INTRODUCTION. II.

 Like many of his contemporaries Auguste Comte thought himself singled out for the mission of formulating the principle of “social reorganisation.” But this is where he differs from them. Each of the reformers begins by proposing his own solution of the social problem, and all his efforts only tend to justify it. As this problem is the most urgent one in their eyes, it is also the only one which they have put directly to themselves. Now this method, according to Comte, is a bad one, and in following it they court certain failure. For a social problem is such that its solution cannot be obtained immediately; other problems, more theoretical in character, must be solved beforehand. It is therefore these which must first be dealt with, if we seek anything else than the lengthening of the history of political dreams and of social chimeras. “Institutions,” Comte says, “depend on morals, and morals, in their turn, depend on beliefs.” Every scheme of new institutions will therefore be useless so long as morals have not been “reorganised,” and so long as, to reach this end, a general system of opinions has not been founded, which are accepted by all minds as true, as was, for instance, the system of Catholic dogma in Europe in the Middle Ages. Therefore, either the5 social problem admits of no solution—and Comte does not stop at this pessimistic hypothesis,—or the solution sought for supposes that a new philosophy shall have been previously established. This is why Comte wishes to be at first only a philosopher. In 1824 he writes “I regard all discussions upon institutions as pure nonsense, until the spiritual reorganisation of society has been brought about, or at least is very far advanced.”1   Comte’s originality will therefore lie in taking from science and philosophy the principles upon which depends the social reorganisation, which is the real end of his efforts. While having the same aim as the reformers of his time, he will follow a different path. It is indeed a polity which he also claims to found, but this polity is positive: it rests upon ethics and philosophy both equally positive. Undoubtedly the polity is the raison d’être of the system, which Comte has constructed for it. But, without the system, the Polity would remain arbitrary. It would lack authority and that which would make it legitimate. Philosophy is no less indispensable to the foundation of politics, than are politics to the completion and unification of philosophy.   Whence comes it that Comte has put this great problem, which preoccupied all the minds of his time, in a form which belongs to him alone? We cannot here enter into the detailed biographical study which would throw some light upon this question. Let us only recall that Comte was born in a Catholic Royalist family. From the age of thirteen, he tells us, he had broken with the political convictions and the religious beliefs of his own people. Perhaps, however, the trace of these beliefs was less completely effaced than he himself thought. During the whole of his life he professed the liveliest admiration for Catholicism. On his own confession he was especially inspired in this by Joseph de Maistre; but,6 if he so much appreciated the book du Pape, did not his great sympathy partly spring from impressions of childhood indelibly stamped upon a passionate and sensitive nature?   Whatever may be the case, the first subject which seriously occupied his mind was mathematics. Being admitted to the Ecole polytechnique a year before the usual age, he began to study the natural sciences. At the same time he “meditates” upon Montesquieu and Condorcet. He approaches philosophy properly so called by reading the Scottish philosophers, Ferguson, Adam Smith, Hume, and he sees very well that the last one is far above the others. Having left the Ecole polytechnique, he remains in Paris, and while giving lessons to earn his living, he completes his scientific education with Delambre, de Blainville, and the Baron Thénard. He reads assiduously Fontenelle, d’Alembert, Diderot, and especially Condorcet who has distilled and clarified the philosophy of the XVIII. century. While studying Descartes and the great mathematicians who came after him, he also follows attentively the labours of naturalists and of biologists, of Lamarck, for instance, of Cuvier, of Gall, of Cabanis, of Bichat, Broussais and of so many others. He understands the philosophical importance of these new sciences, as already pointed out by Diderot. But for all that he does not neglect historical and social studies. He has read the ideologists, among whom he especially esteemed Destutt de Tracy. Without giving up Montesquieu or Condorcet, he studies the traditionalists: M. de Bonald, this “energetic thinker” and, more than the others, Joseph de Maistre who made the deepest and most enduring impression upon his mind.   Before knowing Saint-Simon then—and his correspondence with Valat testifies to the fact—Comte already possessed a large portion of the materials for his future system. Up to this time his labours had borne upon two distinct orders of7 subjects. The one scientific proper (mathematics, physics and chemistry, natural sciences) the other more properly political (history, politics, and social questions).   In 1818 Comte meets Saint-Simon. He is attracted and surrenders himself almost unreservedly. For four years he works with Saint-Simon. He loves and venerates him as a master. He feeds upon his ideas, and collaborates in his labours and enterprises. He calls himself “pupil of M. Saint-Simon.” However, from 1822 he detaches himself from this greatly-admired master, and in 1824 the rupture is complete and final. What can have happened?   The grievances brought forward by Comte are only of secondary importance. As a matter of fact master and pupil were bound to separate sooner or later. There was a radical incompatibility between those two minds. Saint-Simon, marvellously inventive and original, throws out a multitude of new ideas and views, of which many will be fruitful. But he quickly affirms, and proves little. He has not the patience to continue working long at the same subject, or to probe it to the bottom in an orderly way. Comte, on the contrary, thinks with Descartes, that method is essential to science, and that “logical coherence” is the surest sign of truth. He could not long remain satisfied with Saint-Simon’s disconnected essays. He could even, without dishonesty, turn to account the brilliant but disorderly intuition in which his master abounds and believe that his own doctrine alone gave those disconnected essays scientific value, because his doctrine alone was in a position to systematise them and to connect them with their principles.   