VI.

It is not surprising that biology, even more than physics and chemistry, preserves the metaphysical spirit. Such, for instance, is the hypothesis of spontaneous generation. Positive philosophy recognizes that each living being always emanates from another similar being. This is not established _a priori_, but is the result of an “immense induction.”[175] _Omne vivum ex vivo._ Efforts to explain how the generating tissue should itself be formed by kinds of organic monads, (an allusion to certain theories arising out of Schelling’s philosophy) can only fail. We should never know how to connect the organic with the inorganic world except through the fundamental laws belonging to the general phenomena which are common to them both. Positive speculations in anatomy and in physiology form a limited system, within which we must establish the most perfect unity, but which must ever remain separated from the whole of inorganic theories.[176] We see clearly, it is true, that there is no matter which is of itself living. Life is not peculiar to certain substances which are organised in a certain manner. It never belongs to them for more than a time: every organism of which the molecules are not renewed is dissolved. But “we can no more explain this instability than this speciality.”[177]

In the same way we see that in living bodies the nutritive functions are the basis of the others; but there is no contradiction in “dreaming” of thought and sociability in beings whose substance would remain unalterable. From this point of view spiritualism is not less admissible than materialism, in so much as death does not seem to be a necessary consequence of life. This again is an idea which is common to Descartes and to Comte. They both conceive an organism in which the play of functions should not cease of itself. The theory of death, says Comte, although it is founded upon that of life, is entirely distinct from it.[178]

If biology still often hesitates in the statement of its problems and in the choice of its hypotheses, it is in a great measure due to the two opposite tendencies between which it oscillated in the last century. On the one hand, Boerhaave, and the school of physiology which is more or less directly connected with Descartes, sought a mechanical explanation of biological phenomena, and tended to reduce biology to physics and chemistry. On the other hand, Stahl in Germany, and the vitalist school of Montpellier in France, appealed to metaphysical principles and to unverifiable hypotheses. Being thus swayed from one extremity to another, biology only escaped the “oppression” of the inorganic sciences to involve itself in conceptions which were scarcely scientific.[179] It is only at the end of the XVIII. Century, with Haller, Gall and Bichat, that it finds its equilibrium, takes possession of its method, and at last enters into its positive phase.

By its lower extremity it is contiguous to inorganic science (the physico-chemical phenomena of vegetative life). By its higher extremity, (intellectual functions), it reaches to the final science, or sociology. But the adherence is far from being as close in one case as in the other. At the moment when we pass from the inorganic world to the world of living beings, according to positive philosophy, there is a sudden “enrichment of the real.” The transition is very marked. The domain of biology is not so sharply separated from that of sociology. For the higher biological functions, the intellectual functions, cannot be analysed from the point of view of the individual, at least in man, but only from the point of view of the species. We must then, while preserving the distinction between the two sciences, admit a kind of inter-relation between them. Undoubtedly sociology could not be founded so long as biology had not made decisive progress. But, conversely, sociology once founded alone completes the positive study of the highest biological functions.

Certainly, biology has not been less transformed than chemistry during the last sixty years, and the state in which we see it to-day differs singularly from that in which Comte knew it. It has been developed and differentiated far beyond what he could foresee. None the less he conceived some of its principles with remarkable power. He had a precise idea of that which could constitute a general biology that is, a single physiology and anatomy for the whole of living beings. He knew the fecundity of the comparative method, and he pointed out its analogy with the method of analysis in mathematics. Finally, although he refused to adopt the transformist hypothesis, he had understood the importance of Lamarck’s work.

FOOTNOTES:

[154] Cours, VI, 772.

[155] Cours, IV, 285-7.

[156] Cours, III, 8-239.

[157] Cours, III, 490, 510.

[158] Cours, III, 224-7.

[159] Cours, III, 271-2.

[160] Cours, III, 237.

[161] Cours, III, 326 sq.

[162] Cours, III. 259-65.

[163] Cours, III. 284-5.

[164] Cours, III. 282-546.

[165] Cours, III. 437.

[166] Cours, III. 456-7.

[167] Cours, III, 452.

[168] Cours, III, 444.

[169] Cours, III, 441-2.

[170] Cours, III, 452-3.

[171] Cours, III, 529-31; Pol. pos., I, 594.

[172] Cours, III, 553-6.

[173] Cours, III, 380-1.

[174] Cours, III, 562-3.

[175] Pol. Pos., I, 591.

[176] Pol. Pos., I, 587.

[177] Pol. Pos., I, 587; Cours, III, 419-20.

[178] Pol. Pos., I, 589.

[179] Cours, VI, 766-68.

## CHAPTER V

PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology has no place in the classification of the fundamental sciences. In it Sociology immediately succeeds Biology. Use has been made of this fact in order to reproach Comte with having neglected an order of most important phenomena. A grave objection has been raised against his doctrine in general. What are we to think of a philosophy which, deliberately, omits a part, and, according to many philosophers, the chief part of reality, the world of consciousness, the spiritual nature of man?

Presented in this way, the objection rests upon many confused notions about words and ideas. What do we understand by psychology? If the word means: “the science of the soul reached through the introspective method,” we must own that Comte does not admit the possibility of such a science. But the same objection will also hold good against the majority of the psychologists of our time. For they do not admit this possibility any more than Comte, and they have endeavoured to constitute the science of psychical facts by a different method than that of introspection, pure and simple. Is psychology defined as “the science which investigates the laws of feeling, of the intellect and of moral phenomena in man and in animals?” Then it is inaccurate to say that there is no psychology for Comte. On the contrary, he thinks that positive psychology has just been founded by contemporary science of whose methods he approves. If he did not use the word “psychology,” he did so in order to avoid confusion. At that moment the word was, so to speak, the property of the eclectic school. By the “psychological” method, everyone then understood that of Jouffroy. “Psychology” was the science founded by Cousin on the analysis of the _ego_. Comte who opposes these philosophers, did not wish his theory of psychical phenomena, which differs from theirs, to be called by the same name. It is this very precaution which has come to be no longer understood, now that “psychology” does not designate the eclectic doctrine alone, but any theory whatsoever concerning mental facts.