said, or figures of speech. Very well. But does not the very impossibility of avoiding them prove the impossibility of explaining nature by pure mechanism?

§ 70. Positivism and Neo-Criticism

Not all materialists, it must be added, are equally positive and dogmatic. Contrary to the opinion of one Löwenthal, who accuses even the author of Force and Matter of moderantism, there are, in Germany, France, and England, a considerable number of thinkers, moralists and physicists, historians and physiologists, who sympathize with materi alism more than with any other philosophy, but remain, either through conviction or policy, within the limits assigned to speculation by the criticism of Locke, Hume, and Kant. In France, this party, which is decidedly hostile to metaphysics and determined to replace it by science, has, for the last thirty years, been gathering around the standard of Comte. It is known as the positivistic school.

AUGUSTE COMTE was born at Montpellier in 1789. He entered the Ecole polytechnique, then became a tutor and examiner in this school, which, under the Restoration, continued the traditions of the eighteenth century. His Cours de philosophie positive 2 placed him among the original think

1 Dr. Ed. Löwenthal, System und Geschichte des Naturalismus, Leip sic, 1861; 5th ed., 1868.

2 6 vols., Paris, 1839-42; 2d ed., with a Preface by Littré, Paris, 1864; [English version freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau, London, 1853. Later writings: Système de politique positive, 4 vols., Paris, 1851-54 (Engl. tr., 1875-77); Catéchisme positiviste, 1853 (Engl. tr. by Congreve, 1858, 2d ed., 1883). See Littré, Comte et la philosophie positiviste, Paris, 1863; 2d ed., 1864; J. S. Mill, Comte and Positivism, London, 1865; 3d ed., 1882; B. Pünjer, Der Positivismus, etc. (Jahrbücher f. Protestantische Theologie), 1878; E. Caird, The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte, Glasgow, 1885; H. Gruber,

ers of our age. EMIL LITTRÉ' in France, and JOHN STUART MILL' in England, were the most distinguished of his followers. He died at Paris in 1857.

Positivism is not a mere negation,

otherwise it could

not have formed a school, it is a system whose central teaching, the theory of the history of thought, is the realistic counterpart, so to speak, of Hegel's philosophy of mind.

According to Comte, the human mind successively passes through three stages of thinking or philosophizing: the theological stage, which is elementary and represents the period of childhood, the metaphysical stage, and the positive stage.

From the theological or anthropomorphic point of view, cosmical phenomena are governed, not by immutable laws, but by wills like ours. This primitive form of thought has

Comte und der Positivismus, 1890; same author, Der Positivismus vom Tode Comte's, etc., 1891; J. Watson, Comte, Mill, and Spencer, New York, 1895. — TR.].

-

1 1801-1881. Analyse raisonnée du cours de philosophie positive de M. A. Comte, Paris, 1845; Application de la philosophie positive au gouvernement des sociétés, 1849; Conservation, révolution et positivisme, 1852; Paroles de philosophie positive, 1859; Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, 1863; Fragments de philosophie positive et de sociologie contemporaine, 1876. Littré is also the founder of the Revue positive (1867-83). His Dictionnaire de la langue française constitutes his chief claim to glory.

2 John Stuart Mill and Littré, however, wholly disavow Auguste Comte's socialistic Utopias, which proceed from Saint-Simon. To these positivists, properly so-called, we must add, as distinguished representatives of the positivistic movement, two gifted mathematicians: Sophie Germain (1776–1831), who anticipates the system of Comte in her Considérations générales sur l'état des sciences et des lettres aux différentes époques de leur culture [posthumous work, published by L'Herbette, Paris, 1833], and M. Cournot, author of an Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances et sur les caractères de la critique philosophique (1851), and of a Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l'histoire (1861), the conclusions of which are obviously the same as Comte's.

three stages. First, the objects themselves are regarded as animated, living, intelligent (fetichism). On the next stage, invisible beings are imagined, each of them gov erning a certain group of objects or events (polytheism) In a higher form, at last, all these particular divinities. are merged into the conception of one God, who created the world and now governs it either directly or through the medium of supernatural agents of the second order (monotheism).

