IV.

In spite of whatever may have been said, Comte then has a psychology. And, what is more, this psychology is in a sense not far removed from that of the Scottish school and of the Eclectics although he so much fought against their methods. The points of contact are numerous and important. In both doctrines the psychical phenomena are referred to faculties and these are represented as “dispositions,” innate “properties.” In both, the essential psychological problem appears to be the determination of the number and the relations of these faculties, whose action variously combined produces psychical phenomena: before everything, it is a question of not considering as an elementary faculty that which as a matter of fact results from the combination of several faculties, or inversely. Finally in both, it is claimed to establish this doctrine of the innate faculties upon the observation of human nature.

Comte himself had seen that, at any rate in the case of Condillac’s criticism, he was in accordance with the eclectics. On this point he only refused to grant them originality. According to him they merely popularised, in obscure and emphatic declamations, what physiologists like Charles Bonnet, Cabanis, and chiefly Gall and Spurzheim had long before stated on this subject in a far clearer and especially in a far more exact manner. For his part Garnier, the author of the _Traité des Facultés de l’âme_ had clearly seen the relations of eclecticism to Gall’s doctrine, and had studied them in a work entitled _De la Phrénologie et de la Psychologie comparées_ which appeared in 1839.

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 of 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. This is what Comte condemns as a retrogression. “Some men, not recognizing the present and irrevocable direction of the human mind, have endeavoured for ten years to transplant German metaphysics into our midst, and to constitute, _under the name of psychology_, a so-called science entirely independent of physiology, superior to it, and to which should exclusively belong the study of moral phenomena.”[202] And this attempt at reaction takes place at the very moment when the works of Cabanis and of Gall have brought this study upon the positive path!

It is needless to say that, in Comte’s system, psychical phenomena are subordinated, as far as their conditions of existence are concerned, to all the orders of more general natural phenomena. Comte should then have followed Cabanis and Gall, as a matter of course. But he thought that to establish the science of the “transcendent functions,” the biological point of view was insufficient. In this case anatomical considerations are only a kind of reduplication and transcription of physiological considerations. As Maine de Biran said, in terms curiously like Comte’s, “a distinction of places assigned to the exercise of each faculty must necessarily be itself referred to another pre-established division of the faculties.... Hypothesis thus grafted upon hypothesis of a different order would not much contribute to throw light upon the analysis of our intellectual functions.”[203] Only, instead of appealing, like Maine de Biran, to reflection, Comte rises from the biological to the sociological point of view He recognises that the subjective method alone is suitable for the science of psychical phenomena, but, in place of the _metaphysical subjective method_, by means of which the “_ego_” is deluded into the belief that it analyses its operations, and grasps its own activity, he will make use of the _positive subjective method_. The subject which he will analyse will be the human mind, or better, the human soul considered in its continuous evolution, that is to say in its religions, in its sciences, in its philosophy, in its language and in its art. Here is matter for a psychology which will no longer be chimerical, but real, which will be positive, in a word, like the biology upon which it depends and of which it is the fulfilment.

If we leave aside the conception of the “faculties” which Comte accepted rather hastily at the hands of the Scottish school and of Gall, and the “cerebral table” which he believed to be once for all constructed, his psychology contained more than one important and fertile seed. To the eclectic psychology, which is not positive, Comte substituted two sciences which are such. In the first place, an experimental science of the psychical phenomena studied in their relation to their organic conditions: it is the physiological psychology of which no one to-day questions the legitimacy. Then, by the introduction of the sociological point of view, Comte opened the way to a whole series of studies which begin to be developed, (social psychology, ethnical psychology, psychology of the masses, etc). It is often said that sociological laws have their foundation in psychological laws. But the reverse is no less true. The psychological laws, at least the mental and moral laws, are, at the same time, sociological laws, since they are only revealed in the study of the intellectual history of the human species. “We must not explain humanity by man, but man by humanity.” To the “Τγνῶθι σεαυτόν” of ancient psychology, the positive method substitutes this precept: “To know yourself, know history.” Man only becomes conscious of himself, when he becomes aware of his place in the evolution of Humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[180] Correspondance de Comte, et de John Stuart Mill, p. 162 (27 février 1843.) p. 365 (21 oct. 1844).

[181] Pol. pos., IV, Appendix, p. 218.

[182] Lettres à Valat, p. 89-91.

[183] Cours, III. 614-16.

[184] Cours, III, 618-19.

[185] Cours, III, 601-2; 621-22.

[186] Cours, III, 611.

[187] Lettres à Valat, p. 134 (8 septembre 1824).

[188] Cours, III, 631-2.--Gall, Anatomie and physiologie du système nerveux, Paris 1810, II, 6-7.

[189] Cours, III, 626-7.

[190] Cours, III, 666-8.

[191] Cours, III, 654-5.

[192] Cours, III, 15-26.

[193] Pol. pos., I, 729.

[194] Pol. pos., I, 671-2.

[195] Pol. pos., I, 672-3.

[196] Pol. pos., I, 731-2.

[197] Cours, III, 596-8; Pol. pos. I, 598-9.

[198] Pol. pos. I, 727.

[199] Pol. pos. II, 383.

[200] Pol. pos. I, 712-14.

[201] Cours, III, 660.

[202] Pol. pos., IV, Appendice, p. 218.

