imply its uniformity everywhere. Each fundamental science, as will be seen further on, has its methods which are special to itself.

FOOTNOTES:

Cours, I, 46-47.

Cours, I, 14-15.

Cours, I, 82, 12.

Herbert Spencer: The Classification of the Sciences. London, 1864, p. 42.

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