It would therefore seem that we can admit at the same time that Saint-Simon’s influence upon Comte was considerable, and, on the other hand, that Comte’s philosophical originality is no less certain. Saint-Simon’s influence would chiefly have consisted: 1. in suggesting to Comte a certain number of general ideas and of views of detail, especially for his8 philosophy of history; 2. in showing him how the two orders of labours which he had been following until then were to blend into a single one, through the creation of a science which would be social, and consequently of a polity which would be scientific. Would this synthesis of the two orders of studies which Comte had undertaken side by side have been produced in his mind, had he not known Saint-Simon? In any case it would have been produced more slowly. Let us at least leave Saint-Simon the credit which Comte himself granted him, that of having “started” his disciple upon the line best suited to his genius.   The intellectual intimacy between them could never be perfect. If Comte entered entirely into Saint-Simon’s ideas, (without adopting them all, however), in return there was an aspect in Comte’s thought which Saint-Simon scarcely discerned through the lack of a sufficiently strong scientific education. It is enough to see how he speaks of the law of universal attraction. Comte must have been scandalised by it. So, at the very moment when he submits with most enthusiasm and youthful confidence to Saint-Simon’s influence he does not neglect his special mathematical studies. “My labours,” he writes to Valat on the 28th of September, 1819, “are and will be in two orders, scientific and political. I should set little value upon the scientific studies, did I not continually think of their utility to the human race. As well then amuse myself in deciphering very complicated puzzles. I have a supreme aversion for scientific labours whose utility, either direct or remote, I do not see. But I also confess, in spite of all my philanthropy, that I should put far less eagerness into political labours, if they did not stimulate the intellect, if they did not bring my brain strongly into play, in a word: if they were not difficult.”2 A year later, in sending a parcel of political tracts to his friend, in which he9 distinguishes what is in his own manner and what is from Saint-Simon, he says that he is besides very eagerly occupied with mathematical work. He wants to take part in the competition opened by the Institut; and his ambition is soon to enter the Academie des Sciences.   From 1822, in the celebrated pamphlet entitled Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société, the synthesis between the two orders of labours is accomplished in Comte’s mind, thanks to the double discovery of the classification of the sciences and of the great law of social dynamics. We know that this work was, if not the principal reason, at least the occasion of the rupture between Comte and Saint-Simon. It is the moment which Comte himself considers to have been decisive in the history of his mind. The whole of his future doctrine was essentially contained in this pamphlet. The preface added by Saint-Simon shows that he did not understand its full bearings. Comte is henceforth his own master. At length he has found what for several years he had been seeking without being clearly conscious of it; and the rest of his life is now consecrated to the work which he has conceived and of which he has just outlined the plan. Since he has established a philosophical hierarchy of the sciences, whose summit is crowned by social physics, he has no further occasion to ask how he can conciliate his scientific labours with his political studies.   “In the interval of my great philosophical labours,” he writes on the 8th September, 1824, “I propose to publish a few more special works upon the fundamental points in mathematics, which I have long conceived, and which I have at last been able to connect with my general ideas of positive philosophy: so that I shall be free to give myself up to them without breaking through the unity of my thought, which is the great condition for the life of a thinker.”3 And in a very10 remarkable letter to de Blainville, on the 27th February, 1826, he explains in the clearest way the generating idea of his system. “My conception of politics as social physics, and the law which I have discovered upon the three successive states of the human mind are but one and the same thought, considered from the two distinct points of view of method and of science. That being established, I shall show that this single thought directly and completely satisfies the great actual social need, considered under its two aspects of theoretical need and practical need. I will therefore show that what on one hand tends to consolidate the future by re-establishing order and discipline among intellects, tends, on the other hand to regulate the present, as far as possible, by furnishing statesmen with rational lines to work upon.”4   Henceforth Comte’s life was to be but the methodical execution of his programme. In turn, with perfect regularity, he wrote and published the philosophy of the sciences and of history, the ethics, the positive polity and the positive religion. Does this mean that Comte’s thought remained stationary? Most certainly not. It evolved from 1822 to 1857. But this evolution followed a curve which an attentive observer might have sketched beforehand after having read the Plan des travaux scientifiques nécéssaires pour réorganiser la société. Comte had but one system, not two. From the opuscules of his twentieth year to the Synthèse subjective of his last year, it is the development of one and the same conception.