[203] Maine de Biran, _œuvres inédites_ (éd. Cousin), II, 55-58.

## BOOK III

## CHAPTER I

THE TRANSITION FROM ANIMALITY TO HUMANITY.

ART AND LANGUAGE

Of the philosophers who flourished before the rise of the positive doctrine, the greater number assumed as a postulate in the comparative study of man and animals, that there was between them a difference of nature, and not merely one of degree. Whatever fundamental difference be attributed to reason, language, moral sense, religion, etc., the “human kingdom” is conceived for the most part as superior to the animal kingdom and as clearly separated from it. Taking their stand upon an analysis of the present state of the human conscience, those philosophers recognise an order of “moral realities,” to which animals have no access. Thus they give to the science of Man a privileged object which separates it from the group of the natural sciences.

The positive method admits neither this postulate, nor the consequences which are drawn from it. In general this method is characterised by the substitution of the objective to the anthropocentric point of view, and also by the substitution of observation to imagination. It does not suddenly change its orientation when it comes to the study of man. The positive method is not therefore concerned with knowing what idea man forms of himself to-day and of his relations with other living beings. Into this idea enter elements of religious and metaphysical origin, whose presence is explained by historical reasons. The question is to observe the nature of man in his _real_ relations with other beings. Man, so considered, at once takes his place again at the top of the zoological scale.

The problem will then be set in the following terms: Given that man is included in the animal series, of which he is the highest term, but still a term, to account for the differences which to-day place him so high above the term immediately below him. This is taking the very reverse attitude of nearly all the philosophers, whose main difficulty is to give an account of the likenesses which exist between man and animals. It is the position which Darwin will take in his _Descent of Man_.

Comte takes his stand upon two postulates. The first affirms the fundamental identity of the essential functions in man and animals. Since the whole of the moral and intellectual functions constitutes the necessary complement of animal life properly so-called, it would be difficult to conceive that all those functions which are fundamental should not, by this very fact be “common, at various degrees, to all the higher animals, and perhaps even to the entire group of the vertebrata.”[204] The animal functions are as a blossoming out of organic life, destined in the first place to make this life more perfect and more complex: in the same way, the intellectual and moral functions are, originally, as it were, another blossoming out of animal life, and must consequently be found, at least as a possibility, wherever animal life has reached a certain degree of development.

This postulate, according to Comte, is sufficiently established by biology, by means of the comparative method. All the principal characteristics which pride and ignorance set up as absolute privileges of our species, also appear, more or less rudimentary, in the majority of the higher animals.[205] The mistake was made because metaphysical ideology and psychology place intelligence foremost in the study of psychical functions. Intelligence indeed puts to-day an immense distance between man and animals. But a more accurate psychology recognises that the most energetic, the most “fundamental” of mental functions are the affective functions, since, in default of the impulse given by them, intelligence itself would not be developed. The analogy between man and the animals at once appears: for the affective functions are common to them both. It is the same with the intellectual functions, when allowance is made for the development they have assumed in man. In a word, if the dynamical superiority of the human species over the other species is strong, its statical superiority is weak. The problem consists in finding how, to such an apparently unimportant difference in the organs, such a considerable difference in the functions corresponds.[206]

Here comes in the second postulate: “The fundamental constitution of man is invariable.” _Evolution but not transformation_: this great principle, transmitted by biology to sociology, dominates the latter science entirely. In the course of the long history which leads humanity from savage animality to positive civilisation,[207] nothing absolutely new appears. Everything which manifests itself little by little, pre-existed in the nature of man--in a potential state it is true; and this state would perhaps never have ceased if a number of favourable conditions had not occurred together.

The mental functions, which are indispensable to organic and to animal life properly so called, quickly attained the degree of development without which the species would have disappeared. On the contrary, the highest “fundamental dispositions” of our nature remained latent for a long time, and only manifested themselves by degrees. But if their development has been slow, it is, in return, continuous and indefinite. And these dispositions tend to preponderate, although the “inversion” of the primitive economy can never become complete. Humanity emerges progressively from animality. The highest civilization is then, at bottom, entirely in conformity with nature: for it is only the manifestation more and more marked of the most characteristic properties of our species. In this sense, our social solution must be understood “as the extreme term of a progression continued uninterruptedly throughout the whole living kingdom from the most simple forms of vegetable life, the predominance of the organic functions becoming less and less exclusive, in order in the first place to make room for the predominance of the animal functions properly so called, and finally for that of the intellectual and moral functions, whose development is the very definition of humanity.”[208]

Thus, the chain of being is uninterrupted. But Comte, as we know, did not accept Lamarck’s hypothesis. He believed in the fixity of species. Undoubtedly he admits in a measure which science will some day fix, acquisitions slowly incorporated into organisms by heredity. But he does not think that they will go so far as to transform species. The whole evolution of man must then be explained by its original constitution. Indeed, Comte here maintains, as everywhere in nature, the perfect correspondence between the statical and the dynamical point of view. The case of man cannot be an exception to this encyclopædic law, which is verified in all the orders of phenomena from the most simple to the most complex. As the whole line of the curve corresponds to the equation, so the whole development of humanity must correspond to the “fundamental nature” of man. On this condition alone is sociology possible as a science. Now positive sociology exists: therefore the postulate is justified.