CHAPTER III THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES

 According to the law of the three States, all our conceptions in the different orders of knowledge, begin by being theological, pass through the metaphysical transition, and end by becoming positive. If this evolution were terminated at the presented time, the philosophy which Comte wishes to found would be ipso facto established. But we are far from such a state of things. On the contrary, the three modes of thought theological, metaphysical, and positive, coexist, still to-day, even in the most cultivated minds. In a different measure, all lack the “logical coherence.”   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 up50 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.”23   This plan is not a simple artifice destined to make the entirety of the doctrine clearer, or its exposition easier. It is not external to the work. It is born from the very spirit of positive philosophy; it expresses the spirit of that philosophy in a new form. It is the natural complement of the law of the three States. Comte puts it in plain words: “The different branches of our knowledge have not been able with equal rapidity to pass through the three great phases in their development, nor consequently to reach simultaneously the positive state. There exists, in this respect, an invariable and necessary order, which our different kinds of conceptions have followed and have been obliged to follow in their progress, and of which the exact consideration is the indispensable complement to the fundamental law previously enounced.”24   Comte did not, like his contemporary Ampère, set himself the logical problem of the classification of the sciences in their entirety. He did not seek according to what principle we could arrange them all in an order where the fact of their respective subordination would be maintained. He even doubts how far such a principle exists, and he is so far from thinking of establishing a complete classification of the sciences, that he begins by leaving out the greater number of them. He first sets aside all forms of human knowledge which refer to art, that is to say all the applied sciences, practical and technical. Similarly he sets aside all the concrete sciences, such as zoology, mineralogy, geography, etc. He only places within his classification the theoretical and abstract sciences, that is to say those which have no other object but the knowledge of laws, and which study pheno51mena, exclusive of the concrete beings in which these phenomena present themselves. Comte calls them “fundamental” because the other sciences suppose their existence, whereas the abstract sciences do not suppose the existence of the others before them.   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 encyclop?dic 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?   52   Those premature attempts were doomed to failure. In order that the undertaking might succeed, it was necessary that all our conceptions, relating to the various orders of phenomena should have reached the positive form. Here again, the creation of sociology has been the decisive event, for it has allowed the series of fundamental sciences to be made complete. The discovery of the law of the three States has founded sociology, and at the same time it has accomplished the homogeneity of human knowledge. In its time, this homogeneity renders possible the rational classification of the sciences. II.   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 encyclop?dic ladder of the fundamental sciences is easily constructed. After the mathematics, in an order of diminishing generality and of growing com53plexity, 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 had54 not attained to it before them. “It is in this order that the progress, although simultaneous, must have taken place.”25 III.   Mr. Herbert Spencer has made several objections to Auguste Comte’s classification of the sciences; Littré has lengthily refuted them. It is not in our design to reopen this discussion. But it results from the preceding explanations that the greater number of Mr. Spencer’s criticisms miss the mark, perhaps because he has not read Comte properly. On his own admission, he only knows the two first lessons in the Cours de philosophie positive in the text, further the inorganic Physics and the first chapter of the Biology in Miss Martineau’s condensation, and finally the remainder in Lewes’s summing up in his History of Philosophy.26 If Mr. Spencer had been able to obtain a knowledge of the Cours de philosophie positive in its entirety, and especially of the three last lessons, or at least of the Discours sur l’Esprit positif or of the Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme he would probably have appreciated differently the positive classification of the sciences. His own classification, in which he includes the concrete and concrete-abstract sciences, is not really opposed to that of Auguste Comte who only wished to classify the fundamental abstract sciences. Comte never sought to do what Mr. Spencer reproaches him with not having done.   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 he55 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 Littré 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, (that is to say so long as the positive spirit remains special) 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 the56 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.”27   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. IV.   The classification of the sciences is, at the same time, a plan for the setting forth of the positive philosophy, and a complement of the law of the three States. But, while this law expresses the progress of the human intellect in the constitution of science and philosophy, the classification supposes that science and philosophy are already constituted. It expresses their order, and enunciates from the static point of view what the law formulates from the dynamic point of view. It shows the relations of the various elements of philosophy among themselves, and to the whole.   57   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.”28   Thus the ladder of the fundamental sciences represents, in Comte’s mind, the methodical ascent of the positive spirit towards universality and unity. It is a hierarchy, a scala intellectus, according to Bacon’s expression. It includes the whole of the “philosophia prima” also foreshadowed by Bacon and vainly sought after by philosophers.   The memory of Bacon does not prevent the preponderating influence in this conception of Comte from being that of Descartes. Comte is far from ignoring it. He calls himself the continuator and by a dreadful barbarism, the completer of Descartes.29 Undoubtedly Descartes had not like him conceived58 the series of the fundamental sciences. After having applied a positive method to the study of inorganic nature, and even of living nature, for the rest he had reverted to a metaphysical method. But this “cartesian compromise” could only be provisional. None the less to Descartes belongs the merit of having definitely acquired several orders of phenomena for the positive spirit, and of affirming the unity of science at the same time as the unity of method. He was unable himself to realise this twofold unity, for its time had not come, and the necessary conditions had not yet been brought together. Moreover in the cartesian idea of science metaphysical elements subsist, and Descartes wrongly believed that the universal method was to be obtained by a transformation of the mathematical method.   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 “encyclop?dic 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.30   The classification of the sciences thus shows how positive philosophy stretches back over the XVIII. cent., whence it springs, to link itself with Bacon and Descartes. Comte has retained Bacon’s view on this point, that all scientific knowledge rests upon facts which have been fully observed, and that a system of positive sciences constitutes the indispensable59 basis for the only philosophy which is within our reach. To Descartes he here owes the idea of the unity of method and of the unity of science. We might almost say that he has received from Bacon his idea of the contents of the sciences and from Descartes his idea of their form. By what means did he invest such matter with such a form? The answer to this question is found in the positive theory of science.