Metaphysical thought no longer explains phenomena by conscious wills, but by abstractions considered as real beings. Nature is no longer governed by an anthropomor phous God, but by a force, a power, a principle. We rep diate the divinities with which the ancients peopled nature, only to replace them by souls, mysterious essences. We pretend to explain facts by the tendencies of nature, which we regard as a kind of intelligent rather than impersonal being We invest it with a tendency towards perfection, a horror of a vacuum, a curative virtue (vis medicatrix), occult qualities. The metaphysical view errs in that it takes abstractions for realities.

The dominion of metaphysics, more or less influenced by the theological spirit, lasted until the end of the Middle Ages, when the controversy between the nominalists and the realists, the first struggle of modern thought to rid itself of verbal abstractions, inaugurated the positive epoch (Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Galileo, Gassendi, Newton). Ever since the advent of this period, the positive explanation of facts is gradually superseding the theological and metaphys ical explanations, in proportion as the advance of scientific research brings to light an increasing number of invariable laws.

Like philosophy in general, each science in particular passes through these three consecutive stages: the theological state, the metaphysical state, and the positive state

Now, the various branches of human knowledge have deve!oped with unequal rapidity, and cannot simultaneously pass from one phase to the other. The order of succession in which they enter upon the metaphysical stage and the positive stage is indicated by the logical order in which they follow each other. Thus, the search for the order in which the special sciences pass from one phase of thought to the other leads Comte to construct his remarkable classification of the sciences.

In surveying the different sciences he observes that they are naturally arranged in an order of increasing complexity and diminishing generality: so that each one depends on the truths of all the sciences which precede it, plus such truths as properly belong to it.

The science of number (arithmetic and algebra) deals with the most simple, and, at the same time, most general phenomena; the truths which it formulates hold for all things, and depend only upon themselves. We can study it independently of all other sciences; hence it is the fundamental science, and, in a certain sense, the first philosophy. Then comes geometry, which presupposes the laws of number, and can be studied without previous knowledge of any other science except arithmetic. Then comes rational mechanics, which depends on the science of number and geometry, to which it adds the laws of equilibrium and movement. The truths of algebra and geometry would be true even if those of mechanics were not; arithmetic, algebra, and geometry, therefore, do not depend on mechanics, whereas the latter essentially depends on the science of number and extension. The science of number (arithmetic and algebra), geometry, and rational mechanics together constitute the science of mathematics, the universal science and sole basis of all natural philosophy.1

1 Cours de philosophie positive, vol. I. Cf. Pythagoras, Plato. Des

cartes

Astronomy is directly connected with mathematics. Its truths rest on arithmetical, geometrical, and mechanical truths, upon which it exercises no influence, but to which it adds a group of new facts: the laws of gravitation.1

Astronomy is followed by physics, which depends not only on the mathematical sciences, but also on astronomy, for terrestrial phenomena are influenced by the motion of the earth and of celestial bodies. It embraces barology, or the science of weight, a transition-state between astronomy and physics; thermology, or the science of heat; acoustics, optics, and electrology, a connecting-link between physics and the science which immediately follows it in the scale of our knowledge: chemistry.

Chemistry adds its own truths to the laws of physics, especially to those of thermology and electrology, on which it essentially depends.2

Biology (physiology) adds to the laws of the preceding sciences a group of special laws.

Finally, at the top of the scale, we have social physics or sociology,3 which, in turn, depends on all the preceding sciences, and adds new data to them. In fact, the laws of organic and animal life, as well as those of inorganic nature, influence human society, either by directly acting upon life, or by determining the physical conditions under which society is developed.

With the sciences which Comte calls abstract are connected the respective concrete sciences: with physics and chemistry, abstract sciences, mineralogy, a concrete science; with physiology, an abstract science, zoology and botany, concrete sciences. The latter are concerned with existing beings and objects; the former, with the general laws of occurrence. The concrete sciences necessarily advance more slowly than the abstract sciences, since they 1 Cours de philosophie positive, vol. II.

2 Id., vol. III.

3 Id., vols. IV.-V.